Magdalene by Tom Slattery What do we know about Mary Magdalene? Almost nothing. It's also true of Jesus.

For all of the impact of the man and his life, we actually know very little. Three decades between the infancy story by Matthew and those final days of teaching and death are a total blank. So this piece about Mary Magdalene is about reasonable guesses set against the backdrop of arguable history and makes no claim to be the fact. Let's start with her name. The earliest Greek Bibles give her name as Mary of Magdala. While some have suggested that Mary Magdala, or tower, could have been a nickname like the nickname of Simon called Peter, her name was spelled out as "Mary of Magdala," a person from Magdala. Her name may give us a location for her place of birth and residence, a town named Magdala that seems to have been a fishing and fish-processing village on the shore of a pear-shaped fresh-water lake that many call the Sea of Galilee. If she was born and raised in this idyllic location of pleasant climate and gently delightful scenery, she would have been luckier than most people. Moreover, since the Bible hints at her and other women following Jesus supporting his mission with her own means, she would have had those means from a family prosperous enough and supportive enough to offer them to her. So she may have been doubly lucky. Her family may have enjoyed that kind of middle class prosperity from owning a business. And from the lakeshore location, some possibilities might have been a small fishing fleet or a small fish-processing plant. So we might picture her as a loved and lucky girl of an open-minded prosperous middle-class Jewish family. We may be able to add something to that. From her apparent authorship of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary we might conclude that she was not only literate but also a thoughtful writer. So we might guess that Mary Magdalene grew up an adored, educated middleclass girl in one of the prettiest and most pleasant corners of our planet. Little could she have known what time and change had in store for her. While her traditional second name Magdalene offers us a physical location on the map, her first name Mary suggests historical links to Egypt going back to the Exodus. Mary was shortened from Miriam, the same name as the sister of Moses over a thousand years earlier and thus a proper name for a Jewish girl who was a distant descendant of people in the Exodus and subsequent conquest of Canaan. But if we use some imaginative reasoning, there may be more to her name. The name Miriam, like the name Moses, could have been modified from a typical Egyptian female

name "Merit," a popular name in Egypt during the New Kingdom and at the time of the Exodus. For instance we can see "Moses" in the names of pharaohs of the Egyptian period that historians and archaeologists call the New Kingdom like Ah-mosis, Tuth-mosis, and Remosis (more often spelled as Rameses). For those who point out that "Moses" in Hebrew would have been pronounced "Moshe," we might point out that the pronunciation is close. Moreover, we know from the "shibboleth" episode in Chapter 12 of the Book of Judges that there was a range of pronunciation and we might say that Moses or Mosis or Moshe are for our purposes here the same word. "Mosis" in the name of an Egyptian effectively meant "son of," like we might say, for instance, Davidson. After the flight from Egypt and the adoption of the new monotheistic god named Yahweh, good Jewish parents would not have wanted to offend Yahweh by including the name of a foreign god in the name of their child. Some time during or following the Exodus the name of its Jewish leader would have been shortened from something like Tuth-mosis to just plain Moses with no foreign gods in it. Miriam is a little more complicated. We can guess that the name may have been MeritAmen (beloved of the Egyptian god Amen). A reason that this name may not have been divided at the middle like that of Moses could have to do with ancient Egyptian politics. In a bold attempt to establish a new and never before seen monotheistic religion, the pharaoh Akhnaten (1353-1336 BC) eroded the ancient polytheistic state religion of Egypt and replaced it with worship of a single god, the Aten, literally an aspect of the sun. But in a wider sense the Aten was a genuine abstract monotheistic deity, similar to the monotheistic worship of Yahweh brought to light by Moses about two centuries later, circa 1150 BC. Aten worship lasted and additional five or ten years after the end of the reign of the pharaoh Akhnaten. It ended in strife that may have been close to civil war and the pantheon of polytheistic gods was re-imposed. Akhnaten had a daughter named Merit-Aten, and probably many girls of the ancient Egyptian kingdom were named Merit-Aten during that quarter century of Aten worship. However when the new state monotheistic religion was overthrown and the old polytheistic religion was restored, the name for girls changed back to the Merit-Amen. And to keep the two identities separate while at the same time not offending Yahweh with a child named after foreign gods, Merit-Amen could have undergone a change to Merit-Am, and this could have become the Hebrew Miri-am, or Miriam, and later became Mary. So the "Magdalene" in the name Mary Magdalene identifies a place on the Sea of Galilee for Mary and her family to have lived in her childhood. And the "Mary" in the name recalls the centuries-long Jewish residence in Egypt, the Egyptian names that Jews would

often have taken, and the Exodus and Conquest of Canaan commemorated even to this day by the Passover. Moreover, the population around the Sea of Galilee is more closely connected to Moses than other parts of the Jewish kingdom. In the distribution of spoils to the victors at Gilgal and Shiloh, many maps show that half of the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee was included in the territory granted in allotment to the half-tribe of Moses (Manasseh). "Manasseh" in Hebrew is "Menashe," a word is artificially created to disguise the name Moses (in Hebrew: Moshe). A Hebrew letter "nun" ("N") was inserted in the middle of the name. So "Manasseh" is really "Moses," and we could thus assume that the allotment was meant for Moses, Egyptian-named leader of the Exodus out of Egypt about 1100 years before Mary Magdalene was born, and the "tribe" of Moses. Moreover, for allotment purposes the half-tribe Manasseh is half of the House of Joseph, another important figure during the centuries-long Jewish residence in Egypt. The writerhistorian Ahmed Osman has identified Joseph with the powerful Egyptian prime minister under two pharaohs, Yuya. And if Joseph might not have been Yuya, he would certainly have been another ancient Egyptian prime minister with duties and power similar to Yuya's. But the Egyptian prime minister Yuya looks best for it. For instance, if you take the first syllable of his name and add a syllable from one of his Egyptian government titles, you get Yu-Seph, literally Joseph as pronounced in most of the world not using the King James Bible pronunciations. So in the area around the Sea of Galilee and in the north in general we begin to see a Jewish population descended from those who had been in Egypt for years, perhaps centuries, before the Exodus. And as seen from the names that they continued to give to their children we can assume that they were proud of this historical connection. The name Mary would have sounded pretty much the same. If we went back in time 2000 years and called out "Mary," Mary Magdalene might have turned to look. If we went back in time 3300 years and called out the name "Mary," the pharaoh's daughter MeritAten might have turned to look. Besides the Egyptian-derived name Mary that we see not only in Mary Magdalene but also see in the name of mother of Jesus, we have the name Jesus itself. As scientist and novelist Isaac Asimov pointed out, the name "Jesus" has become unrecognizable as the name "Joshua." The name Joshua went from Hebrew to Aramaic to Greek, and then to Latin and morphed into Jesus. So the "Prince of Peace" was named, by his Egyptian-name-derived parents, after another participant in the Exodus, the war hero of the sometimes-brutal conquest of Canaan. But to keep identities clear here we need to call him by the familiar "Jesus."

At first glance it may seem a stretch that a Jewish community in Galilee was still using given names from a time a thousand years earlier. But reflect on the fact that we modern members of the global English-speaking community are still given names like Richard, William, and Harold from English history a thousand years ago. That's just the way it is and nobody thinks anything of it. So at this point in our quest of intelligent guesses and reasoning that might lead to more understanding of Mary Magdalene, we have taken her name and teased information out of it. This information tells us that Mary was fortunate to be born to a good family of respect and means, proud of its genealogy, and living in a pretty place with a gentle temperate climate. That last point may have been of some importance to Mary Magdalene's early life if only because it was not a tropical climate with terrible mind-sapping heat and humidity, dangerous tropical insects and reptiles, and disease microorganisms lurking in tepid soil and waters. Nor was it a terrible frigid climate in which risk of perishing from the cold or from disease brought on by cold was ever present. Her location almost like no other in the world allowed her freedom and comfort to think and wonder and learn. She also lived among reminders and pride of her own direct links with Egypt, the Exodus, and the Conquest that had given her freedom to be what she could be. 2 Except for the infancy story in Matthew and the temple incident, there is nothing about Jesus in the Bible, contemporary documents, or archaeology until a short period preceding his death. An omission of this magnitude is suspicious in itself. Were none of the people associated with Jesus interested in anything about him before he began his ministry? Or was that information intentionally destroyed? There would have been at least a hundred people including disciples, relatives of disciples, Jewish and Roman authorities, and people who had done routine everyday ordinary business with him, who knew about him, who could relate at least hearsay anecdotes about him. By inference, because she was closest to him, these yarns and accounts should also have included material about Mary Magdalene, where she had been and what she had done, in her first eighteen to twenty-five years. Instead there is nothing, just plain nothing. This should make us a little suspicious. In the four official gospels Jesus both of them, except for the infancy story and that brief Temple episode of Jesus, first appear as closely connected adults. If this had happened in our time of crime dramas on television, the standard plot would revolve around two people in a witness protection program whom the government had given new identities. In modern television story line they would have been hidden away somewhere under Secret Service protection, only to suddenly appear in the midst of an investigation as people with no pasts, no Social Security numbers, and no credit card history until a few months ago.

Perhaps our constant conditioning via television and movies makes the sudden appearance of Jesus and Mary Magdalene as an adult man and an adult woman seem mysterious. But shouldn't a decent reasonable person honestly ask why there is virtually nothing? Given the fact that neither Mary Magdalene nor Jesus fled the increasingly dire chain of events leading to his execution when there seem to be times when they could have fled or hid, it is unlikely that they had ever been fugitives prior to their sudden appearances. So let's try to figure out this big mysterious blank of at least a quarter century of time by using history and reason. Something was happening in their time that had not happened for over two thousand years. In much more ancient times people studying the movements of the sky had noticed a slow gradual turning of the Earth. We now know that it is caused by a wobble in the Earth's rotation and modern astronomers call it a precession. It takes about 26,000 years to completely wobble around to where it had been. Not knowing that it was a simple wobble and thinking that it was something of great importance in the universe, very ancient people had patiently measured this mysterious 26,000-year wobble and had divided it into a more manageable twelve parts, each a little over 2000 years in length. We know these twelve parts as the twelve signs of the Zodiac. Ancient astronomers and wise men advising ancient royal governments considered the long span of time to be something profound and even holy, a span of time that could represent the beginning and the end of everything. In the sky and among the stars of the Zodiac an age was coming to an end and a new one was beginning. It happened in AD 1. Well it might be more accurate to say that it happened in AD Zero, but for all practical purposes there is no AD zero. In AD 1 the Age of Aries officially came to an end and the Age of Pisces officially began. For those who may remember the fears accompanying the change in the standard calendar millennium a few years ago, multiply this fear by many times, maybe by an exponent, and you can get an idea of what may have been going on in many ancient minds. We can only see a possible remnant of this now. The early Christian symbol was not the powerful symbol of the cross but a representation of Pisces, a fish. The fish may have communicated like an advertising campaign that Christianity was the way of the future, that Christians owned the Age of Pisces. A reasonable person might, however, wonder why there were twelve apostles when there were many more followers, exactly twelve disciples like exactly twelve signs of the Zodiac, perhaps a way of claiming to usher in a new era, perhaps a recruiting gimmick.

The astronomical-astrological end of the age of Aries and beginning of the Age of Pisces that fell on AD 1 may also help to explain the apocalyptic temperament running through the New Testament. And Mary Magdalene and Jesus were born into this notch marking the end of a great swath of time and the beginning of another. The time into which they were born was also the end of a long dominant empire and the beginning of a new upstart one. A vast Greek-ruled, Greek-speaking, and Greek-valuesoriented hegemony begun by Alexander the Great in 336 BC and stretching from midway in the Mediterranean Sea to the Indus River on the Indian subcontinent had come to an end or was in the process of collapsing and being conquered. The business, government, and scholarly language of that vast hegemony had been Greek. It began a rapid collapse in 31 BC with the defeat of the superpower Egyptian Greek army and navy to the superpower Roman army and navy at Actium in the Ionian sea and on the shore of northwest Greece. The last female ever to rule a significant superpower, Cleopatra VII, escaped back to her native Egypt and committed suicide by snakebite there on August 12, 30 BC, rather than submit to the Roman military. With her death the three-hundred-year-old Greek hegemony began to fall apart. In an episode of cruelty typical of the time and reminding us of passages in the Gospel of Matthew, the sixteen-year-old son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV, nicknamed Caesareon, was murdered on the orders of Octavian. He had nominally ruled Egypt as its final pharaoh for eleven days after his mother Cleopatra died. Octavian would later become the Roman Emperor Augustus. This dark deed was done to the only child of Julius Caesar to prevent the boy from claiming an inheritance to the leadership of a possible joint Egyptian-Roman Empire. Caesareon's younger twin half-brother Alexander Helios and half-sister Cleopatra Selene were brought to Rome. The brother disappears from history there, possibly also murdered. But Cleopatra Selene was married off to the king of the Roman client state of Mauritania and apparently served as co-regent of that country. Cleopatra Selene effectively co-ruled that large Mediterranean country until 8 AD when she died. Jesus would have been about twelve years old and Mary Magdalene would have been about the same age or a little younger. In the Holy Land itself there had been a Jewish female regent-ruler, Salome Alexandra, between 76 BC and her death in 67 BC, which would reasonably have been during the lifetimes of Jesus and Mary Magdalene's grandparents. So Mary Magdalene grew up in a liberated time of acceptance of female rulers and thus an atmosphere of respect for minds and abilities of women. Families would have

educated girls and prepared them for a world in which there was some equality and freedom. But it was slipping away as the new Roman law and values were replacing the 300-yearold Greek hegemony. The Romans were not having an easy time of it. In 6 AD, when Jesus may have been about ten years old, the Pannonians and Dalmatians (modern Serbia and Croatia) revolted against Roman rule, and it took three years and ten Roman legions (90,000 to 100,000 men) to put it down. Then right after that, in 9 AD when Jesus may have been about twelve or thirteen years old and maybe at the Temple in Jerusalem, the Romans totally lost three whole Roman legions, 9000 trained soldiers each and their equipment, fighting the Germans in Germany. The New Testament contains some historical narrative, but it is understandably not a Roman-oriented historical narrative. There is no mention of these two crucial episodes of Roman history in the New Testament. The same goes for Jewish history. While all around kings and tetrarchs were scheming and plotting, building structures and ordering armies, a smidgen of history and biography of this time frame concerns a visit by Jesus to the Temple, as seen in Luke (2:41 -52). And this brief mention entirely concerns the 12-year-old Jewish boy Jesus involved in Jewish matters in Jewish territory. Rome had its effect on the Jewish historical narrative and Bible stories. The lone remaining superpower in the Mediterranean threw its weight around and could hardly be completely ignored. In 14 AD, about the time that Jesus would have reached adulthood, the emperor Augustus died and Tiberius became Roman emperor. Thus throughout the entire adult life of Jesus there was only one emperor in Rome, Tiberius, and there was only one ruler of his home province of Galilee, the tetrarch Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great. In 26 AD, when Jesus and Mary Magdalene were about 30 years old, Pontius Pilate was appointed Roman Procurator of Judea. Pilate's first day on his new job came either just before the first mention of Jesus as an adult, or to put it another way, near the same time as that mention of baptism of Jesus by John. And this correspondence in time may communicate something. That briefly mentioned incident of 12-year-old Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem serves both to anchor his presence in the Holy Land at that time and to shed some light on his teachings and ministry.

The New Testament gives us glimpses of the Jewish High Court for religious and civil matters, the Sanhedrin. It was effectively composed of two houses, the hereditary aristocratic Sadducees and selected non-aristocratic representatives known as the Pharisees. In 70 AD, thirty-seven or thirty-eight years after the death of Jesus, all of the Sadducees perished bravely defending the Temple against the might of the Roman army. After that only the Pharisees remained to decide Jewish law and organize Jewish society. While the Pharisees are mentioned in the New Testament, the sharp political-religious division within the Pharisees between the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel is not mentioned let alone explained. The House of Hillel was clearly the more liberal and human-oriented of the two groups, but by the time that Jesus was born, its leader, Hillel the Elder, was a very old man. He died in 10 AD when Jesus may have been fourteen or fifteen years old and old enough to be a student in Hillel movement educational establishments. Hillel's liberal Jewish movement carried on, but would have begun to fade without him. Some of the Biblical sayings attributed to Jesus appear to have been well-intentioned paraphrases of Hillel's maxims. From that we can gather that Jesus may have been a member of the House of Hillel. Thus we can guess that he would have been caught in the contention between the waning liberal Hillel faction and the growing conservative Shammai faction of the Pharisees. So we see an omission of Roman history and allusions to Jewish history, possibly much of the latter left unsaid because it would have been assumed that everyone interested in the life and teachings of Jesus would have known it. This suggests that Jesus did not go anywhere distant from the Holy Land. That is to say that he theoretically could have been off somewhere like as a badly needed medic in the Roman military (as did Gandhi), but this is highly unlikely. Or like many young men with yearning for knowledge and active minds, he could have traveled to India as part of a trading caravan and stayed there to learn about Buddhism. This is more reasonable. There sometimes seems to be a Buddhist undertone to what Jesus taught. But his going to India is unlikely. There is one more often mentioned possibility for this great gap of two blank decades in the life of Jesus. That is that he was in southwest England, especially Cornwall, as part of his great-uncle Joseph of Arimathea's business empire. It was, after all, to the tomb that Joseph of Arimathea had constructed for himself that Jesus was brought to after being taken down from the cross. There is tradition and legend that Joseph of Arimathea was a tin merchant. Tin ore came from Cornwall in southwest England. A family business is a family business, and Jesus was family. So Jesus could have been off supervising aspects of the tin business and/or keeping accounts in Cornwall between, say, 12 AD and 26 AD.

Even so, though, wouldn't there have been stories, anecdotes, hearsay references, accounts of healing miracles, even derogatory slander from enemies? But no. There is just nothing. 3 The story of the adult Jesus and the adult Mary Magdalene begins circa 26 AD. What would have been a purpose for not only one author but several authors omitting such a significant swath of time? And these omitting authors of the accepted accounts were not the only authors. There were also the apocryphal gospels, largely Gnostic accounts. For no known reason decades are missing. What caused all of these authors to evade, leave out, omit, or sidestep telling interesting and maybe vital information concerning not only Jesus but also his closest and most devoted disciple? One reason, already mentioned, would have been that the authors were writing not terribly long after the death of Jesus. Matthew may have been written as early as 40 AD, only a few years after the death of Jesus. Luke and Mark may have been written down around 50 AD. Why waste high-cost parchment or papyrus and take great time-consuming writing pains with writing brushes and liquid ink or with feathers and liquid ink to say what everyone already knew? John, however, is different. The Gospel of John was accepted into the canon many decades later and stands apart from the first three accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And there may be a jaw-dropping reason. In 1998 biblical scholar Ramon K. Jusino, working from research by Raymond E. Brown (called America's foremost Catholic biblical scholar), laid out a provocative and eminently arguable case that Mary Magdalene was the author of the Gospel of John. As Jusino himself puts it in his Introduction: "This article makes a case for ascribing authorship of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of John, to Mary Magdalene." Jusino notes later in his section "My Thesis": "We begin by presupposing the following well-settled position: The many positive contributions made by women to the development of the early church have been minimized throughout history." Using Brown's research, Jusino offers that he will show that the mysterious and unnamed Beloved Disciple in John is Mary Magdalene. And then Jusino gives us an outline of what his paper hopes to reveal and demonstrate: "I assert that Mary Magdalene's contribution to the writing of the Fourth Gospel took place within the first phase of development identified by Brown -- i.e., the initial pre-Gospel version. The Gospel went through several phases of modification. The end result of these

modifications was the eventual suppression of her role as author of this Gospel and leader of their community." Many scholars, including Jusino, say that several people composed the Book of John, and in three stages. Here is how they see it being composed and edited, slightly paraphrasing Wikipedia: 1. There is an early composition, perhaps the initial one, revolving around experiences of Jesus. 2. There is a later composition more skillfully written as if by a writing professional. 3. Then there is a final rendition with final editing for the canon, possibly done as late as 90 AD. The text was edited to alter references to her, but the editing was poorly done and as a result leaves footprints revealing Mary Magdalene as the true author. Especially after reading the Gnostic gospels one could believe that "the disciple whom Jesus loved" in "John" was Mary Magdalene. If Mary Magdalene wrote the early composition, it may have been contemporary with Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as early as 40 to 50 AD. If this might be true, one might be able to go back through the text of the Fourth Gospel and sort out where Mary Magdalene's writing remains and where the later rewriters, redactors, and editors altered it for their own purposes. Taking Jusino's careful and thoroughly researched findings and adding some guesses based on reasoning we may argue an answer to the question of whether Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married and moreover whether they may have been married to each other. We know from the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that Mary Magdalene was a deeply devoted follower of Jesus and thus that the two were very close. We could conclude that that was all there was to it. In our own time we have seen secular versions of similar chemistry in young women deeply devoted to their cult leaders. But we really have to put ourselves back into the early first century when speculating about this. A never married young man would have stood out, would have been out of place in first century social contexts. Even a young widower would have been unusual and expected to become attached as soon as possible. And gay was certainly not good then. A known gay man would not have been able to gather a following of disciples. Likewise a never married young woman would have stood out as unusual and basically unacceptable. Even a young widow, if she were not engaged in prostitution to survive, could have been branded a prostitute and socially ostracized. A young unattached woman would have been viewed as a threat to married women and community stability. So in a first century context both Jesus and Mary Magdalene probably would have been married to someone. And since we see nothing in the way of references to spouses of

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either of them, we would hardly be wrong to wonder if Mary Magdalene and Jesus were married to each other. And there may be a clue in John, the Fourth Gospel that Ramon Jusino showed possibly to have been originally written by Mary Magdalene and then changed by others. If you look at it, here is what you see. After the first chapter of John that covers big philosophical ideas and seems to have a Gnostic quality, indeed sounding a little like the Gnostic Gospel of Mary (Gospel of Mary Magdalene), the second chapter begins with a wedding in the Galilean town of Cana. Curiously, Mary, the mother of Jesus, is one of the guests. Even considering that there could have been good reasons for Mary to be at the wedding and understandable reasons for an author of John to name-drop a person who would later become a celebrity, the mention of Mary still has an out-of-place feel. She was much later to become famous in the small community but was not then. An author of John must have had compelling reasons for originally placing her there in his or her story line. If Mary Magdalene wrote the first draft she may have been writing about her own wedding, a treasured moment in any young woman's life. But this wedding would seem to have been a wedding marrying her to Jesus, a wedding destined to have both profound consequences for the world and tragic consequences for her. And of course her fianc's mother would have been there. And of course Mary Magdalene would not have left it out of her account. This brief episode of the wedding in Cana may only have survived because it contains the miracle story of turning water into wine. In and of itself the miracle might be explained away as an insider euphemism for dodging taxes on alcohol. It might have worked this way. At weddings good wine, for which taxes had been paid, would at the beginning be graciously served. As bottles emptied and less-than-sober palates became less discerning the homemade alcoholic beverage would be hauled out. And we might guess that there were fauxceremonies where someone would sample the fermented fluid, pronounce it water for tax purposes, and then announce to a cheering crowd that the party could go on. Something like this, anyway. 4 If the seven miracles in John were in fact miracles we can have no argument. Who are we to say? But for the more skeptical among us and for the sake of trying to put some flesh on the mysterious bones of Mary Magdalene, let us pick apart the text to glean from it what we may. It is only guessing and admittedly a little hokey. But as a series of guesses spanning a year or two of time it can also put some life into the missing biography of Mary Magdalene. So for lack of anything better, let's try it.

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Miracles make good stories. Miracles in books, true or not, are magician shows in print. The miracles recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke are virtually the same miracles, as if from copying, story sharing, or collaboration. The miracles in John, however, are, except for one of them, completely different miracles. Moreover, as if added to create excuses to preserve real incidents in the lives of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, the miracles in John seem to occur in association with touching moments in Mary Magdalene's life, possibly in her shared life with Jesus. We can wonder if these co-minglings of miracles with touching personal moments might have been done consciously by Mary Magdalene herself, or whether her followers did it. The miracles or signs almost seem deliberately intended not as miracle stories in themselves but to preserve the biographical moments through attachment to tales of miracles. We might even wonder if it had been done to sneak biographical traces of the real Mary Magdalene past dour male censors anxious to destroy the memory of the earliest female Christian leader and her movement. If any of that might have even a razor-thin possibility of being real, it deserves at least a transitory hearing here. If Mary Magdalene wrote the original draft of John, creatively picking it apart like this might tease out some biography to fill the void. But if Mary Magdalene wrote John, John was not the only Gospel that she may have written. She also seems to have written the apocryphal Gospel of Mary, ten pages of which are missing, six at the beginning and four in the middle. While over half of the total Gospel of Mary is missing, enough remains to show her competence to write lengthy and thoughtful manuscripts. Mary could have written John. As miracles go, the seven miracles or signs in John do seem reconstructed annexations in a rewritten text. For example, as miracle two begins we see that Jesus is again in the town of Cana where the wedding had been held and water had perhaps euphemistically been turned into wine. If that may have been Mary Magdalene's wedding to Jesus, then Mary Magdalene would have had strong family ties to Cana. Weddings are family affairs. And thus a reason for Jesus to visit Cana would have been somehow significant to Mary Magdalene. We don't know what it was, but it hints at another precious moment, most of which was deleted by rewriters and redactors so we may never know what it was to her. Possibly the original text was still available then, and maybe intentions were to restore the text to what it had been after a crisis had blown over. So the miracle stories might have pointed to where the text had been deleted and make restoration easier. The miracle itself leaves something to be desired in the realm of miracles. It's not a smashing great world-shaking miracle like, say, splitting the sky open so a thousand angles could descend. No, in this second miracle a kid gets sick, maybe even quite sick.

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The kid's father is beside himself and asks Jesus for help. Jesus does not help, in fact refuses to help. The father goes back home and finds that the kid, as kids more often than not do, has gotten better. Repackaging it as a miracle, though, could have saved a sliver of a memory precious to Mary Magdalene. After all, who is going to throw out a perfectly good miracle story? But all we can say now is that something short of a miracle seems to have happened in Cana, and recasting it as a miracle could have saved the non-miracle moment for the future. Miracle number three comes up fast after that. It takes place in Jerusalem, at the healing pool of Bethesda, a place that modern archaeologists have been able to locate. The pool clearly was widely regarded to have healing powers. Reality mixes with wishful thinking in that clean water can sometimes cure. Washing a wound or a sore, for instance, may prevent infection, or washing an infection may allow it to heal. In times before modern medicine, anything was better than nothing. Afflicted people lined up for a quick dip in the water and the hope it might bring. One man appears to have been known to Jesus and to the author of John, whom we shall say here is Mary Magdalene. They knew that he claimed to have been afflicted with a disease for thirty-eight years, longer than either of the two of them had been alive on this earth. Jesus would have been about thirty-five-years-old at the time so he would have had to accept the man's claim of thirty-eight years, not having been there to see for himself. What is presented to us as a miracle stems from other sufferers repeatedly cutting into line in front of the man and preventing him from getting into the healing pool and his subsequent desperate plea to Jesus to help him get into the pool. We are told that Jesus said to him, "Stand up, take your mat, and walk." And we are further told that the guy immediately took his mat and walked. We may assume from the story line that the man could not walk before Jesus ordered him to do so. If we assume this, we are also led to accept a miracle. But in fact the text does not say this. The man may have had, for instance, scoliosis, or maybe a clubfoot severe enough to make normal walking difficult and painful. Or he may have had any number of other things. We don't know. We only read that the man walked away with his mat. The fact that Jesus told the man, on the Sabbath when it was forbidden to do so, to carry his mat may play a small part in his sentence to death a year or two later on. But again this is a rather questionable miracle, and maybe even rather paltry in that it is not a great eye-catching one. Few, if any, at that pool would have been aware of any miracle taking place.

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But framing it as a miracle in the text could have allowed a mention of Mary Magdalene's trip to Jerusalem to be preserved, a trip that would have had, like trips do, some special meaning to her but is lost to us now. The next miracle is different than the first three in John. For one thing it involves, as they might say in Hollywood, a cast of 5000. For another, it is not only described in John, it appears in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, too. By the book, it involves feeding the 5000 with five loaves of bread and two fish. These would not have been loaves like Wonder Bread but probably more like circular flat pita bread. To make enough of this bread to feed a small army of 5000 would have taken numerous bakeries numerous hours and barrels of barley and wheat flour. We might wonder about the symbolism of the two fish because there are two fish in the zodiac constellation Pisces and the new Christian movement was apparently touting itself as representing the new astrological age of Pisces that was just being entered. We have to remind ourselves that the earliest symbol of Christianity following the crucifixion was not the cross but a fish. And in this period of proto-Christianity the fledgling movement might well have been using the two-fish sign of Pisces symbolize the brave new age that the world was being ushered into. The exact number of five loaves of bread is also interesting because there were five known planets visible from Earth. For instance, a "great conjunction" of Jupiter and Saturn would have taken place in about 33 AD. As miracles go, this was a miracle on a larger scale, more like we might want miracles to be described in this modern era of Hollywood special effects. This miracle is said to have happened after Jesus had just heard that his colleague John the Baptist had been killed on the orders of Herod Antipas, a shock for anyone. No doubt that Mary Magdalene would have been shocked by this, too. Understandably wanting to get away from it all and have some time to think, Jesus and probably Mary Magdalene, went by boat on the Sea of Galilee to a quiet remote place near the town of Bethsaida (not to be confused with Bethesda of the previous miracle). There may have been a dual reason for this getting away from it all. Bethsaida would have been the first town across the border from the province of Galilee ruled by none other than the tetrarch (sub-king) of Galilee, Herod Antipas. Moreover, Herod Antipas did not get along well with his half-brother, the tetrarch Herod Phillip, ruler of the adjacent province where Bethsaida was located. It is perfectly reasonable to expect an army of revenge to assemble just across the border from Galilee. Bethsaida was at the northeast tip of the Sea of Galilee in a jurisdiction called Gaulanitis (Golan Heights) part of territory ruled by Herod Phillip. It would be understandable for a

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political-religious activist allied with John the Baptist to flee across a border until he could assess the situation. But the fame of Jesus the healer and motivational speaker seems to have grown. That Mary Magdalene could have assisted in his healing activities like a modern nurse might do may play a part in her later life. But that's for later. Near Bethsaida we may see a man who just wanted to get away from it all surround by a multitude said to be 5000 souls just when he would have rather been alone to reflect and grieve. But there may be a more sinister side to it. It was spring, just before the Passover in this lovely part of the world, and people could sit on the green grass. Something of note happened to have that newsworthy moment. Similar accounts of something exceptional are recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke as well as in John. But that something might not have been the obvious miracle. Later in John, Jesus is recorded as saying, "I am the bread of life" interpreted by some as meaning that his flesh is the bread of life as practiced in ritual. He lays aside the fish and compares the bread with the life-sustaining manna that saved the Jews during the Exodus, speaking to a crowd of Jews who were proud descendants of the survivors of the Exodus who had eaten that manna. It is hard to believe that most of those walking on the shore of the Sea of Galilee and following Jesus in the boat would not have had some foresight to bring a lunch for what might have been expected to be a long day. Those who through haste or oversight who did not bring their own food would have made arrangements for others to share some. So even if we accept the story on face value that the crowd of 5000 on the shore were followers hoping to hear a sermon, there is something curious about this picture. Food and hunger would not have been a problem. Jesus would not have had to distribute any fish or bread to them. Moreover, in all four books these followers seem like people who if they might miss lunch could surely look forward to supper. In addition, there would have been plenty of food around in preparation for the joyous celebrations of Passover. The text of the story may have been a reminder of how bad things had once gotten during the Exodus and how bad they still could get while they celebrated in comfort and in plenty. If that crowd were merely the new faithful hoping for guidance following the horrible death of one of their leaders John the Baptist, it still would have been seething. If nothing else, they would have wanted to know what to do next. They would have wanted to know what a remaining leader thought that they should do. A powerful arbitrary monarch had just killed his friend and colleague in a cruel capricious execution. We can picture him telling a large crowd of devoted followers that surely would have been sharing his grief and anger not to engage in revenge but instead to follow him and

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stay in tune with the great chords and counterpoint of the universe. "He who eats this bread will live forever." Let's reiterate here that Mary Magdalene could have written the earliest version of the Gospel of John. Why did she join Matthew, Mark, and Luke in creating a miracle story from this event? A shaky peace existed in the province of Galilee, ruled by the man who capriciously had John the Baptist killed. In addition, the new Roman sole superpower was exerting itself while the old Greek hegemony and culture was fading fast. All around were Jewish fringe groups like the Essenes and Zealots advocating action and violence. Even peaceful and traditional Jewish assemblies like the Pharisees were bitterly divided between the conservative Shammai Pharisees faction and the liberal Hillel Pharisees faction that Jesus was linked to. What might Mary Magdalene and the other three authors have sought to cover up or divert attention from? Mary Magdalene would have been at the gathering at Bethsaida, and it would have been a powerful emotional moment for her. And there may be clues in the texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as to what may have been going on. Matthew points out (Matt 14:21): There were about five thousand men who ate, not counting the women and children. He separates the men from the women and children and reports that there were 5000 men, as if reporting the strength of a military force. Mark merely states the military-like strength (Mark 6:44): "There were five thousand men who ate the food." Luke says it in his own words: (Luke 9:14): "There were about five thousand men in the crowd. The Gospel of John -- that we are saying might have been written by Mary Magdalene -gives us a different but parallel perspective. In it we see (John 6:15): "Jesus therefore, perceiving that they were about to come and take him by force, to make him king, withdrew again to the mountain by himself." It looks like the crowd of 5000 men, not to mention the additional women and children, were seeking a military leader, if not a commander then at least generic "king" to lead an untrained rabble hot for revenge into battle with a trained and well armed military. And Jesus may have grasped the folly and talked them out of it. To get a perspective, let's skip into the chaotic near future. Time passed. Jesus was executed. A decade later some of those who had known him began to write down what they had known.

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By the time that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John began to be written down winds of change had stirred more instability into the region. Instability struck in Rome. Tiberius died in 37 AD and Caligula became emperor for a mere four years until he was assassinated in 41 AD and Claudius became emperor. Instability also struck in the Holy Land. In 50 AD the Zealots raided Jerusalem. And an armed rebellion in Galilee by no doubt some of the very children and grandchildren of those we see gathered with Jesus as Bethsaida drew in the mighty Roman army to put it down in 67 AD. The ancient historian Josephus tells us that the town known in Greek as Tarichaeae, identified by scholars as Magdala, was a focal point of that Jewish rebellion. He also notes that the Jewish defenders of Tarichaeae-Magdala had assembled a fleet of small warships to fight the Romans on the Sea of Galilee. These kinds of naval war preparations also could have been made three decades earlier when the gathering at Bethsaida took place. These tactics failed. Magdala was taken. Many if not most were killed. Those healthy and young were sent as slaves to Nero in Rome. Towns like Magdala were razed and left in ruins. Given even the best of life spans of the time, Mary Magdalene, whose name means that she came from Magdala, probably would no longer have been alive. If she were alive and by then in her 70s, news of the destruction of her town and the mass death and enslavement of its people could not have been good for the elderly woman. After the fierce battles in Galilee the Romans moved on to Jerusalem and captured, destroyed the Temple there in 70 AD, altering the course of Judaism and also Christianity. A writer's plan could have been to cast the gathering at Bethsaida as a miracle instead of a frank news account about Jesus nipping a reckless act of revenge in the bud. This may have been done to serve as reminders for future rewriting and text locations where the rewritten segments belonged. And not having anything incriminating in writing could have prevented sweeping arrests and executions for plotting an armed rebellion against the state, there being no statutes of limitations back then. So might we ask if the fish and bread miracle story represented a code for stockpiled provisions and arms, logistics for a war that could not possibly have been won? Were there failed provocateurs reporting back to their employers that Jesus -- completely in character from what little we know of him -- outwitted them and stopped a war? Might the beheading of John the Baptist have been part of some multi-sided subterranean plot intended to sucker Jewish royal factions, Roman republicans, conquered Egyptian discontents, remnant powers of the dying Greek hegemony, Essenes, Zealots, or others into a war that they could only lose?

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If that seems a little far-fetched, it also seems to be within the realm of reason. And we are examining this material under an unclear microscope only to see if we might shed some light on Mary Magdalene as a historical person. We have to guess that if she wrote the Fourth Gospel she had taken part in the events that she wrote about that were later covered up. We only know from her writing and from the scant other material of her life that she was very close to Jesus. We look here at what might have been happening in the life of Jesus and from that to imply what may have also been happening in the life of Mary Magdalene. But whatever really happened at Bethsaida, that fourth miracle story of fish and bread moves seamlessly into the next, fifth, miracle. And that may be because the fifth miracle, that has Jesus walking on the water of the Sea of Galilee, is or once was a continuous part of the episode of the fourth miracle of feeding the 5000. As with the other miracles we are not presently interested in the miracle of Jesus walking on the water itself, but in why Mary Magdalene might have wanted to save in writing and impart a meaning of an important moment in her life. Others have already pointed out that there is a good explanation for this story of walking on the water. As the episode opens, night is falling. In the late evening twilight and in the nighttime darkness an optical illusion of a man walking along a beach at water's edge might easily appear as if he was walking on water. What might have been so cherished about these moments in time to recast them as a miracle? It seems to place Jesus, and therefore probably Mary Magdalene, heading back to, or actually in, the Province of Galilee at his or their home in the town of Caperneum soon after the events at Bethsaida had ended. The incident of purported walking on water may have been this. The text says that there was a "crossing" of the Sea of Galilee. But a boat trip would never have been far from shore because the place of embarkation and the destination were a short distance from each other in the northeast corner of the Sea of Galilee. The boat would not have "crossed" the Sea of Galilee. It would have "crossed" the border between Gaulanitis and the Province of Galilee. We can only guess that this could have been important. Thus an important moment to Mary Magdalene might have been the mere fact of being able to return home after what had been a scary episode over the border in Bethsaida. To draw on a bad analogy, what if an American couple from Brownsville, Texas, had just been in Matamoros, Mexico, where they had just talked a Mexican drug gang out of a deadly revenge raid? And then they had crossed back across the border to go back home in Brownsville, Texas. We all like to come home safely after a trip, and that would have been some anxietyfilled trip to Bethsaida.

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It also might establish a time in the spring close to Passover when they got back home. And then from a sentence in John we see that they probably stayed there from early spring through the summer and into mid-autumn: "Now the feast of the Jews, the Feast of Booths, was at hand" (John 7:2). Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of the Booths, takes place in late September or early October. Mary Magdalene and Jesus might have had seven precious and peaceful months at home in Caperneum, perhaps their last summer together. 5 The final two miracles or signs given in John involve two men who a decade later would escape from Egypt or would be driven out of Egypt and would settle in what is now southern France along with Mary Magdalene. These were Cedon (or sometimes rendered Cedonus or Sidonius) and Lazarus. In the sixth miracle Jesus is said to have cured Cedon's blindness, and in the seventh miracle Jesus raised Lazarus (Mary Magdalene's brother) from the dead, the first resurrection in the New Testament, the resurrection of Jesus being the second. Jesus and presumably Mary Magdalene had gone to Judea and the big city turbulence of Jerusalem by then, far from the pleasant lakeside communities surrounding the Sea of Galilee. That both Cedon and Lazarus would find themselves in the same boat with Mary Magdalene ten years later suggests a close relationship that lasted over the decade. The author of the Fourth Gospel carefully describes the primitive procedure was almost certainly present. "When he had said this, he spat on the ground, made mud with the saliva, anointed the blind man's eyes with the mud, and said to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam'" (John 9:6-7) We can guess that Cedon had a serious case of bacterial conjunctivitis and pus had sealed his eyelids shut. Making abrasive mud with saliva and rubbing it on the stuck-together eyelids wore through the seals of pus. Moreover, earth microorganisms may have made a natural erythromycin to help with the cure. Subsequent washing rinsed away anything harmful in the procedure. Later the degree of blindness was enhanced and then cast as a miracle, which saved the nice little story and gave us a first-hand look at Jesus practicing healing with primitive tools and empirical knowledge. Cedon or Sidonius only gets mentioned because he is the recipient of Jesus' healing. Very little is known about him except that he was later on the boat that carried Mary Magdalene and others to what is now southern France. Most of the passengers on the boat were either relatives of Jesus or relatives of Mary Magdalene, a fact that should encourage us to ask what, if not marriage, was the special

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relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus that put members of both of their families on that boat together. If Cedon were a member of Jesus' family we might expect description of just how he was. Later applications for sainthood would have glamorized it. But since this is not the case, we might guess that Cedon was a relative of Mary Magdalene. And if that were the case, Mary Magdalene would have been grateful for his restored sight. Recasting it as a miracle may only have been to save that memory of a gentle sigh of relief and her quiet thankfulness. So we come to the final of the seven miracles or signs in the Fourth Gospel that may have originally been written by Mary Magdalene, the raising of Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus was Mary Magdalene's brother. That might say all that we need to know. Raising Lazarus from the dead might at first glance seem that it could have been a cheap circus sideshow trick -- that Lazarus was no more dead than your readers and only played dead. But all of the other "miracles" have a compelling honesty to them, no matter what else one may believe. So we probably can say that something happened that was not intended as a fraud, something in the natural flow of existence. Ancient determination of death was done by evidence of lack of breath, perhaps holding a candle to the mouth and watching for a flicker. Or it was done by feeling for a pulse. The stethoscope was not invented until 1819 so one had to directly feel for a pulse. A weak pulse coupled with a slow heartbeat could feel like no pulse and furthermore could cause unconsciousness and lower body temperature and in total give a tragically wrong impression. Anyone who has tried to find a pulse in a weak old person knows how difficult that can be. Lazarus was young, about the same age as Mary Magdalene and Jesus, but he was also sick, presumably very sick. We can speculate that if a live Lazarus had been wrongly declared dead and on Tuesday or Wednesday was sealed into a tomb carved out of the rock of a low cliff, his muffled anguished cries may have been faintly heard by someone on Saturday. Jesus, having already defied the no-work-on-Saturday rule at Bethesda, could have rushed with others to do the physical labor to free Mary Magdalene's brother. The illness and seeming death of Lazarus would have been a profound emotional moment for Mary Magdalene. And then just when she had begun to adjust to loss, she would have been overjoyed that he was alive. It certainly would have been a moving and memorable moment. Ironically the carefully constructed tombs of both Lazarus and Joseph of Arimathea were never used for their mortal remains. Lazarus became Bishop of Marseilles and is entombed either in southern France or in Cyprus. Joseph of Arimathea is said to have gone to Glastonbury in modern England where presumably he was buried. They had

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obsessively prepared for death, but life had simply led them elsewhere. It seems so very Christian: "Let the dead bury the dead." We know the rest of the story well. Christians and non-Christians hear it every Easter. Mary Magdalene played a large part in it. But after the Easter events, except in the New Testament apocrypha and in partly substantiated legend, she vanished into thin air We know from the Gospel of Mary, apparently written by Mary Magdalene, and from other Apocryphal Gospels like he Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Phillip, that following the execution of Jesus there was at least one meeting of those who had known and had followed him. In that meeting -- or possibly in those several meetings because it seems unlikely that there was only one -- unapologetic misogyny began to rear its ugly form. It would plague and distort the Christian movement from that time on. We also find allusions to Jesus being married, in one of them that Jesus participated in the bridal chamber. In addition to this allusion the Gospel of Phillip talks about a special relationship of Mary Magdalene and Jesus and uses the Greek-derived Coptic word koinonos for it. "In the Bible, koinonos (companion, partner) is sometimes used to refer to a spouse." Wikipedia further points out. And then it gets quite specific. "The Gospel of Philip uses cognates of koinonos and Coptic equivalents to refer to the literal pairing of men and women in marriage and sexual intercourse, but also metaphorically, referring to a spiritual partnership..." What does this say if not literal, legal marriage? Wikipedia notes another and slightly damaged passage in the Gospel of Phillip the says Mary Magdalene and Jesus kissed, apparently on the lips, but that is exactly where some of the damage is so it is unclear. We know from the Gospel of Thomas that Mary Magdalene was regarded as one of the disciples, but if she had been the loving and devoted wife of Jesus that we see over and over she naturally would have followed him. If she had been his wife she would also have been the mother of their children, if any. There is, though, a suggestion of a child, a girl. As far as Mary Magdalene is concerned, the New Testament Gospels fall silent after the events that Christians still commemorate at Easter. And this is strange. Mary Magdalene is a person at the very heart of the Christian story, even vital to the meaning of the Christian story. Why is it that we hear no more of her? We might wonder what might have been deliberately hunted down and destroyed because it failed to conform to stock doctrine? The apocryphal texts give us only a little more, perhaps only weeks more. And then firsthand evidence of Mary Magdalene drops out of sight there, too. We are left with the likes of legend and tradition, but it is legend and tradition that has left some footprints and rings true.

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The date of the execution of Jesus is variously given as just before Passover in the spring of 31 or just before Passover in the spring of 33 AD. Jesus would have been in his early to mid thirties. Only a short time after that, minor and major melees broke out among apostles, disciples, followers, agents of Roman government, and Jewish religiouspolitical factions. At first the Jesus movement was a Jewish movement and required its faithful Jews to observe the laws of Moses, and in particular male circumcision. Factions fought over this. Other factions wanted to be free of it and include all people, Jews and Gentiles both. There is some record of strife. Apparently Mary Magdalene was caught up in this strife. Moreover, powerful factions were forming that wanted to purify the Jesus story and cast him as otherworldly and supernatural. These found that they had a great thorn in their side. Inconveniently for them, there was Mary Magdalene and there were some members of her family, and even worse for them there were close relatives of Jesus. There are scraps of the infighting between higher level figures but there would have been lower level life-threatening attacks and vicious abuse. 6 As legend has it, nine or ten years after the crucifixion, circa 42 AD, Mary Magdalene and some of her near relatives and in addition several near relatives of Jesus, including his mother Mary, were driven out of Egypt or someplace in the eastern Mediterranean. They fled by boat roughly 1500 miles across the Mediterranean Sea to a place just west of the present city of Marseilles, France. A second and quite different legend from that one says that Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene went to the city of Ephesus in present Turkey. We should note that in this legend two unrelated women, Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, are pared almost as if the two were related, almost begging us to see mother-in-law and widowed daughter-in-law emigrating together to Ephesus. This paring stands out like a sore thumb. This paring of the two as if they were related is even more conspicuous when we consider this. While we know for certain where all of the apostles and where most of the other disciples went, we only have fuzzy, conflicting, and curious legends about where the two women most vital to the Christian story went. Doesn't that seem just a little strange? From her emotionally anguishing experiences in Jerusalem in the province of Judea, Mary Magdalene appears to have gone back home to the province of Galilee. We may or may not see clumsily overwritten references to her in John 21:2 and in John 21:20. And then we may see one final autobiographical fragment left intact in John 21:24 before Mary Magdalene disappears altogether from the official record: "This is the disciple who testifies about these things, and wrote these things."

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As with the recasting of stories as miracles or signs to save them, we might wonder if a plotter from the old Magdalene community might have infiltrated the new John community and saved cherished items that would have been eradicated. Whatever it was, that sentence may be the last even remotely possible indication of Mary Magdalene in the official canon. If she might have understandably died of grief in Galilee, we would surely have something in legend or literature about that. As we know, there isn't anything to fill in a time span that may represent the whole second half of her life. So can't we at least assume that there may be some truth to a legend and at some point she went somewhere outside the Holy Land? So let's look at a legend. Unlike fiction and nonfiction writers, writers of false tales (not to imply either of these legends was one) really don't like to write. They tend to write only as much as they must to perpetrate their deceptions. So of the two legends, the one about Mary Magdalene going by boat to what is now southern France and her coming ashore at a town now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (Holy Marys of the Sea) seems the more credible if only for having a larger cast and greater detail. But first there is that gnawing question. Why does the official record go so very blank? One powerful and awful reason hovers over this. A reason that Mary Magdalene goes so terribly missing may well be that she was intentionally obliterated for having had the audacity to lead a Christian faction, for having been a female who had led an influential faction that threatened the male-dominated new Christian order. If this is true we might admire their awful energy and exertion. Those who participated in the intentional obliteration were as thorough as they dared to be. Whatever happened, we must now follow legend and tradition. So may we make a reasonable guess that in about 42 AD Mary Magdalene had already written the early version of what later became the Gospel of John? At that point, contention over what she had written and what she was saying in public may have come to a head. She was forced to leave Alexandria by ship, and escaped to southern France, then called Gaul, with or without her manuscript. The ship carrying her, members of her family, and members of Jesus' family, arrived at a small port town between branches of the Rhone River that was then called Ra, possibly after the ancient Egyptian sun god, and now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, west of Marseilles. There are lists of passengers on that boat. From sites like "Mystics of the Church" and from "Wikipedia" we can find names. On that ship besides Mary Magdalene there were: (1,2) Martha and Lazarus (probably sister and brother of Mary Magdalene). (3,4) Two aunts of Jesus, Mary Salome and Mary Jacoby (also called Mary Cleophas).

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(5,6) Two of the seventy disciples, Maximin (later Bishop of Marseilles) and Cedon or Sidonius (the blind man cured by Jesus), (7) A great uncle of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, whose tomb Jesus was laid to rest in. (8) An approximately ten-to-twelve-year-old girl called Sarah, listed as a maid, but she is widely thought to have been the daughter of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Other lists of passengers show more passengers and some different passengers. For instance, sixteenth century Catholic historian Cardinal Baronius gives this "complete" list of passengers: 1. St. Mary, wife of Cleopas, 2. St. Eutropius, 3. St. Salome, 4. St. Martial, 5. St. Trophimus, 6. St. Cleon, 7. St. Saturninus, 8. St. Maximin (the blind man), 9. St. Sidonius (Restitutus), 10. St. Joseph of Arimathea, 11. St. Mary Magdalene, 12. St. Martha, 13. St. Lazarus, 14. Marcella (instead of Sarah), the Bethany sisters' maid. By the sixteenth century AD Europe was thoroughly Christian, and Cardinal Baronius had thoroughly established texts and traditions to protect. Even the name Sarah was a threat to long established dogma. Marcella may have been pulled from thin air. While there is disagreement about passengers, these lists seem to indicate that the story was not completely legend and that something real took place involving these real people. It also shows that the boat was not small. In fact it would seem to have been a fairly large ship, possibly belonging to a commercial fleet owned by Joseph of Arimathea. This ship took Mary Magdalene and the others to what is now southern France, near Marseilles, and Mary Magdalene lived in southern France for the rest of her life, moving inland from coastal Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer to a place near present Aix-en-Provence and probably lived to be about 75 years old. Most of the people on that boat are mentioned in the four canon Gospels as having had parts in the biography of Jesus and would have been known by the leaders of the fledgling Christian Church. Most or all were also family members who would have looked after one another. So Mary Magdalene would not have been alone in Gaul. The basic story in this legend is probably true. Early Christians in general and the fledgling Christian Church would have known where she was and where she died. The Catholic Church, ever since her death in the beginnings of Christianity, has protected what is left of her earthly remains, even going to great lengths to move them in 710 AD to a safe place during the invasion of France by the Islamic Saracens. So we can reasonably say that Mary Magdalene lived out her final years in southern Gaul. From the place where their ship landed and now called Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer she is said to have gone northeastward and inland and to have lived as a penitent in a cave south of present Marseilles now named La Sainte Baume (The Holy Cave). It naturally became

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a religious site later on. From photographs it does look like the kind of cave shelter in which a hermit could survive, possibly an appearance that gave rise to a legend that she lived there as a penitent hermit. But that story, however touching to the soul, would seem unrealistic and untrue. Mary Magdalene had arrived in southern France with a tight knit group of apparently her relatives and relatives of Jesus. In a new and strange land with a different climate and a different ethnic population they would have struggled together to make for themselves a niche. From accompanying and probably assisting Jesus on his healing missions, Mary Magdalene would have gained specific knowledge and on-the-job training in state-of-theart healing. Given where she and Jesus had been located, it would have been mingled with the best Egyptian medical knowledge, in other words the best in the world at the time. Ancient Egyptian medical papyri show a level of medical sophistication not surpassed until almost our own time. So Mary Magdalene, an educated woman in her mid-forties with specific medical knowledge and training would have been an asset to the community as a healer, caregiver, midwife, and effective doctor. And this may explain her relationship with that particular cave. Fresh water drips from the cave ceiling and in addition there is a spring where fresh uncontaminated water flows like from a faucet. There were no licensed chlorinated city water supplies in those days. Not wanting to make patients any sicker than they already were, an ancient doctor would have needed a natural source of reliable uncontaminated water for his or her potions and lotions. A cave with a cool fresh uncontaminated spring like La Sainte Baume would have been worth the grueling climb to get safe fresh water for medicines and treatments. The climb, though, would have been too much effort for ill and elderly patients and possibly even fatal for seriously ill patients. Indigenous medicines would have been manufactured there and carried back down to Mary Magdalene's house or clinic. Water for treatments and washing wounds would have been carried back down. So Mary Magdalene would have lived below the cave on flat land and near a road, probably among others in a small settlement or even in a village. Since people are grateful to healers, she would have been a respected local resident and reasonably well paid. And we can guess that is how she lived out her life. Legend has it that she lived into her mid-seventies, perhaps long enough to have been made aware of the Roman destruction of her town of Magdala on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in the Jewish War. But of course hopefully not.

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But there is one last point to cover, and that point is Sarah. If Sarah were Mary Magdalene's daughter by Jesus, Mary Magdalene would certainly have been a sympathetic figure of a single parent raising a daughter in a new land, amid a new language and customs, and plagued by political-religious claims that had once caused her to flee the eastern Mediterranean. She would have been in her mid-to-late fifties by the time Sarah would have married. So let's take a look at the approximately ten-to-twelve-year-old girl on the boat back in 42 AD. Most of the varieties of the legend give her name as Sarah, but some as Marcella. The disagreement about her name would at least tend to acknowledge that there was indeed a girl on that boat, but her name was either unclear in the chaos of the event or falsely given to protect her from serious harm if anyone found out. The reason given that such a young girl was on such a long and dangerous trip by sea to an unknown land is that she was a slave girl working as a maid. But this taxes credibility. In the first century slave boys and girls could easily be bought anywhere. The Bible itself comments favorably on the institution of slavery. Slates of all ages were everywhere. There would be little practical reason to bring such a young and relatively unusable slave along to consume ship's rations. As cold as it sounds to us in our day, a practical voyager could have just picked up another slave where they landed. It's not as if a ten-year-old girl would have some valuable irreplaceable skill that forced the owner or employer to separate her from her family ties and bring her along. Moreover, this young and fragile slave could perish from the stress and dangers of the voyage and thus incur an unnecessary financial loss of salable slave property in those days before tax write-offs. While an unlikely slave owner on the ship might have been sentimental and charitable, it makes more sense that Sarah was not a slave but a beloved child of one of the passengers. And since versions of the legend itself seem to attempt to disguise this and perhaps intentionally give her a false identity of a slave or maid, we are led to guess that this girl was probably the daughter of Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Probably the ruse was successful. We don't have any stories of slaughter of an innocent girl. And this seems to have been a favorite theme in both history, as with the murder of Caesarion to prevent him from becoming emperor of both Egypt and Rome, and in yore, as with the murder of innocents by Herod to prevent one of them becoming king of the Jews. But even if no one murdered her, Sarah's life must have been fraught with danger. Religious factions in factions of Judaism still linked with Christianity, religious factions in fledgling Christianity itself, and political factions in the Roman Empire and its Jewish colony would not have hesitated to murder a young girl whose very existence called into question their fictions and threatened their power.

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But it appears not to have happened. So Sarah probably grew to adulthood, married as would have been expected, and had children. And all of her connections to a growing and often persecuted new Christianity and its new intolerant religious bureaucracy in Rome would have been concealed, probably even from her spouse and children. From there anything even remotely real about Mary Magdalene fades, perhaps intentionally, to nothing. END Rocky River, Ohio March 14, 2013

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