Mary Magdalene and Jesus: Gnostic Union or Deferred Desire?
- Margaret D. Kamitsuka
- 2 days ago
- 12 min read
Margaret Kamitsuka on Cynthia Bourgeault's The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity
Mary Magdalene has always fascinated readers of the Bible, and author Cynthia Bourgeault notes that since Dan Brown’s 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, she has fascinated an even wider audience. Her repeated presence in all four gospels, the gnostic gospels (non-canonical texts), Christian art through the ages, and modern scholarship proves the depth and longevity of her place in the Christian tradition. That said, Mary Magdalene is a woman under many veils. She can become whatever one wants her to be, from sinner to apostle to lover. The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity (Shambala) tells a story about a biblical figure, but Bourgeault intends something much more than a religious biography. Bourgeault and I both share a scholarly interest in understanding Mary Magdalene’s meaning and impact, but our research serves different purposes and will probably attract different constituencies. This review lays out our commonalities and differences, my concerns and appreciation.
First, we are both feminists but situated differently as scholars. Bourgeault is part of a broad spiritual movement with various institutional ties and a wide social media presence that can be loosely labeled esoteric Christianity. As an Episcopal priest, she offers courses, retreats, and daily online meditation practice sessions that instruct interested seekers in the ideas and methods of her type of contemplative Christianity. This book promotes her understanding of its mystical wisdom traditions, and many might classify her writings and mentoring as New Age spirituality—a label she would reject as inaccurate and dismissive. I cannot assess Bourgeault’s many and various outreach activities to spiritual seekers, but I can bring a scholarly eye to her book, which is aimed at a wide audience. As a scholar, I do not promote any brand of spirituality and my publications, including my recent book, Desirable Belief: A Theology of Eros, is written from a scholar’s perspective. This essay assesses how Bourgeault’s book might have relevance to today’s culture as well as how it might diverge from traditional Christianity, and why that matters.
In part one, the book introduces Mary Magdalene, often using the gnostic gospels to paint a very specific picture of a woman whom Jesus apparently loved and commissioned to spread his message of what Bourgeault describes as “transformative wisdom.” The key words here are love and wisdom. Bourgeault devotes part two of her book to parsing, delicately, the possibility that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers. But beyond any romantic attachment, she argues that they shared a deep spiritual connection. Part three lays out the content of her apostolic message—one that grounds the spirituality and contemplative practices Bourgeault herself teaches.
Bourgeault and I share a common methodological starting point: Eros. We both examine how the meaning of Christian faith morphs when one focuses on the tradition’s suppressed themes of sexuality and desire. We agree that Christianity has given erotic intimacy a bad rap in relation to its more lofty sibling: agape. We examine the relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus and find textual hints of romantic attraction, and we see important intertextual connections with the Bible’s singularly erotic poem, the Song of Songs. From this methodological commonality, Bourgeault and I diverge.
Bourgeault believes that the erotic (possibly even sexual) relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus is part of a stream of unitive, transformational, cosmic love energy. (Each religion and spiritual tradition has its technical terms. These are hers, which receive fuller explanation in her other books). Bourgeault’s Mary Magdalene emerges as a quasi-tantric bodhisattva and source of wisdom for spiritual seekers today. My conclusions about Jesus and Mary Magdalene are much more tentative—not out of an anti-eros bias but, rather, because I read their story (like that of the lovers in the Song of Songs) as one of deferred passion. Bourgeault’s Mary Magdalene offers a channel to personal spiritual enlightenment. My Mary Magdalene deepens my theological understanding of the negative implications of how the historical tradition has excluded sexuality from Christ’s incarnational full humanity. Bourgeault’s interests are metaphysical. Mine are doctrinal.
The Metaphysics and Textuality of Mary Magdalene
For Bourgeault, Mary Magdalene’s relationship with Jesus “forms a particular kind of energy channel through which divine compassion pours itself forth as wisdom and creativity.” Bourgeault repeatedly makes this type of claim about energy pathways between the created world and the divine, and she believes that many historical figures serve this purpose, such as saints, mystics, and poets. It is important that these figures existed in the flesh. An extraordinary literary, mythological, or archetypal figure (e.g., Galadriel or Athena or Anima) will not suffice. Bourgeault wants more than the idea of an energy pathway—her claim is referential. This metaphysical intention to her research explains why she works so carefully with the historical sources. She relies on biblical texts (the four gospels and the Song of Songs) hermeneutically guided by gnostic texts, such as the “Gospel of Mary Magdalene” and the “Gospel of Philip.” Bourgeault gives significant interpretive weight to these ancient gnostic materials—even if some of them are, she admits, objectively “strange, allegorical…cryptic…surrealistic,” or “just too weird.” Without these non-canonical texts she would not have a sufficient textual basis for her claim that Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have been sexual partners. In short, the biblical text alone does not sustain her portrait of Mary Magdalene. My hermeneutical path to building a portrait of Mary Magdalene is markedly different. I also work intertextually, reading Mary Magdalene in the gospels (especially John 20), the Song of Songs, and Christian art, but I do not engage with the gnostic gospels, which present not only a different Mary Magdalene but a different Jesus. Those non-canonical traditions played a role in the church’s nascent period of development, but they exercised minimal influence on the grassroots regula fidei (“rule of faith”) that formed the basis for the creeds that structure Christian belief to this day.
Thus, Bourgeault makes the case for erotic heterodoxy based on gnostic texts about Mary Magdalene’s and Jesus’s love relationship while I make the case for erotic orthodoxy. That is, I strive to demonstrate that eros did and should inform the very meaning of Christian belief based on canonical sources. When I do work with non-canonical sources that display eros between Jesus and Mary Magdalene—for example, Titian’s early 16th-century sumptuous Noli Me Tangere painting—I do not use this image to prove or imply that they may have consummated their love. For me, an erotic image of Jesus and Mary Magdalene does not point to a past real-life event in Jesus’s earthly life. Rather, it speaks to the human condition as one of a persistent yearning for love. The church has ever tried to rank in importance different kinds of love, with agape at the pinnacle and eros in the mud. A responsible theological anthropology must reject that contrived ranking. Human love is always an embodied mixture of many desires of the heart. To be human is to be caught up in that tangle. The reality of human desire informs Christology in that it opens wide what can be claimed about the meaning of Jesus as “truly human” in the Chalcedonian creed.
Bourgeault notes how the early church leaders conflated Mary Magdalene with Luke’s account of the unnamed female sinner who anoints Jesus with oil (Lk 7:36-50). The tradition assumed the sin in question was sexual, probably prostitution. In other words, Mary Magdalene was tarred with a misogynous and anti-sexuality brush from the start. Bourgeault rightly criticizes “the early church’s collective unconsciousness, the inevitable shadow side of its increasing obsession with celibacy and sexual purity.” She argues that these views run contrary to her sense of how Jesus came to advocate “conscious” or “Fifth Way” love. (Bourgeault explains briefly that these terms were coined by an obscure mid 20th-century Russian esoteric philosopher, Boris Mouravieff. She folds these phrases into her understanding of transformative love that “represents the purest and most sublime realization of the Christian spiritual path.”) She speculates that his romantic relationship with Mary Magdalene influenced his understanding of love. Mary Magdalene may well have helped him evolve from “an Essene ascetic,” who shunned women, into a man who took her as his “companion” and who bestowed on her “kisses,” according to the “Gospel of Philip.” She speculates that Jesus and Mary may have been initiated into what the “Gospel of Philip” called a spiritual “bridal chamber,” though no one can say whether one should take that image literally or metaphorically.
Parts of Bourgeault’s metaphysical worldview are familiar to me, like Jungian and Buddhist references, the fascination with non-canonical texts, the discomfort with some Christian literal-mindedness. I understand her project of wanting to find how various historical world religions each provide keys to understanding a common, cosmic spiritual reality out there that speaks to the human need for love. This aspect of her book is what may give it broad appeal. That I am not personally drawn to the path of Fifth Way love is not the issue. For the sake of argument, let me stipulate, in agreement with Bourgeault, that physical intimacy can be a transformative experience that may even feel cosmically spiritual. That said, I admit to being highly suspicious of endorsing physical intimacy as a religious pathway to enlightenment. Too many students and disciples have been sexually manipulated by their mentors, pastors, gurus, and spiritual directors with the promise of spiritual advancement, when in fact they were being groomed by sexual predators. I have no issue with the claim that “sex itself can be about transformation,” but in our current climate we must be cautious. Bourgeault goes too metaphysical for my comfort in claiming that Jesus and Mary achieved a love relationship that created a “permanent vibratory field within the cosmos,” which any spiritual seeker can access now. Bourgeault’s claim might have been stronger had she acknowledged the shadow side of positing a spiritual practice that could easily be weaponized by sexually unscrupulous people to prey upon unsuspecting and vulnerable people. I have no counterevidence that refutes Bourgeault’s hypothetical that Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have enjoyed a special relationship that involved physical union, but I find no evidence in the canonical gospels that their relationship entailed this union, either. The issue is inconclusive in canonical texts. If Bourgeault thinks the “Gospel of Philip” is suggestive of a consummated relationship, then it would have been responsible for her to have addressed the sexual attitudes and practices found in other gnostic writings, which verge on the bizarre (see Cambry G. Pardee “The Gnostic Magdalene: Mary as Disciple and Revealer” in Mary Magdalene from the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond). As a scholar, I think there are good reasons why the church fathers—patriarchy notwithstanding—opted not to included gnostic texts in the biblical canon.
Challenges of working with gnostic texts aside, one can still plausibly imagine that Mary Magdalene and Jesus each experienced the tug of desire. Indeed, it is difficult to deny this possibility if one admits that he was as fully human as she. The narrative arc in the canonical gospels from the sensual anointing in Bethany to Jesus’s post-resurrection encounter with Mary Magdalene alone dares the Bible reader not to think of Jesus as a man affected by human emotions, including erotic desire. Reading John 20, one would have to be a machine not to feel the agony of their wanting to embrace one another—but holding back. One has only to follow the aromatic nard from the Song of Songs to the anointing in Luke 7 to Titian’s magnificent painting of Jesus and Mary Magdalene with her jar in the garden. Desire drips from all these texts, which affirms the most central doctrinal principle of Christian faith: Chalcedon’s Deum verum et hominem verum (“truly God and truly man”).
The Resurrection—A Psychic or Bodily Event?
Bourgeault is at her most theological (and heterodox) in her discussion of the resurrection. As a scholar of religion and constructive theologian, my most significant divergence from her centers on this faith claim. For Bourgeault, a correct interpretation of the resurrection is pivotal for understanding Mary Magdalene’s spiritual authority. Mary received her apostolic commissioning and confirmation of her status as Jesus’s beloved companion after Jesus’s death and resurrection. Bourgeault goes beyond the testimony of canonical and gnostic texts to make the case for a metaphysical event involving what occurred when Jesus died.
Death changes any relationship. With Jesus’ death, their love transitioned from the physical to what Bourgeault calls the “imaginal.” Whether or not Mary Magdalene saw Jesus’s “resuscitated human body” (as John 20 describes), they met in an “imaginal space between two realms.” Mary Magdalene did not merely acquire a resurrection faith or an intellectual belief in the ongoing relevance of Jesus’s message for the community of believers. Something more happened. She entered an “ontological reality” and “liminal space” that surrounds “our own space-time dimension.” Jesus had to die for their relationship to transition from the physical dimension to this higher spiritual space. By “space,” Bourgeault does not mean merely a state of consciousness. She claims that there is a “realm that objectively exists” out there. Mary Magdalene’s (or anyone’s) spiritual power derives from accessing that dimension and tapping into its spiritual “vibrational field.”
It is not Bourgeault’s somewhat groovy claim about good vibrations that makes me pause. Bourgeault’s interpretation of the resurrection implies that belief in an actually risen body of Christ is not only not necessary but, in addition, will get in the way of a wisdom-oriented understanding of Mary Magdalene’s significance. Theologians have been demythologizing the resurrection almost as soon as the proclamation rang out that “He is risen.” Bourgeault presents a kind of modern, New Age demythologizing interpretation that dispenses with the claim of the bodily resurrection, which she considers to be a retrograde “literal-mindedness.” Whether it is easier to believe that Jesus was literally raised from the dead or that there is another energy-space-time dimension where Jesus and Mary Magdalene met—well, that is for each person to decide for themselves. Either one is faith claim.
My responsibility as a constructive theologian is to interpret the literal-sounding belief about the resurrection of the body and to assess the implications of demythologizing it away. The most doctrinal important claim to Christian faith is that Jesus saves. Of all the various options the church could have taken to explicate the meaning of salvation, it linked being saved with belief in the literal incarnation, death, bodily resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ. He died, his actual body was raised from the dead, and he miraculously ascended to “sit at the right hand of God the Father” (Apostles’ Creed). Some of the creed’s language has always been read metaphorically (e.g., God’s right hand). The incarnation, resurrection, and ascension, however, are not metaphor but belong to the rule of faith. Determining how these miracles might have transpired draws one into apophaticism, mystery, and even paradox. Even so, Christian faith means affirming that they happened as corporeal events and then living one’s life as if that faith claim is referentially true. The apostle Paul made it clear “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15: 14).
Bodily resurrection is not just dogma cooked up by the early church theologians, which can be dispensed with by modern Christians with more advanced scientific views and a dim appreciation of miracles. In my estimation, bodily resurrection is the basis for a theology of embodied eros. Without Jesus’s bodily resurrection, then there was no almost-touching in John 20 by two people experiencing physical desire. If Jesus’s “do not touch me” (Jn 20:17) was not a difficult decision to defer a loving embrace, then those words become a stern admonishment of Mary Magdalene. Those words become (as they did), a script for the church’s misogynous labeling of all women as evil temptresses. If the resurrected Jesus did not ascend bodily to return to the Godhead as the “first fruits” (1Cor 15:20) of the believers’ resurrection, then belief in an eschatological reality of a final bodily resurrection crumbles. There would be no basis to argue that God’s final shalom will provide an unimaginable fulfillment for the many tragic, deferred, and lost loves in this life. The claim that Jesus saves, for me, necessitates seeing John 20 as a poignant, intimate encounter between two very human individuals. Jesus shared a feet-on-the-ground human experience of wanting another person but deferring that touch and the passion it might ignite. The belief that Jesus’s and Mary Magdalene’s love survives the grave is not based on a putative claim about another “imaginal” dimension out there. Their endless love rests upon the belief that Jesus was not only human but also God, which means that death is not the end of anyone’s (love) story.
Any student of historical theology understands that Christianity is one endless and repeating family argument around a dinner table of competing orthodoxies and heterodoxies. Bourgeault and I agree that the love between Mary Magdalene and Jesus was the kind that survives the grave. For Bourgeault, this claim has to do with how they merged in a dimension of transformational wisdom. If others find her approach inspirational and coherent with their Christian faith and human need for love, I would be the last to cry “heresy”! For me, their enduring love is the basis for a very literal-minded hope that all that has been lost, damaged or deferred will be found again and held in one’s arms.
Margaret Kamitsuka is the Francis W. and Lydia L. Davis Professor Emeritus of Religion at Oberlin College, where she taught courses in gender and religion for over 20 years. She received her PhD in religious studies from Yale University and is the author of Feminist Theology and the Challenge of Difference; Abortion and the Christian Tradition: A Pro-choice Theological Ethic; Unborn Bodies: Resurrection and Reproductive Agency; and Desirable Belief: A Theology of Eros. She also edited The Embrace of Eros: Bodies, Desires, and Sexuality in Christianity and has published essays in The Oxford Handbook of Theology, Sexuality, and Gender and in a
variety of scholarly journals including: Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Journal of Religious Ethics, and Theology Today.
