{"id":1090,"date":"2015-04-09T22:33:21","date_gmt":"2015-04-10T02:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/?p=1090"},"modified":"2015-04-09T22:33:21","modified_gmt":"2015-04-10T02:33:21","slug":"margaret-starbird-on-mary-magdalene-in-the-four-gospels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/?p=1090","title":{"rendered":"Margaret Starbird on Mary Magdalene in the Four Gospels"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Mary<\/a>Margaret Starbird wrote the other day:<\/p>\n

I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m always amazed at the contortions New Testament scholars go into in an attempt to avoid seeing and stating the obvious.\u00c2\u00a0 The CNN \u00e2\u20ac\u0153special\u00e2\u20ac\u009d segment about Mary Magdalene aired tonight. One scholar (Dr. Nicola Denzey Lewis) declared twice that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ground zero\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for the idea that Mary Magdalene was the wife of Jesus was the Gospel of Philip, which states that Mary was the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153companion\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153consort\u00e2\u20ac\u009d of Jesus and that he kissed her often on her\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. (sadly the location is missing, but we are told that the apostles were jealous of Mary\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.because Jesus loved her more than all the rest of them\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6.<\/p>\n

If she had read my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Woman with the Alabaster Jar,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d published in 1992 and cited by Dan Brown in The DaVinci Code\u00e2\u20ac\u009d), Dr.Lewis would have known that for many of us \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ground zero\u00e2\u20ac\u009d is the canonical
\nGospel of John which names the woman who anointed Christ at the banquet at Bethany (Mary) and dried his feet with her hair and follows the passion narrative all the way to the sacred reunion of the Sacred King and his Bride at the tomb on Easter morning.\u00c2\u00a0 This has nothing to do with the (2nd or 3rd century) Gospel of Philip. All four canonical Gospels mention the anointing of Jesus by a woman and three place this event in Holy Week\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfollowed closely by the Passion of the Christ and his resurrection. This liturgical sequence is reminiscent, even a reenactment of ancient rites of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hieros games\u00e2\u20ac\u009d indigenous to the Near East\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhere the Sacred King is anointed and united in marriage with a royal priestess\/princess and later sacrificed, mutilated, executed and entombed.
\nAfter three days his Bride\/consort returns to the tomb to mourn him and finds him resurrected. These ancient rites go back to neolithic times and are repeated in the Gospel narratives, where Mary and Jesus embody the archetypal Bride and Bridegroom \u00e2\u20ac\u0153in the flesh\u00e2\u20ac\u009d\u00e2\u20ac\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the CNN segment, the question was raised: What happened to Mary Magdalene?\u00c2\u00a0 Back in the 1980\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s when I was researching everything I could find about Mary Magdalene, it struck me that in spite of her importance in the final chapters of the Gospels\u00e2\u20ac\u201dbeginning with the anointing scene and ending with the reunion with Jesus at the tomb (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t keep clinging to me\u00e2\u20ac\u009d)\u00e2\u20ac\u201dMary totally disappears from the story, never mentioned in the epistles or in the Book of Acts of the Apostles.\u00c2\u00a0 What happened to her? The mother of Jesus and other female disciples show up in Acts and elsewhere.\u00c2\u00a0 Only Mary, Martha and Lazarus are totally missing, except for later legends that try to
\nfill in the gaps, placing them in Gaul around AD 42\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6. But why did they leave?<\/p>\n

One afternoon in 1988, I sat down at my computer and wrote a story\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwhich is now the fictional opening \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Prologue\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in my \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Alabaster Jar\u00e2\u20ac\u009d book\u00e2\u20ac\u201dexplaining how we came to lose the Beloved of Jesus for two millennia.\u00c2\u00a0 Sensing danger to the wife of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea, the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153custodian of the Grail,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d came to her on Easter in the evening and convinced her to flee with him to a place of safety\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6which would only have been necessary if she were possibly pregnant with\u00e2\u20ac\u201dor the mother of\u00e2\u20ac\u201da child of Jesus.\u00c2\u00a0 Protecting the royal family would have been a top priority of the friends and followers of Jesus, the Davidic Messiah of prophecy.<\/p>\n

Imagine her\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmeditate on her\u00e2\u20ac\u201dover these coming days, riding on a donkey across the Sinai under the protection of Joseph of Arimathea\u00e2\u20ac\u201d\u00e2\u20ac\u0153defiled and defamed\u00e2\u20ac\u009d seeking refuge in a foreign land, fulfilling the prophecy of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Magdal-eder\u00e2\u20ac\u009d from Micah 4:8-11.<\/p>\n

In memory of her,
\nMargaret
\n\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mary
\nMagdalene, Bride in Exile\u00e2\u20ac\u009d
\nwww.margaretstarbird.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Margaret Starbird wrote the other day: I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m always amazed at the contortions New Testament scholars go into in an attempt to avoid seeing and stating the obvious.\u00c2\u00a0 The CNN \u00e2\u20ac\u0153special\u00e2\u20ac\u009d segment about Mary Magdalene aired tonight. One scholar (Dr. Nicola Denzey Lewis) declared twice that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153ground zero\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for the idea that Mary Magdalene was the … Continue reading Margaret Starbird on Mary Magdalene in the Four Gospels<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,3,7,2,216],"tags":[259,35,50,264],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gnosticism","category-jesus-family","category-mary-magdalene","category-what-sunday-school-wont-teach","category-women-leaders-in-christianity","tag-gospel-of-philip","tag-margaret-starbird","tag-married-jesus","tag-mary-magdalene"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.northernway.org\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}