The Surprisingly Feminist History of Easter Sunday
Mary Magdalene is the reason we all have Easter eggs. (And, she wasn't a sex worker.)
[Lady Gaga portraying Mary Magdalene in the video for “Judas.” Via Vevo.]
I am very excited for Easter this year, if only because I just finished a book that gives a whole new meaning to the holiday. Meggan Watterson delivered an excellent mix of biography, theology, and personal memoir in Mary Magdalene Revealed, where she vindicates the world’s original Lady in Red from the lies that have carried on about her for centuries.
It turns out that the Catholic Church officially apologized in 1969 for one of their sixth-century Popes branding Mary “the penitent prostitute,” despite all evidence to the contrary. The Church so feared Mary and her role in Christ’s life that a Bishop in the fourth century ordered her writings—and those of some of her “heretical” peers—be destroyed. It was only in 1945 that they would be unearthed, thus disrupting modern theology’s ideas of who Christ was and what kind of world he imagined.
Mary Magdalene’s role on Easter Sunday is the most important of all Christ’s followers: It is she who bears witness to Jesus’ resurrection, and it is her name he specifically calls out. But even this is only scratching the surface of the actual story—one which is oriented around human love, the humanity of Christ, and the importance of the “radical equality” he preached that ultimately led to his crucifixion in the first place.
Regardless of your religious affiliation, the true story of Mary Magdalene is fascinating to consider from a historical perspective, and an all-too-familiar tale of how women were mistreated in order to benefit powerful men. In this case, her biography reveals how a bunch of men in the Church buried and manipulated her life to perpetuate discrimination and the subjugation of women for centuries to come—when really, women are just as much the rightful messengers of Christianity. I had the honor of chatting with Watterson ahead of Easter Sunday to get the story you will most likely not hear from Church services—or Catholic school teachings—today. I hope you enjoy!
PP: To kick us off, I’m wondering if you can tell us why Mary Magdalene plays such a big role on Easter Sunday.
MW: It feels really important to start with the fact that when you don't include Mary’s gospel into the canon, you're only hearing about her through the other gospels that were canonized. She didn't just happen to be at the right place at the right time when Christ resurrected—it was actually much more meaningful and had far more significance than most churches are going to emphasize this coming Sunday.
The typical Easter narrative is to talk about Mary being the one who's there; Christ says her name, and then she recognizes him. The emphasis, unfortunately, isn't on the fact that she can see him, the fact that she's the first to be there when he resurrects. If you read Mary's gospel, you'd understand that there was great intention in the fact that she was there. This moment signifies her importance in Christ’s ministry—that really she was completing a part of his ministry by witnessing him.
As a feminist theologian, I've always been really shocked at the inability to see what's right there in our faces: the significance of the relationship between Mary and Christ. If you read her gospel, you understand that Christ didn't resurrect as though he was in an episode of The Walking Dead—it wasn't actually his body she witnessed, it was a vision. There’s a word that Christ uses in Mary's gospel, and it’s this Greek word, nous. I became obsessed with this word when I was in seminary, and if you follow it through the different centuries, that word meant “the highest aspect of the soul.”
The reason this is so powerful is that it articulates a direct connection to a kind of vision that lies within all of us—it’s something we are all capable of. This is decentralizing spiritual authority, because it's saying that you can have a direct connection to spirit from within yourself, you can purify the heart, and you can see from within you. This has nothing to do with a priest who is going to absolve you, or something you have to get from an institution outside of the self. This is inner work. It's a transformation that happens from within.
PP: Another part of this that intrigues me is that Christ more or less chose who to show himself to first. And so even though Mary was able to, spiritually as you say, witness his resurrection, the story also shows us that Christ chose Mary to visit first.
MW: Exactly. He calls out her name first.
PP: So why is that significant to mention, given what Catholicism has done to Mary's persona over the years?
MW: As a scholar, what I’m fascinated with is the Christianity that existed before the fourth century. This Christianity includes gospels like the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. If you include those gospels today, you're sort of like, what happened when this radical cult hit the fourth century and Emperor Constantine wanted to make it the state religion?
Initially, there was a different message going on, and one of the threads of that message was: We are all equal, we are all radically just as much human and soul. What Mary keeps saying in her gospel is that Christ referred to himself as anthropos, and that we are anthropos, too. That word in Greek means “fully human and fully divine.”
Our humanity is really represented in our ego, and our divinity is represented in our soul—we're meant to be both. Therefore, the external markers of whether we're male, female, trans, intersex have nothing to do with our worth or our capacity to be a Pope, or to speak on behalf of the Divine. That's the aspect of Mary’s gospel that is so significant, because ultimately, the Church decided women could not be a part of the story, so they had to radically excise so much of that early Christianity because it was radically inclusive.
It was radical at the time, but Christ was saying that a woman—who had almost no rights—was worthy of receiving his vision, his transmission, his teachings. He showed up first to a woman—someone who would be considered, in terms of the apostles, the least among them based solely on her gender. So Christ is literally making the last, his first. He was putting into practice this radical idea that, rather than human existence being ranked on a vertical line hierarchically, we’re all horizontal. We are all equally soul and ego.
PP: You wrote that the Bishop of Athanasius of Alexandria ordered that certain writings from this early part of Christianity—which included the Gospel of Philip, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, The Thunder, Perfect Mind and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene—be destroyed. [Editor’s note: These gospels were unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945.] Part of the reason was exactly what you’re saying: these texts showed that women were equal to men and thus, could be leaders in the faith. The other part, though, was that the texts, specifically the Gospel of Philip, reveal that Mary was beloved by Christ, that he kissed her on the mouth. I never thought of the Bible as a love story before, but maybe—based on what you’re saying about the resurrection—that’s actually a relevant interpretation?
MW: This whole idea that we all are equally fully human and fully divine is radical to modern Christianity. The fact that we're a soul is as important as the fact that we're human. What's been lost on Christianity—and what's been lost in spirituality in general—is not acknowledging the power of human love to transform us, to save us. We put so much towards divine love, which is great, but when you look at this story as one about human love too, it's equally their souls, and equally the human aspect of Christ.
When you strip all of that humanity from Christ, it shames us for any times that we are human, and it also puts us in a position where we feel as though human love is somehow less than Divine love. But that's not what Christ's message was; that's not what he was embodying and fulfilling when he showed up to Mary. They had a human love that compelled their connection as well.
“What's so fascinating about the word ‘death’ is that in Aramaic, which is supposedly the language that Christ spoke, ‘death’ means existing elsewhere. That feels so right to me, because when someone dies in my life that I loved completely, I've never felt the sense of them being absolutely gone. I mourn and I grieve not being able to be with their physical body, but my experience has always been that they're existing elsewhere.”
PP: I think your interpretation of the Resurrection is urgent right now, with everything we're seeing in the world about death. It does feel like collectively, across the whole globe, society is in mourning—we all know people who are being affected by coronavirus. I haven't thought of Easter Sunday as a story about death so much as one about life, or the miracle of the rebirth. What you're saying is that it was essentially Mary Magdalene and Jesus' love that allowed Jesus to resurrect and to live on? That her undying love for her deceased was a part of the miracle? Is that a fair translation?
MW: Yes, yes—we don't acknowledge and lift up the humanity in their story enough. It was human love that compelled them to want to be together. Human love is a part of that coming back to life. What's so fascinating about the word “death,” is that in Aramaic, which is supposedly the language that Christ spoke, “death” means existing elsewhere. That feels so right to me, because when someone dies in my life that I loved completely, I've never felt the sense of them being absolutely gone. I mourn and I grieve not being able to be with their physical body, but my experience has always been that they're existing elsewhere. There are moments of nearness and proximity, like grace. I can't explain it, you know?
So when we take that metaphor and we apply it while we're still embodied, it's fascinating to think about how many of us, if we're trapped in an aspect of the ego, also exist elsewhere. We're not here, we're not in the present moment—and that's another kind of death. It's been interesting to look at the way that so many people are forced right now to figure out how to be present. This experience is forcing us to not exist elsewhere. In doing so, there’s a possibility of our becoming more alive.
Being able to return to the present moment is a meditation, to me—it's a metaphor of the whole Resurrection story. How can we die to the ego in any given moment? How can we die to the stories that we've been telling about ourselves? How can we die so that we don't have to exist elsewhere anymore? We can actually be present to the life that's right here in front of us.
PP: That’s powerful, thank you. I also want to talk about Easter eggs! I had no idea that the reason we egg hunt on Easter is not just because of some Bunny, but it’s about Mary Magdalene.
MW: The egg has always been my obsession in terms of Mary Magdalene because there’s so much irony that we all dye eggs, but everybody attributes it to a bunny rabbit rather than to Mary. The egg is the story of the beginning of the universe: the Cosmic Egg. It runs throughout all religious traditions—like, I could teach a course on the egg and how it became such a symbol. But in essence, what it's saying is that all life comes from within.
This isn’t just about giving birth! In other words, if you want to resurrect your life—if you want to recreate yourself—it comes from within, not the outside of you. The only way you're going to create a new life, a new perspective, a new level of consciousness, comes from within. It's not anything anyone could ever give you, no matter how Oprah they might be.
Usually we only hear about Mary up until the witnessing of the resurrection. But The Eastern Orthodox tradition of Christianity continues that story, where she then goes on to the court of Tiberius Caesar, and she gives witness and testimony to the horrific thing she saw happen to Christ, as well as his resurrection. This is, by the way, evidence of her high social standing and her wealth, that she was able to have an audience with Caesar.
So they're at this feast, and she's basically giving a sermon about Christ’s resurrection. Then, one of the men at the feast doubted what she had to say—that Christ could resurrect. He said to her, “Christ could no more resurrect than the egg on this table could turn red.” And supposedly, Mary Magdalene picked up the egg, and it immediately turned red in her hands. That's her initial association to red, which later became associated with sexuality and the idea that she was a prostitute. Even today, the Eastern Orthodox tradition still colors red eggs on Easter on behalf of Mary Magdalene.
PP: You mentioned this moment being evidence of her social standing or that she was a wealthy woman and not the penitent sex worker, which is what common Biblical knowledge would have us believe. In your book, I actually learned that it was Pope Gregory who basically assumed that Mary was the unnamed sinner in the Gospel of Luke who anointed Christ's feet, and it was the Mary of Luke eight and Mark 16th who is freed of all of her demons by Christ. You say Pope Gregory, "interpreted these passages as confirming that Mary's sinfulness had to do with her sexuality, that seven demons translated to him as prostitution, without question."
MW: Right. The homily 33 from Pope Gregory pretty much sealed the deal that, moving forward, the Faithful were to consider Mary Magdalene a penitent prostitute.
PP: I went to Catholic school practically my whole life, and I never learned this next part. You said that in 1969—1,378 years after Pope Gregory declared that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute—the church officially corrected its mistake. They clarified that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. However, that did not stop the story of Mary Magdalene being a prostitute from being spread. Why?
MW: Even Pope Francis, our Tango dancing pope, rehabilitated Mary Magdalene in 2016. He said, she's no longer to be referred to as the penitent prostitute, she is to be referred to as the apostle to the apostles. But she's not an official apostle! It's just a really nice way of saying, “she meant a lot, but she isn't to be considered an actual apostle, there are still only 12 apostles.”
PP: And even then, he's basically insisting that she is beneath the men who were Jesus's actual sanctioned apostles, when she was the one that he revealed himself to first when he resurrected.
MW: Exactly. So if anyone's going to be an apostle, it is her! They wouldn't have been able to become apostles without her vision. But it was the decentralization of power that Mary's gospel illuminates—that true power comes from within —that's still incredibly threatening to the Church. Because then, the power is divested outside of us, and it's divested of one particular sex or one particular sexuality. That’s why, to this day, nothing sets me off more than that idea that someone's sexuality could forbid them from being able to speak on behalf of Christ. It makes absolutely no sense—and not only that, it is so incredibly harmful. To me, it’s such a misrepresentation of what Christ stood for.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Great story! Love the idea of this blog, or whatever the cool kids are calling it nowadays. :)
Such an awesome interview! I want to pick up this book and read more. There’s always another side to the story huh? Happy Easter!