From: joachim omolo ouko
News Dispatch with Father Omolo Beste
TUESDAY, APRIL 22, 2014

Wilfred from Mujwa, Meru, Kenya writes: “Dear Fr Omolo Beste, Happy Easter. I read all your homilies from Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday. You are a greater preacher Father, may God continue giving you abundant blessings and good health.

I have 2 questions on your homily on Mary Magdalene. My first question is that there is no where in the Bible written that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, only that Jesus removed seven demons. My second question is, it is true that Jesus had sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, got married and had children? Thank you Father”.

Thank you for these important questions and your best wishes Wilfred. You are absolutely right. Mary Magdalene is mentioned in each of the four gospels in the New Testament, but not once does it mention that she was a prostitute. The Bible provides no personal details of her age, status or family. Only her name, Mary Magdalene, gives us the first real clue about her.

It suggests that she came from a town called Magdala. There is a place today called Magdala, 120 miles north of Jerusalem on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The name occurs in the New Testament, and also in Jewish texts. Its full name is Magdala Tarichaea. Magdala seems to mean tower, and Tarichaea means salted fish.

The idea of Mary Magdalene being a prostitute might have come from one Jewish text which mentions Magdala, called Lamentations Raba, which says that Magdala is judged by God and destroyed because of its fornication. It is possible that the description of Magdala as a place of fornication is the origin of the idea that arose in western Christianity that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.

Your second question whether Jesus had sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene and whether they got married is quite interesting. Yale Divinity School dean Harold Attridge asked this question in 2006 in a short piece prepared in response to The Da Vinci Code. He concludes that such a relationship was improbable based on his interpretation of the Gospel of Philip, one of the codices discovered in the 1940’s in Upper Egypt near the town of Nag Hammadi.

The Gospel of Philip has caused quite a stir for several reasons. It says Jesus’ companion (also translated as “consort”) was Mary Magdalen, and that he “loved Mary more than the rest of us because he used to kiss her.

Philip also speaks of a “stainless physical union” which has great power. Early scholars translated the ‘union’ phrase as “undefiled intercourse,” which would mean that the text advises, “Understand/seek the undefiled intercourse, for it has great power.”

However, in recent years orthodox scholars have tended to translate the phrase as “pure embrace” or “marriage.” Attridge claims that it is a reference to an early Christian practice of offering one’s fellow worshipers a kiss, known in some circles as “passing the peace.”

Some scholars have interpreted the kiss in a more spiritual sense and see kissing as a symbol for an intimate reception of teaching of the word of God, of learning. The image of Jesus and Mary as engaged in mouth-to-mouth closeness suggests not necessarily sexuality, but the transmission of divine knowledge.

Those who claim that she was the wife of Jesus rely on some apocryphal gospels. All of them, with the possible exception of part of the Gospel of Thomas, were written after the canonical Gospels and are not historical in character, but were written to transmit Gnostic teachings.

The huge misunderstanding is the fact that these writings are used to make them say exactly the opposite of what they intended. The Gnostic vision – a mixture of Platonic dualism and Eastern doctrines, cloaked in biblical ideas – holds that the material world is an illusion, the work of the God of the Old Testament, who is an evil god, or at least inferior.

This idea has been stipulated in the popularity of Dan Brown’s controversial novel, The Da Vinci Code. This novel advocates the thesis that Jesus was in fact married to the woman we know as Mary Magdalene, that they had a child together.

Many readers of The Da Vinci Code, believing the fictional history of the novel to be true, have been buzzing about the possibility of Jesus’ having been married. In a recent survey conducted by the online religious website Beliefnet, 19 percent of respondents said they believe that Mary Magdalene was in fact Jesus’ wife.

The New Testament contains no explicit answer to the question of Jesus’ marital state. It never mentions his wife, nor that he was unmarried. In fact, whenever the New Testament gospels refer to Jesus’ natural relatives, they speak only of his father, mother, and siblings, but never of a wife.

Two prominent Jewish writers from the first-century A.D., Philo and Josephus, mention that some Jewish men in the time of Jesus were single by choice. Philo, a contemporary of Jesus, was a Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and who wrote many volumes in the first half of the century.

Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote near the end of the century. Both Philo and Josephus mention that the Essenes, a group of apocalyptic Jews who eagerly awaited God’s intervention in history, did not marry by choice.

What we actually know about Mary Magdalene is from the biblical gospels. Something else is not is not correct.

Fr Joachim Omolo Ouko, AJ
Tel +254 7350 14559/+254 722 623 578
E-mail obolobeste@gmail.com

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