Mary Magdalene & the role of women

"The power of the female and her ability to produce life was once very sacred, but it posed a threat to the rise of the predominantly male Church, and so the sacred feminine was demonized...The Holy Grail...is symbolic of the lost goddess...the Church ... subjugated women, banished the Goddess, burned nonbelievers, and forbid the pagan reverence for the sacred feminine..."

To get a taste of the common view of women by pagans and Jews at the time of Christ, consider the following:

1. A famous line of Cicero, which very well describes the status of pagan Roman women reads as follows:

'Our ancestors, in their wisdom, considered that all women, because of their innate weakness, should be under the control of guardians"

2. In the first century the Jewish writer, Philo of Alexandria, wrote about a Jewish sect known as the Essenes (the same group that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls)"

"[The Essenes] repudiate marriage; and at the same time they practice continence in an eminent degree; for no one of the Essenes ever marries a wife, because woman is a selfish creature and one addicted to jealousy in an immoderate degree, and terribly calculated to agitate and overturn the natural inclinations of a man, and to mislead him by her continual tricks; for as she is always studying deceitful speeches and all other kinds of hypocrisy, like an actress on the stage, when she is alluring the eyes and ears of her husband, she proceeds to cajole his predominant mind after the servants have been deceived.

And again, if there are children she becomes full of pride and all kinds of license in her speech, and all the obscure sayings which she previously meditated in irony in a disguised manner she now begins to utter with audacious confidence; and becoming utterly shameless she proceeds to acts of violence, and does numbers of actions of which every one is hostile to such associations; for the man who is bound under the influence of the charms of a woman, or of children, by the necessary ties of nature, being overwhelmed by the impulses of affection, is no longer the same person towards others, but is entirely changed, having, without being aware of it, become a slave instead of a free man."

These quotes are examples that highlight two important facts about that culture that Jesus came to:

Each culture tends to distort the gospel, tending to conform it to it's own image, so it is reasonable to expect that the danger in 100 AD would be a distortion of the gospel in the direction towards male dominance. However, before we get too smug about the shortcomings of other times and cultures, we should remember that the sword cuts both ways - wouldn't it be highly likely that the danger in our culture would be to distort the gospel in a politically correct direction?

So if the culture was truly oppressive to women, what would be the corrective ? The Da Vinci Code implies that the 'lost' gospels that were kept out of the bible would give us a much more balanced, woman empowering Christianity. The opposite is the actual case. Consider the following quote from "The Gospel of Thomas" - one of the Gnostic gospels the church rejected and championed by the Da Vinci Code:

114: Simon Peter said to [the disciples], "Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life". Jesus said, "I myself shall lead her, in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit, resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven".

So where is the answer found ? In the Word of God. While it is shamefully true that people claiming to be Christians have oppressed women at different points in history, the question is what did Christ actually teach, and thus, what is the true teaching of Christianity in regards to women ? Consider the following quote from the Gospel of Matthew in the bible that is talking about what happened after Jesus died:

Why would the male writers of all 4 gospels in a patriarchal society (where a woman’s witness was not trusted) say that it was the women who stayed by the cross, who first saw the risen Jesus and who were entrusted to preach the most important message of the movement to his male disciples: “He is not here – he is risen!” If the writers were making up the story and trying to make it sound credible to people in the first century AD, why would they put the words that were the very corner stone of their new religion in the mouths of women witnesses instead of into the mouths of men?

How do you account for it?

I believe that only reasonable explanation is because it is exactly what happened. In other words, one of the strongest arguments that the gospels weren't just made up, that they actually describe what happened is because they say it was the women who were the witnesses. No one trying to make up a convincing story in that culture would have written it this way. Further, we have strong evidence that women were involved in leadership in a variety of ways in the early church and that this aspect of the early church has tended to be obscured or ignored. The Da Vinci Code rightly draws our attention to how the gospel has been distorted by popular culture through the ages, especially in regards to the role of women. It is true that the heavy use of male pronouns in the grammar of the original languages is a stumbling block to many. However the female is no more holy than the male. The God of the bible is beyond sexuality, for this is the God who created both male and female. The bible uses both male and female images to describe the work and passion of God. Thus we need to reject both female goddesses and male gods and return to the one God, the maker of heaven and earth who says to you:

"Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!" (Isaiah 49:15)

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