Descriptions:
Video Description
For fifteen hundred years Mary Magdalene was remembered as a repentant prostitute, and this video from the Conscious Radical channel shows she was never any such thing. In 1896 a worn papyrus book surfaced in a Cairo market with a gospel written in her name inside it.
The story follows that fragile book from its discovery to its sixty-year road to print, and asks how the woman who carried its teaching was rewritten as a sinner by a single sermon in 591. Around her name a number keeps turning, seven demons, seven powers, seven deadly sins, the same figure telling different stories depending on who held the pen.
Full Video Transcript
Walk with me through Cairo in January 1896 and as you pass through the antiquities quarter
moving by stalls with scarabs and coins and pieces of ancient worlds
a dealer shows up from Agmene 300 miles south along the Nile and he carries a worn papyrus
book with a soft old leather cover hoping to sell it and he meets Karl Reinhardt a German scholar
who sees that the book is old but doesn’t know its exact age or what secrets it might contain
now the dealer claims the book was found wrapped in feathers and hidden in a wall niche at an old
christian burial ground and whilst this story is really charming it’s probably not true scholars
have later agreed that the papyrus just would not have lasted 1500 years in a wall so the more
likely truth is that someone disturbed a grave near egmim and made up the story to cover it up
so setting aside how it was found the book contained texts that few people had seen before
and one of these was the gospel of mary magdalene and when scholars pieced it together they found
a version of mary that was very different from her usual image and the surviving text
starts in the middle of a conversation between jesus and his disciples after his resurrection
but before i continue i want to explain why i’m sharing this text i am not saying the bible is
wrong or that i have a hidden truth i approach all of these writings with curiosity i’m interested in
what was remembered and what was forgotten because before the bible became what we know today there
were hundreds of christian teachings but not all were included so i’m not here to take sides
what interests me is why some texts made it into the bible and others that were just as old didn’t
so this one was left out and i have my own ideas about why but you can decide for yourself you’ll
often see this called a gnostic gospel though not everyone agrees it is one karen king for instance
argues it isn’t really gnostic at all but i’ve kept it in this collection because it raises the
same questions not because i’m certain of the label so reinhardt brought the book back to
berlin and from that point the story shifted from mystery and romance to something more like
a tragic comedy on the 16th of july in 1896 the book was given to a scholar named carl schmidt
who showed it at the royal prussian academy of sciences in berlin and he spent years carefully
sorting the pages reading the coptic translating it and getting it ready for publication by 1912
schmidt’s edition was finished and he sent it to a printer in leipzig unfortunately a water pipe
burst at the print shop and it ruined the entire print run before any copies could be made then the
first world war broke out so all progress stopped again and then after the war schmidt returned to
the project but died in 1938 before being able to finish it in comes water till he’s an austrian
expert in coptic studies and he took over the project but then world war ii made publishing
impossible again so while waiting for the war to end till learned of a discovery at nakamadi and
he delayed the publication just to see whether these texts would change his work and after many
setbacks that were beyond his control he finally decided to publish the edition in 1955 till
published the first academic edition and german translation of the berlin codex and at last people
could read it almost 60 years after it was first sold in a cairo market so the gospel of mary is
incomplete two more fragments in greek have been found but there’s still no complete copy and fewer
are the nine pages of the papyrus have survived when reinhard bought the text there were actually
a small collection of four different works that were bound together the gospel of mary was the
first of the four and quite a short work next came the apocryphon of john which talks about
the unknowable god talks about barbello and the flawed creator of the world and then there was
the sophia of jesus christ another post-resurrection dialogue the last work was the act of peter which
is a short and unusual story about peter and his paralyzed daughter the gospel of mary was at the
front and its first pages were also the first pages of the whole book those are some of the
pages that didn’t survive but we know the gospel was first written in greek but this copy is in
coptic which is the language used by egypt’s christians in the 20th century two small greek
fragments were found one was published in the 1930s and another in the 1980s so
there are three copies of Mary but the Greek ones are only scraps with a few
lines the Coptic book which is the most complete is missing the first six pages
and four more from the middle when the lost library at Nag Hammadi was found in
1945 people had hoped it might include a complete copy of the Gospel of Mary but
unfortunately it didn’t, though two other works from the same book, the Apocryphon of John and
the Saphira of Jesus Christ, were found. Its beginning and part of its main teaching are still
missing and unless another copy is discovered they are going to stay lost. Before we continue though
there is a small detail in the book’s binding just to notice. The book begins with Mary and Peter
arguing that a woman should not have received the teaching but it ends with a different work
focused on peter’s authority and it’s really important to remember that we’re only seeing
half of a conversation and many claims about this text are much more confident than the surviving
pages actually support so what does it say so the gospel of mary opens for the teachings of jesus
after his death and resurrection and then he departs the disciples are scared they’re sitting
together and they’re worried that if they preach as jesus is asked they’re going to be killed just
like he was but Mary is the one who calms them Peter asks her to share the
words of the Savior the words that he told only to her and so she begins the
teaching explains what happens to the soul as it rises climbing past a series
of powers that each try to keep it tight to the world it gets past them by
refusing to accept their claim on it so one power says you belong to me the soul
answers that it was never truly seen that only its outer layer was held not
its real self and the soul rises another power calls it bound and the soul asks
how can it be judged by something it is already seen through and it rises again
the last power is the strongest because it’s not a new obstacle at all is
everything the soul has already faced gathered into one and turned to rage
that’s why it wears seven faces and why the first of them of the powers the soul has only just left
behind darkness desire and ignorance now joined by zeal for death the pull of the flesh the folly of
the flesh and at its center the wisdom of the wrathful person together these are the seven
powers of wrath the soul meets all seven and refuses them all and is finally freed as the
text says from the chain of forgetfulness which exists in time seven now there is a reason i’m
stopping to talk about the number seven what a single line in luke says about mary magdalene
has shaped almost everything we think we know about her in luke chapter 8 verses 2 to 3 it says
also some women were with him they’d been cured from evil spirits and various illnesses
these women were mary also called magdalene from whom seven demons had gone out joanna whose
husband chusa was herod’s administrator susanna and many other women they provided financial
support for jesus and his disciples now luke describes seven demons leaving her and that is
where the story began if you can compare this to her own gospel where a soul escapes by facing
seven powers the two sets of seven are not the same and i don’t think any scholar would say that
that they are but still the matching number stands out in one story seven
things are cast out of her as an affliction and in another she overcomes
seven obstacles it’s the same number but a very different woman depending on who
tells the story for the people telling these stories the number seven stood for
completeness the whole of something with nothing left out they counted the Sun
and the moon and five visible planets which led to the idea of seven heavens
between earth and God each with its own gatekeeper to parcel seven meant freedom
so a soul that faces seven powers and Mary’s gospel and overcomes them all has
truly been set free and that’s why the three sevens connects so clearly seven
demons mean total affliction a woman completely overtaken seven powers are
everything a soul must go through the seven deadly sins are the full list of guilt so the number
always means totality but what changes is whether that wholeness is something done to her something
that she overcomes or something she is accused of now most of us grew up thinking of mary magdalene
as a repentant prostitute but that idea doesn’t come from these texts in 591 pope gregory the
great gave a sermon that combined several women from the gospels into mary magdalene
her seven demons were seen as the seven deadly sins without the gospel mary’s teachings and
how the soul finds freedom were turned into a list of her supposed wrongdoings
the seven became sins and mary became the sinner thankfully the catholic church finally rejected
the idea of her being a prostitute in 1969 so why did a text like this disappear while others
survived in these writings salvation comes from knowledge and inner awakening not just from the
cross the text says clearly there is no such thing as sin rather you yourselves are what produces sin
when you act in accordance with the nature of adultery which is called sin so sin is not
something you are but something you do this message comes from a woman and the men are arguing
about whether to listen to her or not peter can’t accept that jesus trusted her more than them
and so another disciple levi tells peter he’s acting like an opponent and that if jesus found
her worthing it’s not peter’s place to disagree and as you might guess this did not fit with how
the early church was forming i don’t think there was a secret plan to destroy the book it’s just
more likely that people stopped copying it because at the time a text only survived if people kept
making new copies by hand before the old ones had worn out if they stopped the book simply vanished
and it seems the gospel of mary wasn’t copied after the fifth century so maybe that was a
choice or maybe it just became less popular but either way the result was the same the medieval
church gave mary the title apostola apostolorum or apostle to the apostles she was the first to
the empty tomb and the first sent to tell the others whilst also carrying the label of a
prostitute from gregory salmon the gospel of mary almost didn’t survive but it did so now what half
the pages are missing and there is so much we can’t know but still what remains gives us a
better understanding of how a woman remembered mostly for her demons showed how a soul can find
freedom by refusing the powers that judge and hold it back now you might see this as ancient
cosmology you could see it as a guide for your own inner struggles or an old debate about who gets to
speak or maybe it’s all three some texts never made it into the bible while others did the ones
left out weren’t always about secret answers or dangerous ideas there were
simply other voices that we didn’t get to hear but thankfully we have this
voice even if it’s brief but what you make of it is up to you
Source: The Conscious Radical