Mary Magdalene, the repentant courtesan who followed Christ, is one of the most famed and least-known characters in the Gospels. Because of her early trade, some of the ancient church fathers, and later Christians of excessive scruple, have been embarrassed by her presence in the liturgy. On the other hand, her sinful past has been a never-failing godsend to novelists trying to put a little spice into stories with a New Testament setting.
A book published last week, Mary Magdalene (Pantheon; $3), is one of the most intelligent and provocative efforts yet made to reconstruct her character and its meaning. The author, Father Raymond Leopold Bruckberger, is a French Dominican priest, recently transplanted to the U.S., whose earlier books of memoirs and stories (One Sky to Share, Golden Goat) have had considerable success (TIME, Aug. 11; Nov. 24). His purpose in writing this one was to bring back to life the Magdalene, "la Femme coupèe en morceaux—the woman hacked into bits by modern exegetes."
The Courtesan. Gospel references to Mary Magdalene are fragmentary. Although she is mentioned by name twelve times, there are few details given about her life or her significance as one of Christ's followers. Bruckberger holds to the view of most Roman Catholic scholars that she is mentioned elsewhere in the Gospels by other names.* She is, he believes, the "woman in the city" in Luke 7:37, who washes Christ's feet with her tears, and humbly begs forgiveness of her sins at the house of Simon the Pharisee. She is also, by this interpretation, the New Testament's Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus.
Dominican Bruckberger, basing his deductions on a study of early Christian history as well as the Bible, goes further than this. His reconstructed Mary Magdalene was a woman of wealth and beauty, and one of the ornaments of King Herod's court. Although a Jewess, she was Hellenized, and, like many among the upper classes in Palestine, considered herself as belonging to the rich but dying culture of Plato's Greece.
The ancient Greeks had high philosophic ideals, but the best of them, including Plato, ran into a great deal of difficulty trying to set up standards of personal morality. In their uninstructed search for the true and the beautiful, writes Bruckberger, they "gave to bodily beauty the character of a religious revelation." Since they felt that beauty should be enjoyed, the figure of the courtesan became not at all a shameful one. To Father Bruckberger, the clever courtesan Mary Magdalene symbolizes in the Gospels the outward beauty of the Greek ideal as well as its moral shortcomings.
The Law. Opposed to Plato's philosophy and the Greek search for philosophic wisdom, the Jewish Pharisees clung to a law of stern, ritual purity. Each tradition, in Bruckberger's view, was deficient. But broken, then united by Christ's love, they merged to give Christianity both its traditional faith and its abstract philosophy.