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Mary Magdalene, writes Bruckberger, symbolized the Christian baptism of Greek philosophy. The sensual paganism of the Greeks, he contends, was really "a deep homesickness for the first Paradise, for its innocence, for its freedom of behavior." The search for wisdom was one expression of this. Magdalene, the sinner, made the great discovery that Paradise and wisdom could be found only through God's love and forgiveness.
But Author Bruckberger finds another moral in Mary Magdalene's conversion—she also proved the hollowness of her Pharisee countrymen. "Simon the Pharisee believes himself 'pure,' and thereby he becomes a sinner, impenitent because his sin consists in believing that he is without sin. Mary Magdalene knows herself, recognizes herself, proclaims herself 'impure' and a sinner; this is why she attains the wellspring of all purity. In this humility and [in] this contrition is she justified.
"This revolution—the greatest ever to have taken place in the moral order—the Pharisees could not understand. For them, justice lay in the practice of the Law, the absence of all material breach of this Law. Nor could the Greeks understand any better, because for them there was no sin, there were only ugly actions, but actions which did not touch God himself . . . The Pharisees betrayed the Law itself, the first commandment of which is the love of God. And the Greeks knew not true wisdom, which is to attune one's heart with God's."
The Scandal. In telling his story, Author Bruckberger includes a rarely original account of Christ's life and death, as the Magdalene saw it. The Christ of his book is a revolutionary who "gave scandal as though wantonly." Clearly subversive of both Hellenism and Judaism as they then existed, he was put to death not "by the ungodly, but by the 'just' and the 'pious.' "
He was also a man of infinite accessibility ("the most anti-Cellophane being imaginable"), who hated "both stoicism and puritanism." No one dramatized his love and mercy as did Mary Magdalene. Writes Bruckberger: "She foretells that God has come among men not for the sake of the just, but for sinners, for their salvation. He is not really at home among us save when he is in the midst of sinners; he is worthily received only with the tears of repentance ... He came to convert sinners, but he converted them only by making himself loved. That is what, without opening her mouth, this woman teaches us."
* Most Protestant scholars disagree.