WHAT DID LUTHER SAY?JESUS AND MARY MAGDALENE

What did Luther say? Jesus and Mary Magdalene.("Mary Magdalene: A Biography")
From: The Christian Century | Date: 5/16/2006 | Author: Becker, Matthew

A recent New Yorker article on Mary Magdalene, obviously written with an eye on her role as Jesus' paramour in Dan Brown's best-selling The Da Vinci Code, began by noting that "Brown is by no means the first to have suggested that Christ had a sex life--Martin Luther said it" (February 13-20). Bruce Chilton, an Episcopal scholar from Bard College, also makes this claim about Luther in Mary Magdalene: A Biography (2005). And a 2003 story in Time magazine declared that "Martin Luther believed that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married."

Did Luther really make these assertions? An electronic search of the digital edition of Luther's works, the massive Weimar Ausgabe (WA), uncovers no evidence that he did. Only two statements come even close to suggesting these unorthodoxies.

The first is a comment on Psalm 119:145 in which Luther interprets Mary Magdalene's actions at the tomb of Christ as an example of loving devotion. Mary "came beforehand at the dawn and with untimely haste and cried and called for her betrothed [sponsum] much more wonderfully in spirit than in the body. But I think that she alone might easily explain the Song of Songs."

Luther's Works: American Edition (LW) unfortunately mistranslates sponsum as "husband." In Luther's medieval monastic context, the word meant something different. The verb spondeo means "to pledge oneself to" or "to promise oneself to someone," as in "to pledge in the vow of marriage." The male form of the noun is "fiance" and the female form is "bride."

The full context of Luther's remark indicates that he was thinking allegorically. Influenced by mainstream allegorical interpretations of the Song of Songs, Luther viewed Mary as the prototypical disciple (a celibate nun?), the first "bride of Christ," who had made her vow of unconditional love and obedience to her sponsum ("betrothed," "groom"). Even today Roman Catholic nuns wear a ring to symbolize their betrothal to Christ. On another occasion Luther argued that all Christians are "brides of Christ" (LW 28:48). He certainly did not think Jesus and Mary were actually husband and wife. Several unambiguous statements in his writings clearly indicate that he held the traditional view that Jesus, like Paul, was celibate and chaste.

Seemingly more problematic is a small notation from John Schlagenhaufen, one of Luther's close friends, which contains a recollection of something Luther supposedly said informally at his Wittenberg dinner table in 1532:


Christ [as] adulterer. In the first instance
Jesus became an adulterer
with the woman at the well in John
4, because they say (no one understands),
"What is he doing with
her?" In the same way with Magdalena;
in the same way with the
adulteress of John 8, whom he let
off so easily. In that way the godly
Christ first of all must also become
an adulterer before he died. (WA
TR 6, 107, sec. 1472; cf. LW 54:154)
No one knows if Luther actually said this. The critical apparatus in the Weimar Ausgabe reveals the textual and grammatical problems in this supposed quotation. Schlagenhaufen recorded only a portion of what he remembered Luther to have said that day (and after how many beers?). No context is given.

Scholars know how difficult, if not impossible, it is to link the lapidary "table notations" of Luther's friends to Luther's own views. The editors of the American Edition speculate in a footnote that the "probable context is suggested in a sermon of 1536 (WA 41, 647) in which Luther asserted that Christ was reproached by the world as a glutton, a winebibber, and even an adulterer" (LW 54:154).

A more probable context is Luther's account of the atonement. One of his basic assertions is that our sins become Christ's and Christ's perfect righteousness becomes ours by faith. This idea of "the happy exchange" is found in many Luther texts. Given his central soteriological and christological concern, the theological irony in Schlagenhaufen's remembered notation becomes clearer: The "godly" Christ becomes or is made a sinner through his solidarity with sinners, even to the point of dying as a God-forsaken criminal on the cross. This is how Luther understood Paul's statement, "God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).

So Christ "becomes" an adulterer, though he does not actually commit adultery with Mary or anyone else. He puts mercy front and center, and rejects the legalism which demanded that the woman caught in adultery be killed and the woman at the well and Mary Magdalene be shunned. The holy one becomes the sinner by putting himself into the situation of sinners, by loving and forgiving them, and ultimately by taking their sins on himself. For this gospel reason, Luther could also remark that God made Jesus "the worst sinner of the whole world," even though he also acknowledged that the sinless, righteous Christ actually committed no sin himself.

Trapped in a literalistic approach to Schlagenhaufen's contextless note, some readers have missed the metaphorical character of the remark, which Luther may have made, if he made it at all, with a twinkle in his eye. I'm confident that Luther would not be a fan of The Da Vinci Code--except perhaps with a beer in hand and that twinkle in his eye.

Matthew Becker teaches theology at Valparaiso University.

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THE MAGDALENE LEGACY

A review of Laurence Gardner's The Magdalene Legacy

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by

"Punkish"

|http://www.tektonics.org/books/maglegrvw.html


I don't need to say much about this one, which is mostly a rewrite of Gardner's previous book Bloodline of the Holy Grail. If you own that, I don't advise you part with your money on this as well. It also explores the same premise: it supposes Jesus was married - to Mary Magdalene of course.

A quick look at the bibliography is quite revealing: John Allegro, Baigent and Leigh, Rudolph Bultmann, Dupont-Sommer, Robert Eisenman, Riane Eisler, Knight and Lomas(!), G.R.S. Mead, Ahmed Osman, Morton Smith's Secret Mark, Barbara G. Walker(!!) and some of Gardner's previous books and other oddball or outdated works for sources. To be sure there are gems of scholarship as well, such as Michael Grant, but the combination is hardly satisfactory.

No Laurence Gardner book would be complete without the obligatory uncritical overuse of Barbara Thiering (whose work Jesus the Man is described as "the finest work for describing precisely how the Essene scribal codes work in practice"!, 315) or mention of the pretender Michael of Albany. Basically this is a compendium of Gardner's bad methodology and argumentation from his previous books stuffed into a single volume. Actually the book deals more with art and allegory than hard data.

There are some real howlers in this book - two examples should suffice:

He has Mary Magdalene performing something related to a pagan rite with Jesus! [158] Why would Jesus, a Jew, submit to such a thing?? This is not explained. (His sources for this claim: Margaret Starbird, who uses sculptor and art-history professor Merlin Stone; and Barbara G Walker, whose source dates from 1901!)
If you thought that was bad; try this, it is just amazing how Gardner can so misread a passage and interprets it exactly the opposite way as presented in the book. The passage reads:
And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day. (Qumran Temple Scroll) [127]

Gardner applies this to the events of the Crucifixion (may we ask what sin Jesus committed?) - even having Joseph of Arimathea supposedly getting Pilate to change how Christ is being executed to fit with the law in Deuteronomy 21:22-23 [126], as if Pilate would allow such a thing) and - this is the amazing part - interprets the scroll's last phrase as meaning "the alternate Jewish custom of burial alive"! Burial alive? The text's second line says "put to death", does it not? Further, Pilate, in Mark 15:42-45 asks for the centurion's confirmation that Jesus was dead. This is either a bizarre misreading or a deliberate attempt to push through a theory regardless of contrary data! (The theory being the vastly outdated swoon theory refuted by D F Strauss in the 1830s!)

He then goes on to claim the old canard that the accounts of the Resurrection are "very confusing". All miraculous gospel events are interpreted as non-supernatural in some way or other. Quoting a Dominican friar who thinks faith and evidence are two separate things. Uncritical use of Gnostic texts. The "Son of man" title means "a human being" [345 and he doesn't deal with Daniel 7 at all]. The usual stuff. The usual place for storage: the round filing basket.

Gardner also demonstrates he cannot do mathematics. [365] The circle-ratio constant pi is not equal to 3.1416! Nor is it constructed out of formulae using rational fractions. (That one was disproven in 1761!) I realise this is non-central to the book's thesis but if he cannot present indisputable facts properly why should his theories be believed?

Despite these errors in scholarship the book does have one interesting feature: its criticisms of Dan Brown's fictional novel, The Da Vinci Code. Now Gardner, before he turned his hand to writing the Holy Bloodline series, was an art restorer; hence he is qualified to discuss the da Vinci painting of the Last Supper, indeed showing Brown's book to be incorrect by relying on outdated information about the painting; information which was available at the time Brown wrote his novel! [266] There's also a chapter on the Priory of Sion, in which Gardner pegs Brown for more errors despite acknowledging the Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction.

And so, again, Laurence Gardner's conspiracy-based work is to be considered a waste of time - except for the novel entrance of some critical thinking which is to be encouraged; whether this will be applied by Gardner in future works (or even by fellow bloodline theorists) - instead of the par-for-the-course uncritical lunacy - remains to be seen.