Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] A very different, not to say bizarre, Gospel featuring Mary Magdalene by Bart D. Ehrman, read by John Paul Middlesworth.
[00:00:11] To round out this brief thread of gospels connected with Mary Magdalene, I've decided to repost something from a few years ago that almost no one outside of a small pond of early Christian studies knows about. A book called the Greater Questions of Mary, that is of Mary Magdalene, trigger warning sexual content.
[00:00:30] Really, one of the great questions for scholars is whether such a book ever really did exist. It is mentioned only once in ancient literature in a highly charged polemical context by Epiphanius of Salamis, a Christian heresy hunter who was prone to exaggeration and fabrication, who was incautious at best in his attacks against heretical sects. In his book the Panarion, that is the medicine Chest.
[00:00:57] In it, Epiphanius supplies the antidotes for the snake bites of heresy.
[00:01:03] The most notorious of the groups that Epiphanius attacks were known by a variety of names, including the Fibionites. According to Epiphanius, our sole source of knowledge about the group, these Gnostic believers engaged in nocturnal sex rituals that involved indiscriminate sex, coitus interruptus and the consumption of semen and menstrual blood, all in a bizarre act of Christian worship, a sacred Eucharist, really.
[00:01:30] Moreover, they allegedly possessed apostolic books that supported their outrageous rituals, including this one known as the Greater Questions of Mary.
[00:01:41] Epiphanius claims to have had access to this and the other Fibionite books, but this one he actually quotes.
[00:01:49] If the quotation does indeed go back to an actual document, as opposed to Epiphanius fertile imagination, it is no wonder the book never survived as it recounts an episode in which Jesus himself engages in a sex act before a very bewildered Mary Magdalene.
[00:02:06] For the Gnostic Fibonites, this text and their corresponding rituals related to their doctrinal views. That humans represent divine sparks entrapped in human bodies which need to escape human procreation perpetuates this state of entrapment by providing an endless supply of bodies as prisons for the sparks of the divine.
[00:02:27] The solution to the problem then was to engage in non procreative sex, as shown to Mary Magdalene by the Savior himself one odd night on a mountaintop.
[00:02:37] Here's the quotation of the text from Epiphanius. The first sentence obviously is Epiphanius himself explaining what the book is for. In the book called the Greater Questions of Mary, they also have forged one called the Lesser.
[00:02:52] They indicate that he gave a revelation to her Mary.
[00:02:57] Taking her to the mountain, he prayed and then extracted a woman from his side and began having sexual intercourse with her.
[00:03:05] Then he gathered his semen in his hand, explaining that this is what we must do in order to live.
[00:03:12] When Mary became disturbed and fell to the ground, he again raised her and said to her, why do you doubt you of little faith?
[00:03:23] Somehow I think this one never had much of a chance of getting into the New Testament.
[00:03:28] But oh boy, do I wish the entire thing would be discovered some time.
