Was Mary Magdalene the Actual Founder of Christianity?

[00:00:01] Was Mary Magdalene the actual founder of Christianity? [00:00:06] Written by Bart Ehrman Read by Ken Teutsch in my last post, I talked a bit about the relationship of competition between Peter and Mary in early Christian traditions. [00:00:21] Peter, of course, has traditionally been seen as the rock on which Christ built his church, the the very foundation of Christianity. Matthew 16:18, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church. [00:00:40] And Indeed, according to 1 Corinthians 15:3 5, Peter was the first to see the resurrected Jesus and realize he had been raised from the dead, and that is the very beginning of Christianity. [00:00:54] But what if the Gospels are right, that Mary actually was the first? [00:00:59] Wouldn't it make better sense then to say that Mary started Christianity? [00:01:04] Here is how I talk about the matter in my book Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene. [00:01:10] There is no doubt that Peter became dominant as the leader of the church early in the Christian movement, and Mary receded into the background. We have scores of passages that talk about Peter, his involvement with Jesus during his life and his leadership of the church after his death, and scarcely any reference to Mary. [00:01:29] Somewhat ironically, this is what makes a number of scholars conclude that the religion actually started with Mary rather than Peter. The logic is later storytellers were fully aware of Peter's vast importance in the burgeoning Christian movement. How could they not be? He was the main figure during Jesus ministry, one of the inner circle, the leader of the 12. And after Jesus death, he became the head of the church in Jerusalem and eventually the main missionary to the Jewish people. [00:02:00] He, along with the apostle Paul, was responsible for the spread of the religion from its tiny, inauspicious beginnings to its relative triumph throughout the empire. Peter was huge. [00:02:13] And what about Mary? [00:02:15] She was scarcely known and little talked about. And so the if storytellers were to make up, or at least to modify the stories of Christianity's beginnings, would they invent the story that it was a woman who started it? Wouldn't they be more likely to celebrate the greatness of the illustrious Apostle Peter? Wouldn't they show that although he had denied Christ at the moment of crisis, he had redeemed himself in the aftermath by being the first to realize that Christ had been vindicated by God, raised from the dead and exalted to heaven? [00:02:50] Why would someone make up a story about a virtually unknown woman discovering the empty tomb and proclaiming the resurrection? [00:02:58] Especially if the point of the stories is to give evidence that Jesus death was not the last word, that God himself had the last word. By reversing the illicit judgment of the Jewish leaders and The Roman authorities by raising his son from the dead. [00:03:14] Would the idol tale of a woman be invented as evidence for the resurrection? [00:03:20] It seems unlikely. [00:03:23] But then, where did the stories of Mary Magdalene, either by herself or in company of other women, originally come from? [00:03:30] If it is hard to imagine them being made up by a number of early Christian storytellers, then maybe the stories have a real historical basis. Maybe it actually was Mary who found the tomb empty on the third day and who proclaimed that Jesus was raised from the dead. [00:03:48] I should emphasize, even though Christianity is based ultimately on the life and ministry of Jesus, it is much more than that. [00:03:57] Traditional Christianity is the belief that he died for the sins of the world and was raised from the dead. [00:04:04] Technically speaking, Christianity could not begin until someone proclaimed Jesus raised from the dead. [00:04:12] It appears that the first to do so was Mary Magdalene. If so, as I argued in the previous chapter, Mary really is the one who started Christianity. [00:04:22] There could scarcely be a more significant woman for the history of Western civilization, or man, for that matter, who is at the same time less known than Mary Magdalene. [00:04:35] Her role in the story came to be minimized in some places, especially as men became increasingly in charge of the Church and the women leaders, some of them apostles, came to be silenced. In other places, her role and reputation lived on, as evidenced in the scattered references to her in various sources from the early Christian movement, especially among the Gnostics. [00:04:57] But for orthodox Christianity, Peter and Paul eventually triumphed. [00:05:03] In what ways were Peter's and Paul's understandings of the Christian faith different from Mary's? [00:05:10] Unfortunately, we will never know for sure, since Mary left us no writings and is scarcely referred to in our early sources. [00:05:18] We do learn from the early 3rd century author Origen that Mary had followers devoted to her understanding of the religion, but unfortunately, we know nothing about what that might have been, what that is she herself actually believed about Christ, except what can be inferred from certain facts of history. [00:05:39] These include the fact that she was a Jewish woman from Galilee who was a devoted disciple of Jesus. She must have been drawn to his message, otherwise she would not have followed him and supported his mission from her own means. [00:05:52] That means that she too must have been a Jewish apocalypticist, anticipating that this evil age of pain, suffering and oppression was soon to be overthrown and God's kingdom was soon to arrive here on Earth. [00:06:07] In that kingdom there would be no more war, hatred, injustice, poverty, disease, demonic forces, oppression. It would be a paradisal age in which God and all he stood for ruled supreme. [00:06:22] And it would be an age in which there would be no more oppression based on class, race, wealth, prestige, or gender. There would be no destitution, no underclass, no slavery, no sexual differentiation. [00:06:36] Women would no longer be subject to the control of the men in their lives. [00:06:40] They, along with the men, would be like the angels of heaven in Jesus. Message of the Future Liberation of the Earth Mary herself must have seen a message of her own liberation in a future age filled only with what is good, when God would reign supreme. [00:06:58] And once she came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead, she, like other apocalyptic Jews such as Paul, probably drew the logical the end is upon us. The kingdom of God is almost here. The expectations of Jesus are soon to be realized, and the promises of God are about to be fulfilled. [00:07:20] Mary may well have expected to see liberation of the earth within her own lifetime.