Mary Magdelene

One of the more difficult lines in the Gospel of John is Jesus’ reaction to Mary. He tells her “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (verse 17). The phrase is Noli me tangere in Latin. What does Jesus mean?

It may be the case that he has only just resurrected, and cannot be touched until he ascends. The King James translation makes the problem more difficult by translating the verb as “touch,” rather than “cling.” But the ascension takes place forty days later, and later in this chapter, Jesus tells Thomas to touch the wounds on his hands and side. Unless we assume that there is an ascension sometime during that day that “completed” the resurrection, this cannot be what Jesus means here.

A more likely explanation of “Do not touch me” is that Mary is not just touching Jesus, but “clinging” to him. The verb ἅπτω is not uncommon in the New Testament, but is used by John only here (and 1 John 5:18, the evil one cannot touch the believer). It is likely that Mary fell at Jesus’ feet and was clinging to him in a way we might expect since she thought he was dead! Mary is holding on to Jesus so tightly that she does not want to let him go ever again!

Coupled with the allusion to the ascension, this line probably means something like, “Mary, you do not have to cling to me, I have not yet ascended to heaven! I’ll be here for a little while longer.”

It is possible that Mary’s emotional response to seeing Jesus is a hint that she has not fully understood the resurrection, perhaps thinking that Jesus had not actually died. Mary returns to the disciples, who are likely discussing where the body of Jesus might have gone. When she arrives, she announces that she has seen the Lord and that he is alive. At this point, she does not say “he has risen from the dead.” It is only after he appeared to his disciples that they begin to understand what has happened.

John’s gospel is a well-constructed piece of theology and it is hard for me to believe that John did not intend a little more here than simply warning Mary that he was not immediately leaving her again.  What might be the theological point John is making in this unusual story?  It is also possible that John is making a pastoral point as well by describing Mary’s emotional response to the resurrection.

According to John 20:1, the first witness to the resurrection is Mary Magdalene, who visited the tomb very early on Sunday morning. Who is this Mary?

The name “Magdalene” indicates she was from a town in Galilee, Magdal, about a mile north of Tiberias. The name means “tower” and is called “fish tower” in the Talmud, perhaps indicating that it was associated with exporting fish from Galilee. The town may have been as large as 40,000 in the first century and predominantly Gentile (ABD, 4:579).

According to Luke 8:2, Jesus healed Mary “from seven evil spirits”; otherwise, she only appears in the resurrection stories in Matthew and Mark. Luke only says that demons left her, but it is safe to assume that Jesus was the exorcist. According to a sixth-century tradition, Mary was the sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50 (and Mary of Bethany, John 11:1-12:8, Luke 10:38-42). This is possibly because Migdal had a reputation as a sinful town in Midr. Lam 2:2. It is possible that a Jewish woman living in a Gentile town was there to work as a prostitute, although there is no reason to assume that is the case. There is nothing in the Bible to support the idea that she was a prostitute or adulterous, only that she had been demon-possessed. Famously, she tries to cling to Jesus, prompting the enigmatic saying, “Do not touch me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (verse 17).

Mary has become popular in contemporary culture as a female disciple of Jesus on the same level as Peter and the Twelve. The real problem with this view is that the New Testament does not present her as part of the inner circle. These popular readings of Mary are based on Gnostic literature, including the Gospel of Peter and the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (both date to about A.D. 200) and the Gospel of Philip (third century A.D.), which describes Mary as the disciple whom Christ loved more than all the others.

There is a longstanding Gnostic tradition that Jesus and Mary had a romantic relationship, secretly married, and had a child. This child began a kind of “Jesus dynasty,” a secret line of Jesus that existed for centuries. This sort of thing turns up in the Da Vinci Code and other conspiracy-mined entertainment. There is little evidence for this, and what evidence does exist is strained at best.

Still, remarkably, this woman is the first to visit the empty tomb in John’s gospel. Since it is still early morning, Mary cannot see into the tomb; only the stone has been moved away from the entrance. She assumes that the body has been disturbed, perhaps that the tomb has been robbed. She returns to the place where Peter and the others are staying, presumably the upper room) and reports that the tomb has been opened.

If one were to invent the resurrection story, Mary would be a poor choice as the first witness to the empty tomb. As a woman, her testimony would be questioned, and even in the story as we read it in John, she misunderstands what has happened and assumes (as most people would) that someone has moved the body of Jesus, likely to prevent the disciples from venerating the tomb of their prophet.

What are the ramifications of the “first witness” being a woman with a potentially tarnished reputation?