The Gospel of Mary, Part 1
(DISCLAIMER: I’m not a scholar or a historian, nor do I pretend to be. Scholarship is a hobby for me, not a profession. I’m currently reading all sorts of books about the Gospel of Mary and other Gnostic texts because I find them fascinating, and I’ve listed a few of them below. My aim in writing this series of posts on the Gospel of Mary is to share some things about the book and the background of it that have made me think and wonder and dream. I guess you could say that I’m writing this for my own benefit of processing what I’m learning, but am bringing you along for the ride. In all honesty, I’m at a place where I’m rethinking everything about my faith and am pulling from multiple traditions, both Christian/Ancient Christian and non-Christian, to follow a path that makes sense to me.)
The Gospel of Mary is a short text that was written in the early to mid-second century (around the same time that some of our other New Testament texts were written) and it's a wonderful, short story that presents a much different version of Jesus' message than many of us were raised with in our more Conservative / Evangelical / “Orthodox” traditions.
The What If Project explores the question, "what if there are ways of thinking about God and faith that are different than what our traditions have handed us?" and so the Gospel of Mary (along with other ancient texts that didn't make it into the Bible - the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Truth, etc.) is of great interest to me.
What's different about it?
Well ...
It interprets Jesus' teachings as a path to inner spiritual knowledge.
It rejects Jesus' suffering and death as a path to eternal life.
It exposes the view of Mary as a prostitute for what it is - fiction.
It presents an argument for the legitimacy of women's leadership.
... just to name a few things.
The question a lot of people ask next is, "is it reliable?" meaning, "is it true?", which really means - "did the things recorded in the Gospel of Mary actually happen or is it fiction?"
It's hard to say, of course, but I would fall more on the side that the story found in the Gospel of Mary is fictional in nature in the same way that (I think) the stories found in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are (often times) fictional.
That's a loaded statement, I know, and can be a powder keg that brings an explosion of responses ... but, remember - the stories that were passed around in Early Christianity were ORAL long before they were WRITTEN and as different communities passed the stories around they grew and changed and evolved to fit the different contexts of the communities they were shared in. Once the writers of the various Gospels wrote them down, they did so not so much to make a historical record, but to address the needs and worries and concerns and ongoings of a particular community of people and to encourage them in the ways and teachings of Jesus as their particular community understood them.
Because.
Really.
The early centuries of Christianity were very, very diverse and (much like today, but even more so back then) not every community of people understood things in the same way. In fact, some scholars suggest that we have lost as much as 85% of early Christian literature from the first 2 centuries of Christianity and that includes ONLY the literature that we know about that has been referenced in other documents. Layer on top of that the stories that were only told orally and (therefore) died with the voices of the people who shared them ... and. Well. There's A LOT we don't know about those early years.
AND REMEMBER - when we speak of these early years, there was no "Bible" yet and so there was no "New Testament".
No Bible
No New Testament.
No list of "approved writings".
No Nicene Creed.
No list of proper beliefs.
... None of these things were around yet because rather than these things being the starting points that came to define Christianity, these things (the Bible, New Testament, Creeds, etc.) were the end results of years and years and years of debates and arguments and disputes where the winners got what they wanted and the losers got many of their writings and ideas outlawed, condemned, and (sometimes literally) lit on fire.
The Gospel of Mary is one of those voices that we didn't know existed until it was discovered in January of 1896 because it's one of the voices that was on the losing side.
Sadly, some of the text was lost. Scholars believe we are missing the first 6 pages as well as a few other segments, but from what little we do have we're able to enter into and observe a very, very interesting story that challenges many of our most deeply held ideas.
Next time I'll tell you the story of Mary's Gospel and then over the next few posts after that I'll share some interesting things that I took away from the story.
Much love,
Glenn || PATREON / BUY ME A COFFEE
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Are you as fascinated by this as I am? Here are a few books I'm reading that have been a springboard for a whole lot of ideas.