The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

But there is a Gospel of Mary: and this opera is based not only on that text, but also on other versions of the New Testament story that only came to light seventy-five years ago. In 1945, in the Egyptian desert, archaeologists discovered a treasure trove of these alternate versions: the Gospels of Mary, of Thomas, and of Philip; the Dialogue of the Savior; Pistis Sophia (Faith-Wisdom, in the Greek) to name a few. All these versions—while echoing the sayings and character of Jesus as described in the traditional Gospels—shed brilliant new light on Jesus, his teachings, and his relationships: especially his relationship with a woman known as Mary from the Galilean city of Magdala, known more commonly as Mary Magdalene.

Mary Magdalene appears in every traditional Gospel, but never as the center of a story, and never in the same way each time. No Gospel, though claims she was a prostitute. She came to be remembered as one because a sixth-century Pope, in one influential sermon, combined several female characters—some sensual, some sinning, some both—into one character: and called that character by the Magdalene’s name. All the Gospels agree that Mary Magdalene went to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus. But Luke 7:11 also mentions another, unnamed female “sinner,” two days before Jesus’s crucifixion, who burst in to a dinner held in Jesus’s honor and, weeping, anointed his feet and dried them with her hair. And the Gospels remember two other Marys (aside from Jesus’s mother): a reformed prostitute named Mary of Egypt, and Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha. In 594 CE, Pope Gregory declared all these women were one woman: Mary Magdalene. The first woman---the first person—to whom the risen Christ appeared, became (in Roman Catholicism, at least: the Orthodox Church never agreed) a whore!

As such, she was a tremendous success. Countless churches, particularly in France, were erected in her honor. Generations of poets, musicians, and sculptors depicted her; and, over the course of innumerable paintings, she acquired her own iconography: red hair, glamorous gowns, an ointment jar. She became even more extravagantly fictionalized during the Middle Ages: sailing to Provence and ending her days as a kind of female John the Baptist in some tales, marrying Jesus and establishing the French royal family in another. (There’s no Scriptural support for either of these tales: but that didn’t stop Dan Brown from using them as a colorful backdrop for his thriller The Da Vinci Code.) Mary, the Mother of Jesus, virginal and untroubled, remained what women were supposed to be. But the emotionally and erotically alive Magdalene—human, flawed, but ultimately redeemed—was closer to what women—to what people—actually were and… are.

But then these Gnostic texts, which had been forgotten—or suppressed?—for nearly two millennia came to light: and they describe a very different Magdalene. This Mary is not only a member of Jesus’s inner circle of followers, but one Jesus describes as “the blessed one…she whose heart is more directed to the Kingdom of Heaven than all your brothers.” Was she his spouse? Mary is described with a word that can mean either his “companion” or “consort,” and Jesus is described as “constantly kissing her on the mouth.” Many of these texts assert that Peter, the father of the Western Church, resented Mary’s influence on Jesus and vied with her for Jesus’s favor. And the Gospel of Mary concludes with a breathtaking account of how Mary, after seeing Jesus in the tomb, returns to the terrified disciples and encourages them to take heart and preach the gospel far and wide.

So, neither a virgin nor a whore but a human woman—alive both erotically and spiritually—who may have been as (or more!) important than any of the male disciples in founding, at Jesus’ side. How can this not be an opera? Of course it’s a fascinating historical project: taking a story we thought we knew and daring us to wonder if it might have happened differently, before the institutional Christianity of long ago decided on an official version. But it’s also a richly dramatic project. Read these texts for story, not just doctrine, and there are hints of intense and fascinating conflicts among Mary, Peter, Jesus, even his mother Mary; and ambivalence about women not just from Peter, but within Jesus himself. The drama, in becoming more human, gains, not loses, richness. And, fortunately, we have the composer-librettist who can bring this to life. Mark Adamo was fired by this subject five years ago, and the opera he’s created—meticulously researched, vividly scored, touching and true—will be unlike anything you’ve seen or heard before.

For composer Mark Adamo, grand opera signifies more than big production values, impressive sets, and musicians crowding the pit. The medium always had a reputation for spectacular entertainment, but Verdi, Wagner, and other pioneers used its grandeur as the Trojan horse through which to smuggle in their deeper inquiries into human nature. That vast potential still beckons to those writing opera for today’s audiences. “As well as an experience of extraordinary amplitude, a grand opera is a metaphor: a 3,000-seat theater sends a message about both what we’ve been and what we still long for as a community,” says Adamo. “So, when creating such an opera, one has to ask: how can you embody something crucial about the way we live now, as opposed to miming familiar ideas of long ago and far away?”

The question turned urgent when San Francisco Opera General Director David Gockley invited the composer-librettist to write a large-scale work following the two previous operas—both notable successes—he had commissioned from Adamo during his tenure as general director of Houston Grand Opera. And what could be grander in scale than one of the foundational stories of Western civilization: the emergence of Christianity from the relationships between Jesus and his inner circle?

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, scheduled for its premiere this coming June by San Francisco Opera, posed the toughest artistic challenges Adamo has faced in his career. Five years have elapsed from initial concept to final orchestration (completed just this month). Yet even aside from that enormous investment, Mary Magdalene is as risk-taking a venture as it is audacious. Noting the precedent of ambitious projects like John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, Adamo affirms that opera should “wrestle with large ideas yet, at the same time, present a complete drama in which music and language are deeply intertwined.”

That’s his goal for The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, for which Adamo wrote both music and libretto. The production marks the Company debuts of Adamo as well as of director Kevin Newbury, conductor Michael Christie, and, in the title role, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke: artists returning to San Francisco include baritone Nathan Gunn as Yeshua (Jesus), soprano Maria Kanyova (Miriam, Jesus’ mother), and tenor William Burden (Peter).

Adamo’s previous stage works show an impressive gift for connecting with today’s audiences. His debut, Little Women, which recast the beloved Louisa May Alcott novel as a lyrically touching chamber opera, been given over 75 American and international productions since it premiered at Houston Grand Opera in 1998. The instant success of Little Women led Gockley to commission the highly acclaimed Lysistrata, or The Nude Goddess (2005), based on Aristophanes’ “make-love-not-war” satire and which was celebrated in New York and Washington before its most-recent engagement at Fort Worth Opera in May 2012.

But Adamo, now 50, has put his ability to reinvigorate classic stories with contemporary insights to the ultimate test. The Gospel of Mary Magdalene presents a speculative vision in which alternative narratives of the life and preaching of Jesus—versions that had literally been buried and long forgotten—are integrated into the familiar narrative of the New Testament. Adamo uses these sources to imagine a drama populated by “the living characters behind these ancient personae, the faces behind the masks. Ideally, such a drama could invite us to think deeply about the myths by which we live our lives. By ‘myth,’ I mean, not lie, but those narratives by which we organize our moral imaginations—and which need to be looked at afresh.” The precedent, he continues, is Wagner’s treatment of the Nibelungenlied in the Ring cycle, which wove its many strands of myth into a new narrative “reinterpreted for his time and place.”

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene began in 2007, when Adamo chanced to read a lengthy article by critic Joan Acocella titled “The Saintly Sinner,” (which originally appeared in The New Yorker issue of February 13, 2006). In it Acocella reflected on “the 2,000-year obsession with Mary Magdalene,” the female disciple whom all four official gospels describe as the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus. But her presence in those gospels is otherwise minimal, sketchy, ambiguous. It was only centuries later that she became identified with a prostitute, an earthly antipode to Jesus’ mother, the Virgin Mary— “sometimes a pinup, sometimes a sermon,” as Acocella puts it—until both aspects were integrated into the image of the repentant sinner.

Over the centuries the Magdalene character (her family name is usually associated with Magdala, a coastal town in Galilee) would inspire thousands of artworks and nearly as many churches erected in her honor. But the startling discovery in Egypt in 1945 of other texts describing Jesus and his circle radically challenged the traditional view of her. Often referred to as the “Gnostic Gospels” because of their emphasis on esoteric wisdom (gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge), these were written between the second and fourth centuries C.E., a period teeming with competing early-Christian sects. They were, however, kept out of the official New Testament canon, though the Gospel of John shares some features with the Gnostic accounts.

Acocella’s article surveyed some of the burgeoning scholarly investigations of these discoveries, which include, among others, the Gospels of Thomas and Philip, Faith-Wisdom, and Dialogue of the Savior. They not only helped illuminate The Gospel of Mary—an earlier Gnostic discovery from 1898—but suggested new ways of looking at the familiar story. In preparing his libretto, Adamo immersed himself in both the texts and their scholarship to develop a narrative about Jesus and his followers that grapples with the questions these new texts raise. For example, what role could Mary Magdalene—whom Jesus describes as having “a heart more directed to the Kingdom of Heaven than all your brothers”—have played in the evolution of Jesus’s ideas? If they had married, how might this have affected the bitter rivalry—minutely detailed in the Gnostic texts— between Mary and his disciple Peter? For that matter, why, in the canonical Gospels, is Jesus consistently described as being “born of fornication?”

These various questions suggested to Adamo one overriding one, which he phrases as: “What is the role of eros in a godly life?” Traditional interpretations of the Jesus story duck the problem, attributing to Jesus a celibacy he never claimed and exhorting believers to demonize sexuality and attribute it exclusively to women. (Explaining, perhaps, why the most-admired female figure in Roman Catholicism is the Virgin Mary.) But these interpretations ignore these Gnostic descriptions of Mary Magdalene as both “companion” and apostle; lines like Peter’s, in Thomas, urging Jesus to  “make Mary leave us, for females are not worthy of this life;” that perception of Jesus as illegitimate child, and the enigma of the mother who bore that child.

So Adamo wondered: could you wrestle with desire and holiness via a music-drama in which no convenient miracles rescue any of the characters from the results of their actions; a drama in which the nearly-erased women characters were restored, in full, to the story? And could you do it without resorting to the fantasizing of, say, Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, or to the medieval, folkloric Magdalene imagery—unsupported by Scripture—of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code? “Some have asked me whether I mean The Gospel of Mary Magdalene as an ‘alternative history’ like  The Plot Against America,” novelist Philip Roth’s counterfactual fantasia in which Charles Lindbergh is elected president. But—as the 100-plus footnotes of his 80-page libretto attest— Adamo wanted a factual fantasia. “I don’t say—I can’t say—that the Jesus story played out as I wrote it. I can say that— based on the texts that we now all share—no one can disprove it played out this way.”

Both playwright and composer, Adamo weighs the sound of his language as closely as his music: and the diction of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene tries to strike a precise balance between the personal and the iconic. “If there was a lost ‘original’ of the New Testament of which all our inherited versions are magical variations, how might its characters have spoken? Candidly enough to be credible as people and yet obliquely enough that you’d be convinced by their later transformation into archetype. Also, with no archaisms. For good or ill, this is a modern story.”  (Ariel and Chana Bloch’s “frank, elegant” translation of The Song of Songs proved an indispensable reference.)

Set design for The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by David Korins
Photo by Cory Weaver

Musically, too, the same questions were at the forefront: “No archaisms,” and no Middle-Easternisms, either. The framing story of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene follows five disillusioned “moderns” who can neither wholly accept nor wholly abandon their traditions: it’s they who conjure the ancient tale to life. So, in sound as well as word, “the time is now, the place is Galilee, the first century C.E.,” as the libretto asserts. Balancing the intimate with the epic became indispensable when composing for 17 soloists, a chorus of 48, a Strauss-sized orchestra, and electronic sound design.

As in his previous scores, Adamo’s music for The Gospel of Mary Magdalene extends from unadorned lines to clusters of granitic density; the composer weaves a web of leitmotifs that make audible a sense of destiny that each character intuits but none fully understands. But the larger forces enable here a characterization by texture and tone color that wasn’t as readily available in the smaller orchestras of Little Women or Lysistrata.

“For example,” says Adamo, “there’s this boiling cauldron of triple bassoons and marimba under Mary’s madness up front, which then yields to an aria beginning deep in the bass register and evanescing into a cloudbank of piccolo and glockenspiel. Miriam’s scena begins just with pulsing pairs of woodwinds, but thickens little by little into a grinding polychord: and the chorus in Act Two trade these slightly skewed triads so that you’ll hear, if I’ve done it correctly, an ebb and flow of consonance and dissonance.” When describing what he wanted from the score, Adamo repeats the word iridescent: “I wanted the feeling you get from a flashlight that sends beams of light ricocheting around a vast cathedral or underground cave but that never fully illuminates it at any given time.”

But—even as that chorus, in Act Two, makes a small ceremony of five entire verses, verbatim, of the gnostic The Gospel of Mary—don’t expect an oratorio. “I’m interested in drama, which invites conflict, humor, ambiguity; whereas an oratorio assumes consensus. A Bach Passion commemorates the Easter myth: it doesn’t interrogate it.” Nor is the opera meant as “a graffito scrawled across the New Testament: I couldn’t write this piece if I didn’t love this tradition as much as I argue with it.” The Gospel of Mary Magdalene is designed as a character study, an intellectual safari, an emotional journey, and, above all, an adventure:  “From Athens till now, the theatre has always been a safe place to talk about dangerous things. What can be more necessary? What can be more fun?”


Thomas May is a frequent contributor to San Francisco Opera Magazine. His books include Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.

In fact, Jesus’ likely marital status—as unmarried, that is—remains relatively intact among scholars. However, research on the diversity of early Christianity, the role of women in the ancient church, and newly discovered ancient manuscripts has produced some consensus that the traditional history told about the Christian church needs significant revision.

Among the concepts getting a makeover is “Gnosticism,” a 17th-century term for the ancient heresy that the material world is corrupt and only those few with the right knowledge, or gnosis in Greek, can be saved. Traditionally, Gnosticism is characterized negatively as a dualistic, elitist, and highly mythological worldview promoted in the second and third centuries by heretical Christian teachers who brought too much speculative Greek philosophy to the orthodox Christian story of Jesus. But things changed with the 1945 discovery, at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, of a stash of papyrus books containing 46 texts, many unknown before. For the first time, we were able to read Gnostic thought on its own terms rather than through the evaluations of its detractors like Irenaeus, the 2nd-century Bishop of Lyons, whose work gives “Gnostics” their name and negative evaluation. Irenaeus sought to define true Christianity by denouncing a variety of groups as propagating “miserable fables” and false knowledge.

There was no First Church of Gnosticism on every 2nd-century street corner vying with orthodox Christians. However, as historian David Brakke argues, we can talk about a specific Christian school of Gnostic thought. The Secret Revelation of John, three copies of which were found at Nag Hammadi, describes a revelation given by Christ to his disciple John concerning knowledge about God, the divine realm, and the origin of the world and humanity. God the Father, or the Invisible Spirit, is not the biblical God, but is pure perfection and beyond description. The divine realm is populated by emanations of the Thought of the Invisible Spirit. Figures like the self-generated Christ, Sophia (Wisdom), Truth, and the Perfect Human, often presented in male and female pairs, are all beings, or ideals of divine fullness. Together they are the complexity of divine thought. The material world is a flawed copy of the divine world, but all humans who cultivate true knowledge will achieve ascent to the divine realm.

According to Karen King, leading scholar on The Secret Revelation of John, this strange and elaborate text is our earliest known attempt at a comprehensive Christian theology, cosmology, and salvation. This school of thought likely raised the ire of Irenaeus with its emphasis on philosophical speculation led by authoritative teachers, but taken on its own terms, it is a message of hope in which humanity receives saving enlightenment from the divine Savior Christ. Some similar ideas appear in the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary as well as in the New Testament Gospel of John.  

Is this all part of a heresy or religion called “Gnosticism”? No. This period was a time of lively debate and creative thinking about spiritual knowledge, personal fate, the wisdom of ancient texts, and the authority of teachers. Although there was great diversity of approaches and views within and across groups, Christians, Jews, and followers of Greek and Roman religions in this period were all interested in these topics. Perhaps because of globalization in the last half-century, these submerged voices from early Christianity have also captured the attention of contemporary people who are interested in new ways of approaching religion, science, human suffering, and spiritual knowledge.

The Nag Hammadi library first gained popular attention with the publication of The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels. Her groundbreaking work showed how these new texts, along with others outside the New Testament canon traditionally criticized as “Gnosticism,” shared a view of human salvation as a quest for divine wisdom and, perhaps, a more democratic view of church than that of the orthodox bishops. Although not feminist in a modern sense, these texts have more female metaphors for the divine, as well a thoroughly positive image of figures like Mary Magdalene as an intimate intellectual and spiritual partner of Jesus and a leader in her own right. We know that some early Christians claimed Mary’s authority for their teachings about a mystical ascent of the soul and the irrelevance of gender difference to spirituality. Perhaps this is one of the reasons such groups were rejected by bishops like Irenaeus. Mary Magdalene’s story might have been even more controversial than we think.
 
Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre is the associate professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Drew University and co-author of Mary Magdalene Understood. This article was based on the following books, recommended for futher reading:

Karen King, The Secret Revelation of John (Harvard, 2006)
David Brakke, The Gnostics (Harvard, 2010)
Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity (Yale, 2009)
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (Vintange, 1989; original, 1979)