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Mistaking Mary Magdalene
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gryfft 1y agohttps://archive.ph/lQqM9 https://archive.ph/lQqM9
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- computerthings 1y ago[dead]
- IAmBroom 1y ago[flagged]
- logiczero 1y agoMary Magdalene is called "Equal to the Apostles," one of the highest honorifics that can be bestowed on a saint: https://orthodoxwiki.org/Mary_Magdalene https://orthodoxwiki.org/Mary_Magdalene
- kaonwarb 1y ago"Mary Magdalene is considered to be a saint by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran denominations." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene) Plenty of other references too!
- cylinder714 1y agoI watched a bit of the coverage of Pope Francis' coffin being brought into St. Peter's basilica, and heard "Santa Maria Magdalena [pray for us]" chanted by the choir. Also, the final episode of Martin Scorsese's "The Saints" series dropped, featuring her.
- jfengel 1y agoThere are at least five different Mary's in the Gospels. She was not the prostitute, but the prostitute was also a Mary. It is, as you say, a misogynist way to dismiss the many women who were important during Jesus' ministry and during the founding of the early gentile Churches. But the book sure doesn't make it easy to keep em straight.
- shampto3 1y agoThere is no prostitute called Mary in the Gospels. There was a conflation of three women: - Mary Magdalene who had 7 devils cast out of her - Mary of Bethany who anointed Christ with oil close to his crucifixion - Unnamed woman who anointed Christ with oil and tears in the home of Simon Not only are these three woman separate and distinct, none of them are even explicitly called out as prostitutes. So they both conflated their stories and assumed what the sin was. Other Marys in the Gospels: - Mary the mother of Christ - Mary the mother of James - Mary of Clopas
- o11c 1y agoAnd if anyone is like me and thinking "wait, there are more Marys than that", the above comment specifies "in the gospels". Mary mother of [John] Mark is in Acts, and Mary of Rome is in Romans. It's generally assumed that "the other Mary" is one of the many above. It is widely, but not universally, assumed that the two "Mary and Martha" stories refer to the same people. Some traditions say that Salome was yet another Mary, but this seems poorly founded.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoHow do we know those are the different women though?
- watwut 1y agoBy reading with comprehension.
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- giraffe_lady 1y agoIn addition to her individual feast day the myrrhbearing women are commemorated on the second sunday after pascha in the eastern churches. Can't be more prominently celebrated short of a great feast.
- kgwxd 1y ago[flagged]
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- o11c 1y agoPrior to 1850, there's no evidence my alleged ancestors even existed.
- milesrout 1y agoAlso it makes no sense to say there is no evidence of them existing, given that we are discussing precisely that: evidence of them existing. Why would the sources that were put together to form the Bible be discounted when the whole point of putting it together was to collect the best evidence into one source?
- dang 1y ago(This is not a reply to your current comment, but I want to make sure you see this, so I'm replying to the most recent post.) We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797087.
- deeThrow94 1y agoI agree it's not direct evidence, but it seems easier to believe some guy named Jesus was crucified by the romans than that he was made up for some indiscernible reason. If you read the text as a historical depiction of a real (but not necessarily divine) figure, you can read a jewish eschatological preacher who predicted an imminent apocalypse. We can explain the formation of the bible entirely historically and note how the themes changed over the course of writing it to reflect a realization that an christian society had to organize when the apocalypse did not happen. This doesn't require taking the accounts of miracle as fact by any means, nor that the gospels were actually written by the apostles whose names adorn the text, etc. (In fact this can all be true if you're christian, though that may not be a popular sentiment, as faith without clear evidence is kind of central to the religion.) Anyone who does want to press the question of the historicity of the existence of Jesus then needs to explain the motivations of the people who wrote the texts. That's a hard question to answer given that we don't know much about them or the contemporary christians. It seems easier to believe that the bible did originate in some concrete event surrounding the crucifixion of a jewish eschatological preacher causing trouble to the local romans than some inscrutable conspiracy to... what, accept suffering in this life but not the next? That seems like something that dovetails with state religion ala "opium of the masses"—genuinely soothing, but in so doing inherently works to maintain the status quo—not a place to start analyzing the motives of the authors as entirely fabricating the situation. And of course by the time it started gaining real momentum, the distinction between it and a popular political movement vanished rapidly. Why not see men taking advantage of a clear opportunity for social change to develop culture, much like they behave today in, say, business? Miracles themselves can be explained by psychosis, by intentional exaggeration, by unintended exaggeration, by some contemporary rhetorical flourish that might have been interpreted differently at the time, etc. I don't expect people to understand the faith and belief of others, but it shows a woeful lack of imagination, curiosity, and empathy to write off the billions of christians to have existed as irrational even if you can't take claims of divinity or afterlives or miracles themselves at face value in modern interpretation, especially compared to 2000 years ago. To the contrary—most of our current institutions of rationality in the west were formed by people struggling with the very question of how to reconcile their christian worldviews with the empirical evidence of the world around them. In my opinion, of course. I suspect many, if not the majority of, historians would agree that Jesus likely did exist and there was some event where he was crucified by the romans, and the people who witnessed this spread the news of such event.
- 1123581321 1y agoMary mother of Jesus, Mary of Clopas, Mary Magdalen, Mary of Bethany, Mary and Martha are all sainted/venerated and were mentioned as followers. There may be more who are venerated but those are top of mind. Christian churches that enumerate saints do a pretty good job distinguishing between the different women named Mary.
- graemep 1y agoLots of speculation and guesswork. Some things are well known (e.g. Gregory’s role in arguing she was a prostitute) but their interpretation here is questionable - it is usually taken as an indication of Jesus's attitude to people conventionally labelled "bad", as with Matthew. There is some downright ridiculous stuff here as well - "Maybe Jesus was clearing Magdalene’s chakras.".
- xhkkffbf 1y agoYeah, seems like plenty of wishful thinking. There's not much official that we know and plenty that's been added in the centuries afterwards.
- LargoLasskhyfv 1y agoThere is nothing wrong with clearing, or rather recalibrating chakras, especially the Kundalini. The rest will follow automagically, and blow the Sahasrara wide open. It's rather enjoyable, for both, in fact.