Few characters in the New Testament have been so sorely miscast as Mary Magdalene, whose reputation as a fallen woman originated not in the Bible but in a sixth-century sermon by Pope Gregory the Great. Not only is she not the repentant prostitute of legend, meditating and levitating in a cave, but she was not necessarily even a notable sinner: Being possessed by "seven demons" that were exorcised by Jesus, she was arguably more victim than sinner. And the idea, popularized by The Da Vinci Code, that Mary was Jesus's wife and bore his child, while not totally disprovable, is the longest of long shots.
But arguments over whether Mary Magdalene was Jesus's wife, a reformed harlot, or the adulterous woman Jesus saved from stoning pale in comparison with the most rancorously disputed aspect of her legacy—what exactly she witnessed at Jesus's Resurrection. In a new biography of Mary Magdalene, theologian Bruce Chilton contends that Mary witnessed not the resurrection of a flesh-and-blood Jesus but a spiritual visitation. This is one of the principal reasons that she has been sidelined in the New Testament, says Chilton. Like the apostle Paul, who claims that only a "fool" could believe in the physical resuscitation of the body, and Jesus himself, who maintains men will be reborn "like angels," Mary perceives the risen Christ as a "sequence of visions," shared by the disciples, argues Chilton. (Luke, of course, insists that Jesus is bodily resurrected. "A spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have," Jesus tells the disciples in Luke, then eats broiled fish to drive his point home.)
