Amanda Hope Haley - Mary Magdalene Never Wore Blue Eye Shadow: How to Trust the Bible When Truth and Tradition Collide

Table of Contents

Amanda Haley will inspire you to look at the Scriptures with new lenses. Combining the best of academic research with her unique brand of humor, topped with a dash of pop culture, she hosts a wild ride through the geography, history, and culture of the Bible. This book will enlighten, inform, and entertain you. Most importantly, you will be equipped with the right tools, resources, and questions to engage biblical study. You will be motivated to look at the Scriptures again from a new perspective. And you might find yourself surprised by whats in thereand even more surprised by whats not.

Heather Zempel, author of Community Is Messy and Big Change, Small Groups

Amanda Haley has written an incredibly timely and important work. She bravely navigates the obstacles many of us encounter during faith deconstruction, all while keeping the heart of God the North Star. Blending common sense and scholarly integrity, Amanda has created a seminary-level hermeneutics course in one approachable, holistic, and relatable book.

Dr. Ashley Davis, DMin, author and spiritual director

HARVEST HOUSE PUBLISHERS

EUGENE, OREGON

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked T HE V OICE are taken from The Voice TM . Copyright 2012 by Ecclesia Bible Society. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Cover design and illustration by Kristi Smith, Juicebox Designs

Mary Magdalene Never Wore Blue Eye Shadow

Copyright 2019 by Amanda Hope Haley

Published by Harvest House Publishers

Eugene, Oregon 97408

www.harvesthousepublishers.com

ISBN 978-0-7369-7512-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-0-7369-7513-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Haley, Amanda Hope, author.

Title: Mary Magdalene never wore blue eye shadow / Amanda Hope Haley.

Description: Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019004528 (print) | LCCN 2019022236 (ebook) | ISBN 9780736975124 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: BibleHermeneutics. | Common fallaciesMiscellanea. | BibleCriticism, interpretation, etc.

Classification: LCC BS476 .H2355 2019 (print) | LCC BS476 (ebook) | DDC 220.601dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019004528

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022236

All rights reserved. No part of this electronic publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, digital, photocopy, recording, or any otherwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The authorized purchaser has been granted a nontransferable, nonexclusive, and noncommercial right to access and view this electronic publication, and purchaser agrees to do so only in accordance with the terms of use under which it was purchased or transmitted. Participation in or encouragement of piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of authors and publishers rights is strictly prohibited.

For Rachel and Jennifer

Your honest questions

revealed to me how humans traditions

can sometimes obscure the beauty, power,

and truth of Gods Scripture.

CONTENTS

S o why didnt the other disciples respect Mary Magdalenes authority in this text? asked the teaching fellow in my Apocryphal Jesus class. We were analyzing the Gospel of Mary, a second-century writing that exalts Mary Magdalene as Jesus beloved apostle and is not part of the Bible for several reasonsmost obviously that more of the manuscript is damaged than is legible.

There were about ten students there, and we were all seated around a big table in a windowless room. It was a graduate course at the Divinity School, but undergraduate students were allowed to take it. Across from me sat DeWitt, a Harvard senior who (as I remember him) always wore a popped-collar pink polo and a smirk.

I volunteered the first answer: Maybe its because she was a prostitute?

DeWitt could not control his laughter. Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. How did you make it to grad school without knowing that?

The TF tried to smooth things over by calmly explaining to me that the Bible does not claim Mary was a prostitute. That was a traditional, not scriptural, belief that had been introduced by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century. In my defense, it was 2003 and The DaVinci Code was not yet the worldwide phenomenon that has since made this fact common knowledge.

I dont remember too much more about the not-in-the-Bible-for-good-reasons texts we studied that semester. But as tends to happen in life, that embarrassing mistake taught me a more important lesson: we must examine Scripture itself so we know the differences between what God said in the Bible and what people say about the Bible.

When I told my mother what had happened, she was livid. She recalled that when she had dressed up as Mary Magdalene for a childrens Easter play at her church, her mother had smothered her face in makeup becauseas everyone knewMary Magdalene was a prostitute. (And apparently first-century prostitutes wore a lot of blue eye shadow.) I was at least the third generation of my family who wholeheartedly believed the Bible said something that it does not.

So how did I make it to grad school without knowing that? I grew up in the Bible Belt and attended church Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, and Wednesday nightsas did my mother and her mother before her. We knew the Bible as well as anyone else in our churches; we also knew our churches teachings and traditions. But we didnt know how to differentiate between them. The traditions had been taught to us as if they were the inspired Word of God.

I cant imagine theres some Sunday school teachers convention where everyone is trained in how to use felt boards, serve animal crackers, and indoctrinate children. No, when laypeople and sometimes even the ordained mistakenly teach Christian traditions or denominational beliefs as if they are scriptural truths, they do so because they believe what they are saying. This is why James says, teachers will be held to a higher standard (James 3:1, T HE V OICE ): teachers must know how to study the Bible for what God says and not just recite to students what they have been taught.

Traditions get elevated to doctrinesand eventually honored as equal to Scripturewhen people fill in details they think the Bible has left out. In the case of Mary Magdalene, Pope Gregory was trying to give a name to the woman who washed Jesus feet in Luke 7:36-50. He chose Mary Magdalene simply because hers is the next womans name in the text (Luke 8:2). Because Pope Gregory was the authority for the Catholic Church at the time, no one questioned his teaching. When the people heard that Mary Magdalene was the sinner of Luke 7, they took the rumor and ran with it. And as all rumors do, it grew until Mary became the archetypal blue-eye-shadow-wearing prostitute I saw on Sunday school felt boards. Academic and armchair scholars alike may debate whether or not Gregorys intentions were insidious and misogynistic, but the fact is he filled something in where he thought God had left something out. This was false teaching.