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Raymond E. Brown. Union Theological Seminary,
N.Y.C.
from: Theological Studies 36 (1975) pp.
688-699.
There
are several ways of approaching the biblical evidence pertinent to the
contemporary debate about the role of women in the Church and about the
possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood. One approach is a general
discussion of first-century ecclesiology both in itself and in its
hermeneutical implications for the present. How does one read the NT evidence
about the foundation of the Church and the institution of the sacraments, and
to what extent is that evidence culturally conditioned? Following the teachings
of the Council of Trent, Catholics have spoken of the institution of the
priesthood at the Last Supper. Does that mean that at the Supper Jesus
consciously thought of priests?(1) If he did not and if the clear
conceptualization of the priesthood came only toward the second century, does
the fact that men exclusively were ordained reflect a divine dispensation? Or
are we dealing with a cultural phenomenon which can be changed? In other words,
do we work with a “blueprint ecclesiology” wherein Jesus or the Holy
Spirit has given us a blueprint of church structure in which virtually no
changes can be made? While I regard the discussion of these questions as most
important, I have written on them elsewhere and shall not repeat my
observations here.(2)
A
second approach to the biblical evidence is to discuss the explicit texts that
refer respectively to the equality and the subordination of women in society
and cult. I am not convinced of the usefulness of such a discussion, since for
every text pointing in one direction there is usually a countertext. If Eph
5:24 states that wives must be subject in everything to their husbands, Eph
5:21 introduces that section by commanding “Be subject to one
another.” If 1 Cor 11:7 says that the man (anãr) is the
image and glory of God, while woman is the glory of man, Gn 1:27 states that
both man and woman are in the image of God. If 1 Cor 14:34 rules that women
should keep silence in the churches,(3)1 Cor 11:5 recognizes the custom that
women pray and prophesy—and prophecy is the charism ranking second after
apostleship (1 Cor 12:28), to the extent that Eph 2:20 has the Church, the
household of God, built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets. I
might continue listing contrary voices, but then we would still have the
question of how to evaluate the voices that stress subordination. Once more we
would have to ask: Is that purely a cultural pattern or divine revelation?
I
prefer here to follow a third approach and to consider the general picture of
women in one NT work, the fourth Gospel, and in one NT community, the Johannine
community.(4) I have chosen the fourth Gospel because of the perceptive
corrective that the Evangelist offers to some ecclesiastical attitudes of his
time—his should be a voice heard and reflected upon when we are discussing
new roles for women in the Church today. I presuppose (5) that the Evangelist
was an unknown Christian living at the end of the first century in a community
for which the Beloved Disciple, now deceased, had been the great authority. I
do not think that the Evangelist was either antisacramental (in a Bultmannian
sense) or anti-ecclesiastical. He took for granted the church situation of his
time, which included both structure and sacraments; yet he counteracted some of
the tendencies inherent in that situation by writing a Gospel in which he
attempted to root the Christians of his time solidly in Jesus. They may be
members of the Church, but the Church does not give God’s life: Jesus
does. And so, in order to have life, they must inhere in Jesus (Jn 15:1-8). The
sacraments are not simply church actions commanded or instituted by Jesus; they
are the continuation of the power that Jesus exhibited in signs when he opened
the eyes of the blind (baptism as enlightenment) and fed the hungry (Eucharist
as food). At the end of the first century, when the memory of the apostles (now
increasingly identified with the Twelve) was being increasingly revered, the
fourth Gospel glorifies the disciple and never uses the term
“apostle” in the technical sense,(6) almost as if the Evangelist
wishes to remind the Christian that what is primary is not to have had a
special ecclesiastical charism from God but to have followed Jesus, obedient to
his word. In short, it is a Gospel that seeks to make certain that in the
inevitable structuring of the Church the radical Christian values are not lost.
What information does such a perceptive Evangelist give us about the role of
women?
I
There
is not much information about church offices in the fourth Gospel (7) and, a
fortiori, about women in church offices. Perhaps the only text that may reflect
directly on this is 12:2, where we are told that Martha served at table
(diakonein). On the story-level of Jesus’ ministry this might not
seem significant; but the Evangelist is writing in the 90’s, when the
office of diakonos already existed in the post-Pauline churches (see the
Pastorals) and when the task of waiting on tables was a specific function to
which the community or its leaders appointed individuals by laying on hands
(Acts 6:1-6).(8) In the Johannine community a woman could be described as
exercising a function which in other churches was the function of an
“ordained” person. But, except for that one passage, our discussion
must center rather on the general position of women in the Johannine
community.
Let
us begin with the story of the Samaritan woman. In the sequence of reactions to
Jesus found in the dialogues of chaps. 2, 3, and 4, there seems to be a
movement from disbelief through inadequate belief to more adequate belief. The
“Jews” in the Temple scene are openly skeptical about his signs
(2:18-20); Nicodemus is one of those in Jerusalem who believe because of
Jesus’ signs but do not have an adequate conception of Jesus (2:23 ff.);
the Samaritan woman is led to the brink of perceiving that Jesus is the Christ
(Messiah; 4:25-26, 29) and shares this with others. Indeed, the Samaritan
villagers believe because of the woman’s word (4:39, 42: dia ton logon
[lalian ] pisteuein). This expression is significant because it occurs
again in Jesus’ “priestly” prayer for his disciples: “It is
not for these alone that I pray, but also for those who believe in me through
their word” (17:20: dia ton logon pisteuein). In other words, the
Evangelist can describe both a woman and the (presumably male) disciples at the
Last Supper as bearing witness to Jesus through preaching and thus bringing
people to believe in him on the strength of their word. One may object that in
chap. 4 the Samaritan villagers ultimately come to a faith based on Jesus’
own word and thus are not dependent on the woman’s word (4:42). Yet this
is scarcely because of an inferiority she might have as a woman—it is the
inferiority of any human witness compared to encountering Jesus himself. A
similar attitude may be found in chap.17, where Jesus prays that those who
believe in him through the word of his disciples may ultimately be with him in
order that they may see glory (17:24).
That
the Samaritan woman has a real missionary function is made clear by the
dialogue between Jesus and his male disciples which precedes the passage we
have been discussing. In 4:38 we have one of the most important uses of the
verb apostellein in John.(9) Jesus has just spoken of the fields being
ripe for the harvest—a reference to the Samaritans coming out from the
village to meet him because of what the woman has told them (4:35 following
4:30). This is missionary language, as we see from the parallel in Mt 9:37-38:
“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore pray to the
Lord of the harvest that He send out laborers into the harvest." But curiously
the harvest of the Samaritans verifies the saying “One sows, while another
reaps” (Jn :4:37). Jesus explains this to his male disciples: “What I
sent [apostellein) you to reap was not something you worked for. Others
have done the hard work, and you have come in for the fruit of their
work.” Whatever this may have meant in reference to the history of the
Samaritan church,(10) in the story itself it means that the woman has sown the
seed and thus prepared for the apostolic harvest. One may argue that only the
male disciples are sent to harvest, but the woman’s role is an essential
component in the total mission. To some extent she serves to modify the thesis
that male disciples were the only important figures in church founding.
The
phenomenon of giving a quasi-apostolic role to a woman is even more apparent in
chap.20. Essential to the apostolate in the mind of Paul were the two
components of having seen the risen Jesus and having been sent to proclaim him;
this is the implicit logic of 1 Cor 9:1-2; 15:8-11; Gal 1:11-16. A key to
Peter’s importance in the apostolate was the tradition that he was the
first to see the risen Jesus (1 Cor 15:5; Lk 24:34). More than any other
Gospel, John revises this tradition about Peter. Mt 28:9-10 recalls that the
women who were leaving the empty tomb were the first to encounter the risen
Jesus, but in Matthew they are not contrasted with Peter. In Jn 20:2-10 Simon
Peter and the Beloved Disciple go to the empty tomb and do not see Jesus
(also Lk 24:12, 24); in fact, only the Beloved Disciple perceives the
significance of the grave clothes and comes to believe. It is to a woman, Mary
Magdalene, that Jesus first appears, instructing her to go and tell his
“brothers” (the disciples: 20:17 and 18) of his ascension to the
Father.(11) In the stories of the angel(s) at the empty tomb, the women are
given a message for the disciples; but in John (and in Matthew) Mary Magdalene
is sent by the risen Lord himself, and what she proclaims is the standard
apostolic announcement of the Resurrection: “I have seen the Lord.”
True, this is not a mission to the whole world; but Mary Magdalene comes close
to meeting the basic Pauline requirements of an apostle; and it is she, not
Peter, who is the first to see the risen Jesus. (12) Small wonder that in some
Gnostic quarters Mary Magdalene rather than Peter became the most prominent
witness to the teaching oí the risen Lord.(13) And in Western Church
tradition she received the honor of being the only woman (besides the Mother of
God) on whose feast the Creed was recited precisely because she was considered
to be an apostle—"the apostle to the apostles" (apostola apostolorum).
(l4)
Giving to a woman a role traditionally associated with Peter may well be a
deliberate emphasis on John’s part, for substitution is also exemplified
in the story of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. The most famous incident in which
Peter figures during the ministry of Jesus (and his other claim to primacy
besides that of witnessing the first appearance of the risen Jesus) is the
confession he made at Caesarea Philippi, especially in its Matthean form
(16:16): “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.(15) Already the
disciples had generally confessed Jesus as a “Son of God” (no
definite article in Mt 14:33), but it is Peter’s more solemn confession
that wins Jesus’ praise as a statement reflecting divine revelation. The
closest parallel to that confession in the four Gospels is found in Jn 11:27:
“You are the Christ, the Son of God”;(15) and it appears on the lips
of a woman, Martha, sister of Mary and Lazarus. (And it comes in the context of
a major revelation of Jesus to Martha; it is to a woman that the mystery of
Jesus as the resurrection and the life is revealed!) Thus, if other Christian
communities thought of Peter as the one who made a supreme confession of Jesus
as the Son of God and the one to whom the risen Jesus first appeared, the
Johannine community associated such memories with heroines like Martha and Mary
Magdalene. This substitution, if it was deliberate, was not meant to denigrate
Peter or deny him a role of ecclesiastical authority, any more than the
introduction of the Beloved Disciple alongside Peter in crucial scenes had that
purpose. If I interpret John correctly, at a time when the twelve apostles
(almost personified in Peter, as in Acts) were becoming dominant in the memory
of the ministry of Jesus and of church origins, John portrays Simon Peter as
only one of a number of heroes and heroines and thus hints that ecclesiastical
authority is not the sole criterion for judging importance in the following of
Jesus.(16)
The
importance of women in the Johannine community is seen not only by comparing
them with male figures from the Synoptic tradition but also by studying their
place within peculiarly Johannine patterns. Discipleship is the primary
Christian category for John, and the disciple par excellence is the Disciple
whom Jesus loved. But John tells us in 11:5: “Now Jesus loved Martha and
her sister [Mary] and Lazarus.” The fact that Lazarus is the only male in
the Gospel who is named as the object of Jesus’ love(l7)—nothing
similar is said of the Twelve—has led some scholars to identify him as the
Beloved Disciple.(18) And so it is noteworthy that John would report that Jesus
loved Martha and Mary, who seem to have been better known than Lazarus.(19)
Another proof that women could be intimate disciples of Jesus is found in chap.
20. In the allegorical parable of the Good Shepherd John compares the disciples
of Jesus to sheep who know their shepherd’s voice when he calls them by
name (10:3-5). This description is fulfilled in the appearance of the risen
Jesus to Mary Magdalene as she recognizes him when he calls her by her name
“Mary” (20:16). The point that Mary Magdalene can belong to
Jesus’ sheep is all the more important since in 10:3-5 the sheep are twice
identified as “his own,” the almost technical expression used at the
beginning of the Last Supper: “Having loved his own who were in the world,
he loved them to the end" (13:1). On the analogy of the Synoptic Gospels,
conservative scholars have argued that the participants in the Johannine Last
Supper scene were the Twelve. Be that as it may,(20) it is clear that John has
no hesitation in placing a woman in the same category of relationship to Jesus
as the Twelve would be placed if they are meant by “his own” in 13:1.
II
It is
as a continuation of this idea that I now turn to John’s treatment of the
mother of Jesus, who appears in the fourth Gospel at the first Cana miracle and
at the foot of the Cross. There are many symbolisms that John may have intended
his reader to associate with the mother of Jesus; in my commentary on the two
scenes I have explained some of them at length. But here I am concerned only
with discipleship and with the relative importance of men and women in the
Johannine community. I shall be concise, since I do not want this paper to be
more than a note and since elsewhere I have given detailed arguments.(21)
Let
us begin with the wedding at Cana. Many theorize that there was a pre-Johannine
form of the story. One form of this theory suggests that John drew the basic
Cana miracle story from a tradition of the preministry career of
Jesus—a tradition wherein the Christology of the ministry was anticipated
by describing Jesus as endowed with divine power and knowledge during his
youth, when he was still living with his family.(22) In this tradition Jesus
spoke freely of his divine mission and worked miracles in order to help family
and friends. It is borne witness to in the apocryphal Gospels of the second
century (e.g., The Infancy Gospel of Thomas) and in one other place in
the canonical Gospels, namely, the scene in Lk 2:41-50 where as a youth Jesus
shows extraordinary knowledge and refers to the Temple as his Father’s
house. This background would explain many peculiar features in the story of the
water changed to wine at Cana: Jesus is still up in the highlands of Galilee
(where he does not work miracles in the Synoptic tradition); he has not yet
left his home and moved to Capernaum, which will be the center of his public
ministry (2:12), he is in the family circle of his mother and brothers (2:12)
and he is attending the wedding of a friend of the family (2:1-2); his mother
expects him to use his miraculous power to solve the shortage of wine at the
wedding (2:3); the miracle he performs is particularly exuberant (about 100
gallons of wine from the six stone jars mentioned in 2:6).
I
have described one form of the theory that a pre-Johannine story underlies the
present Cana narrative. There are other forms of this theory, but almost all
propose that there was no response of Jesus such as now appears in 2:4—a
response which makes the story very hard to understand. It is a seeming
refusal; and yet Jesus’ mother goes ahead as if he had not refused, and
Jesus does what she requested. The substance of the pre-Johannine story may
have gone thus:(23)
Now
there was a wedding at Cana of Galilee and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus
himself and his disciples had been invited to the wedding celebration. But they
had no wine, for the wine provided for the wedding banquet had been used up.
The mother of Jesus told the waiters: “Do whatever he tells you.”
There were at hand six stone water jars, each holding fifteen to twenty-five
gallons. “Fill those jars with water,” Jesus ordered....
Such
a popular picture of Mary’s ability as a mother to intervene in
Jesus’ activities, to ask for a miracle for her friends and to have it
granted, did not correspond with the oldest Gospel tradition about Jesus’
attitude toward family. In Mk 3:31-35 we find Jesus strongly rejecting
intervention by his mother and brothers in favor of obedience to God’s
will. And so, when John brought this miracle story into the Gospel, he modified
it by inserting 2:4,24 where Jesus carefully dissociates himself from his
mother’s interests (“Woman, what has this concern of yours to do with
me?”) and gives priority to the hour dictated by his heavenly Father
(“My hour has not yet come?”).(25) Thus the fourth Gospel agrees with
the other three that Mary had no role in the ministry as Jesus’ physical
mother. The Jesus who asked his disciples not to give any priority to family
(Mk 10:29-30; Mt 10:37; Lk 14:26) was not himself going to give priority to
family. This interpretation of Jn 2:4 is valid whatever theory one accepts
about the origins of the Cana story.
If
one had just Mk 3:31-35, the only scene common to the Synoptics in which the
mother and brothers of Jesus play a role, one might conclude that Jesus
completely rejected them from his following. According to Mark, when Jesus was
told that his mother and brothers were outside asking for him, he replied:
“‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking about at
those who sat around him, he said: ‘Here are my mother and my
brothers!’” He then stated that whoever did the will of God was
his brother and sister and mother—in other words, his disciples take the
place of his family. But this was not Luke’s understanding of Jesus’
intent. His version of the scene (Lk 8:19-21) omits the Marcan words I have
italicized above and reads thus:
Then Jesus’ mother and his brothers approached him, but they could not
reach him because of the crowd. He was given the message: “Your mother and
your brothers are standing outside waiting to see you.” But he replied:
‘My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it."
For
Luke, the hearers of the word of God do not replace Jesus’ mother
and brothers as his true family; for his mother and brothers hear the word of
God and do it and so are part of the true family of disciples. Luke preserves
Jesus’ insistence that hearing the word of God and doing it is
constitutive of his family, but Luke thinks that Jesus’ mother and
brothers meet that criterion. That this is a correct interpretation is
confirmed by Acts 1 :14,25 where, among the 120 “brethren” who
constitute the believing community after the Resurrection-Ascension, Luke lists
“Mary the mother of Jesus and his brothers.”
This
is also John’s understanding of the role of Jesus’ mother in relation
to discipleship, as we see from the other scene in which she appears
(19:25-27). At the foot of the Cross there are brought together the two great
symbolic figures of the fourth Gospel whose personal names are never used by
the Evangelist: the mother of Jesus and the Disciple whom Jesus loved.(27) Both
were historical personages, but they are not named by John, since their primary
(not sole) importance is in their symbolism for discipleship rather than in
their historical careers. During the ministry, as we saw in the final Johannine
form of the Cana story (especially 2:4), the mother of Jesus was denied
involvement as his physical mother in favor of the timetable of the
“hour” dictated by Jesus’ Father; but now that the hour has come
for Jesus to pass from this world to the Father (13:1), Jesus will grant her a
role that will involve her, not as his mother but as the mother of the
Beloved Disciple. In other words, John agrees with Luke that Jesus’
rejection of intervention by Mary did not mean that his natural family could
not become his true family through discipleship. By stressing not only that his
mother has become the mother of the Beloved Disciple, but also that this
Disciple has become her son, the Johannine Jesus is logically claiming the
Disciple as his true brother. In the fourth Gospel, then, as well as in the
Synoptic scene, Jesus has reinterpreted who his mother and his brothers are and
reinterpreted them in terms of discipleship.(28) If in Acts 1:14 Luke brought
back the mother and brothers of Jesus as disciples after the Ascension, John
chooses the “hour” when Jesus has been lifted up (12:32) to bring
onto the scene the mother of Jesus who is made the mother of the Beloved
Disciple, now Jesus’ brother.
I
pointed out earlier that discipleship is the primary Johannine category and
that John included women as “first-class” disciples by telling us
that Jesus loved Martha and Mary and that Mary Magdalene was one of “his
own” sheep whom he called by name. John’s treatment of the mother of
Jesus is a step further in that direction. If the Beloved Disciple was the
ideal of discipleship, intimately involved with that Disciple on an equal plane
as part of Jesus’ true family was a woman. A woman and a man stood at the
foot of the Cross as models for Jesus’ “own,” his true family of
disciples.
I
spoke earlier of the Samaritan woman to whom Jesus revealed himself as the
source of life and the Messiah, a woman who in a missionary role brought men to
him on the strength of her word. In the scene in 4:27, we are told that when
Jesus’ male disciples saw him speaking to her, they were surprised that he
was dealing in such an open way with a woman. In researching the evidence of
the fourth Gospel, one is still surprised to see to what extent in the
Johannine community women and men were already on an equal level in the fold of
the Good Shepherd. This seems to have been a community where in the things that
really mattered in the following of Christ there was no difference between male
and female—a Pauline dream (Gal 3:28) that was not completely realized in
the Pauline communities.(29) But even John has left us with one curious note of
incompleteness: the disciples, surprised at Jesus’ openness with a woman,
still did not dare to ask him, “What do you want of a woman?” (4:27).
That may well be a question whose time has come in the Church of Jesus Christ.
Footnotes
1. In
this question care is required in interpreting Trent: “If anyone shall say
that by the words ‘Do this for a commemoration of me,’ Christ did not
institute the apostles priests. . .let him be anathema”
(Denzinger-Schönmetzer 1752). The fathers of Trent did not distinguish
between the Jesus of the historical ministry and the developed Christological
picture of Jesus presented in the Gospel accounts of the ministry written
thirty to sixty years later; thus they did not speak simply of Jesus but of
Christ. Today, in loyalty to the 1964 statement of the Pontifical Biblical
Commission on Gospel historicity (see Jerome Biblical Commentary
Englewoods Cliffs, N.J., 1968] art. 72, sect. 35), Catholics would have to
acknowledge that the divinity of Jesus was recognized after the Resurrection
and that eventually it was this fuller appreciation of Jesus as the Christ, the
Son of God, that was made part of the Gospel accounts of his ministry.
Therefore, institution of priests by Christ, as taught by Trent, which
cites words reported by Luke and Paul (but not by Mark and Matthew), may imply
more than was apparent at the historical Last Supper.
2.
0ne of my Hoover Lectures delivered at the University of Chicago in January
1975 treated this subject; it is now published in Biblical Reflections on
Crises Facing the Church (New York, 1975). To what I have said there I
would add only a plea for accuracy. The statement is sometimes made that there
were no women priests in NT times. Since in the NT itself the term
“priest” is applied to Christians only in the broad sense of the
priesthood of the people (1 Pt 2:5; Ap 5:10—i.e., a priesthood of
spiritually offering one’s life as a sacrifice according to the demands of
the gospel), it would seem warranted to affirm that the term “priest”
was just as applicable to women as it was to men in NT times. If the more
precise claim is made that women did not celebrate the Eucharist in NT times,
there is simply no way of proving that, even if one may well doubt that they
did. We know very little about who presided at the Eucharist in NT times.
Yet, there is some evidence that prophets did, for prophets are said to be
involved in liturgy (leitourgein in Acts 13:2) and to give thanks
(eucharistein in Didache 10, 7); and certainly there were women
who prophesied (1 Cor 11:5; Acts 21:9).
3. It
is frequently argued that 1 Cor 14:34b-36 is not genuinely Pauline.
H.Conzelmann, 1Corinthians (Philadelphia, 1975) p. 246, states:
“The section is accordingly to be regarded as an interpolation.”
4.
This paper is a development of remarks prepared for the session of the
Pontifical Biblical Commission in April 1975. In treating the Gospel, while
maintaining that the Evangelist has tradition about the ministry of Jesus, I
take for granted that he reports that tradition through the optic of his own
times, so that he tells us something sbout the role of women in his own
community. I shall use the name “John” for the Evangelist even though
I do not think he was John son of Zebedee; it is more open to discussion
whether the Beloved Disciple was John. All the narratives in the Gospel dealing
with women will be discussed except the story of the adulteress in
7:53—8:11, which is a later and non-Johannine insertion into the Gospel.
5.
The evidence for these presuppositions may be found in my commentary on John in
the Anchor Bible (2 vols.; Garden City, N.Y., 1966, 1970). In particular, see
the section on Johannine ecclesiology, pp. CV-CXI.
6.
Cf. 13:16 for apostolos in the nontechnical sense of
“messenger.” Apostellein, “to send” (seemingly
interchangeable with pempein), occurs for sending on a mission, but
women can be involved in a mission too. See n. 9 below.
7.
Although John knows of the existence of the Twelve as a group during
Jesus’ ministry (6:70), their names are not listed, nor is there a
description of their call as a group.
8.
Originally this scene referred to the selection of leaders for the Hellenist
Christian community. Although we do not know if titles were used at this early
period, the closed parallel in the titulary used in later church structure
would be “bishop.” Luke looks back on the scene from the 80’s,
and he may have thought that their work was comparable to that done by the
deacons in his time, especially if he had begun to think of the apostles as
bishops.
9.
See n. 6 above. Another usage of apostellein is in 17:18: “As you
[Father] sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world,” which
precedes the prayer “for those who believe in me through their word”
(17:20)—even as apostellein in 4:38 precedes the references in
4:39, 42 to those who believe in Jesus through the woman’s word. A third
significant usage of “send” (apostellein and pempein) is
in the postresurrectional appearance of Jesus to the disciples: “As
the Father has sent me, so do I send you” (20:21). In the next paragraph
of my paper I shall discuss the priority John gives to the appearance of the
risen Jesus to a woman disciple.
10.
See the discussion in my commentary (n. 5 above) pp. 183-84.
11. A
similar instruction to go and tell Jesus’ “brothers” is found in
the parallel appearance to the women in Mt 28:10.
12.
Mary Magdalene has a good chance of being historical—he remembered first
this representative of the women who had not deserted him during the Passion.
The priority given to Peter in Paul and in Luke is a priority among: those who
became official witnesses to the Resurrection. The secondary place given to the
tradition of an appearance to a woman or women probably reflects the fact that
women did not serve at first as official preachers of the Church—a fact
that would make the creation of an appearance to a woman unlikely.
13.
The Gospel according to Mary, in E. Hennecke and W. Schneemelcher,
New Testament Apocrypha 1 (Philadelphia, 1963) 342-44.
14.
A. Jungmann, The Mass of the Roman Rite (New York, 1950) p. 470, n. 55.
The use of “apostle” of Magdalene is frequent in the famous
ninth-century life of her authored by Rabanus Maurus: Jesus instituted her
apostle to the apostles (PL 112, 1474B), she did not delay in exercising
the office of the apostolate by which she had been honored (1475A), she
evangelized her coapostles with the news of the Resurrection of the Messiah
(1475B), she was elevated to the honor of the apostolate and instituted
evangelist (evangelista) of the Resurrection (1479C).
15.
In my commentary on John (n. 5 above) p. 302, I show how the elements of
Matthew’s account of Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi are
found scattered in John: e.g., Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, confesses
Jesus to be the Messiah when Andrew is calling Simon to follow Jesus, and on
that occasion Jesus changes Simon’s name to Cephas (1:40-42); Simon Peter
as spokesman of the Twelve confesses Jesus to be the “holy one of
God” (6:69); ecclesiastical authority is given to Simon Peter in 21:15-17.
16.
Such an attitude can be detected in the Synoptic tradition as well. Matthew is
the Evangelist who gives Peter the most exalted role as the recipient of the
keys of the kingdom of heaven (16:19), but Matthew would never make Peter first
in the kingdom. That is a primacy specifically denied even to members of the
Twelve (Mt 20:20-26). The criterion for primacy in the kingdom. as distinct
from the Church, is not ecclesiastical authority or power but total dependence
on God, whence the model of the little child ( 18:1-4). At a time when we are
engaged in a necessary debate as to who among the baptized can be ordained to
priesthood or bishopric, it may be useful to remind ourselves that it remains
more important to be baptized than to be ordained, more important to be a
Christian than to be a priest, bishop, or pope.
17.
See also Jn 11:3, 11, 36, where philein and philos are used of
Lazarus. The significance is not different from the use of agapan in
11:5; both verbs are used of the Beloved Disciple (philein in 20:2;
elsewhere agapan).
18.
See the discussion in my commentary (n. 5 above) p. xcv.
19.
Notice the order of names in 11:5. Moreover, in 11:1-2 Lazarus is identified
through his relationship to Mary and Martha. The reason for this may be that
the two women were known in the wider Gospel tradition (Lk 10:38-42), whereas
Lazarus is a peculiarly Johannine character (at least as a historical figure;
cf. Lk 16:19-31) who is introduced into the Gospel by being placed in a family
relationship to Mary and Martha. This is not unlike the introduction of the
Beloved Disciple into well-known scenes by placing him in a relationship to
Peter.
20.
The “his own” at the beginning of chap.13 are the replacement of an
older “his own’’ who refused to receive him (1:11); and so,
whether or not the Twelve are placed in the scenario of the Last Supper as
“his own,” in many passages of chaps. 13-17 they are the
representatives of all who believe in Jesus.
21.
In the last of the Hoover Lectures (the one on an ecumenical understanding of
Mary) mentioned in n. 2 above and published in the same collection; there I
approach the Johannine evidence concerning Mary from another angle—a quest
for the historical Mary.
22.
This is a development of the thesis proposed by B. Lindars, The Gospel of
John (London, 1972) pp. 126-27. It supposes the legitimacy of several
attitudes in modern Gospel research. First, in the course of early Christian
preaching the Christology developed “backwards”: the role of Jesus as
the Messiah, the Son of God, was first understood in relation to the future
(the Parousia), then in relation to the present (the Resurrection), and finally
in relation to the past (the ministry). As part of a reflection on what Jesus
was before the Resurrection, Christology was pushed back to his youth and to
his conception/birth. Thus, Mark, the first Gospel, has no infancy story but
concentrates on Jesus as Son of God during the ministry; the later Gospels,
Matthew and Luke, have infancy stories which took their final shape after the
story of Jesus’ ministry had been preached. In Lk 2:41-50 a
once-independent story of Jesus as a youth has been appended to the story of
Jesus’ conception/birth, leaving us the awkward sequence wherein Mary who
has been told that Jesus is the Son of God does not understand when he speaks
about his Father (2:50). Second, the modern Roman Catholic exegete,
following the directives of Pius XII, recognizes the existence of different
types of literature in the Bible, including fiction and popular stories which
can be inspired by God just as well as history. And so there is nothing
contrary to Catholic teaching in supposing that an Evangelist on rare occasions
took over stories (of undefinable historicity) from popular traditions about
Jesus—certainly that happened in both infancy narratives. Inerrancy comes
into play, not in reference to either the origin or historicity of a story like
that of Cana, but in reference to its teaching “that truth which God
wanted put into the sacred writings for the sake of our salvation”
(Vatican II, Dei Verbum, no. 11). As we shall see, John did adapt the
story to make it conform to the genuine Gospel picture of Jesus’
relationship to his family. All of this is treated in detail in the lecture
referred to in the preceding note.
23.
The best reconstruction of the pre-Johannine miracle material is found in
R.T.Fortna, The Gospel of Signs (Cambridge Univ., 1970), and I offer
here a translation of the first part of his Greek reconstruction of the
pre-Johannine Cana miracle story. I (and others) do not agree with Fortna that
a whole pre-Johannine gospel can be reconstructed, but all admit that the best
evidence for a pre-Johannine miracle collection is in the two Cana miracles
which John himself numbers in sequence (2:11, 4:54).
24.
Fortna points out that this verse, besides creating logical difficulties, is
written in the characteristic prose of the Evangelist, something that is not
true of the pre-Johannine story Fortna has reconstructed. It is worth noting
that in Lk 2:49 a similar modification of the parents’ claims appears:
“How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my
Father’s house [about my Father’s business]?”
25.
The “hour” pertains to the heavenly Father’s domain: “The
hour had come for Jesus to pass from this world to the Father” (13:1).
26.
Another confirmation is found in Lk 1:38, where Luke dramatizes Mary’s
reaction to
the
Christological proclamation about Jesus’ divine sonship (formerly attached
to the baptism of Jesus but now attached to his conception). Her response is
drawn from Luke’s positive understanding of the Marcan scene, namely, that
she was one who heard the word of God and did it: “Let it be done to me
according to your word.” See R. E. Brown, “Luke’s Method in the
Annunciation Narratives of Chapter One,” in No Famine in the Land:
Studies in Honor of John L. McKenzie, ed. J. W. Flanagan and Anita Robinson
(Missoula; 1975).
27.
Johns failure to use the personal name of the mother of Jesus is striking
because John is not shy of that name. “Mary” occurs some fifteen
times in the fourth Gospel: for Mary the sister of Martha, for Mary Magdalene,
for Mary the wife of Clopas. His insistence on the title “the mother of
Jesus” or “his mother” is probably because John is interpreting
a tradition about what constituted her true motherhood.
28. I
repeat what I stated at the beginning of the discussion of the mother of Jesus:
this is not the only symbolism. It should be noted, too, that Mary does not
become simply a disciple among many; she has an eminence as the mother of the
ideal Disciple. While John and Luke move here in the same general theological
direction, Luke is reinterpreting the role of Jesus’ physical
“brothers,” i.e., relatives. John (7:5) treats the physical brothers
as nonbelievers, and so he chooses to deal with the brotherhood of the Beloved
Disciple, who is not a physical relative of Jesus.
29.
The rule that a woman should keep silence in the churches, if it was
authentically Pauline (see n. 3 above), was scarcely in effect in the Johannine
community, in whose gallery of heroes were the Samaritan woman who brought men
to faith by her word and Mary Magdalene who proclaimed the good news of the
risen Jesus.
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