Quantum Gospel of Mary Magdalene
I started reading Keith Giles new book entitled The Quantum Gospel of Mary and The Lost Gospel of Truth by Keith Giles. He is one of the co-hosts of the Heretic Happy Hour Podcast. One of the key themes in this book is balancing the Divine Feminine with the Divine Masculine. After Constantine, the church took on a patriarchal nature, and anything that smelled of Divine Feminine was stamped out. This is what Keith says about the Divine Feminine:
The fact that we know so little about her, then, may be evidence itself that her voice has been silenced and that her Gospel has been suppressed by patriarchal religious leaders who felt threatened by her femininity as much as by her message. (Giles, pages 24-25)
One of the things that Keith highlights early on is that the Gospel of Mary Magdalene highlights the conflict between Simon Peter and herself. He writes:
The rivalry between Mary and Peter is quite well-attested in the early Christian lexicon. If Mary Magdalene [the Tower] began to threaten the authority of the Apostle Peter [the Rock], it would make perfect sense for Christian scribes to go back and erase Mary Magdalene from the Gospel of John and put this confession in the mouth of Martha— thereby conflating and confusing Mary and Martha of Bethany with Mary Magdalene and forever obscuring her place of prominence with the Christian story. (pp. 19-20)
In the age of Aquarius which is associated with water with is a feminine element, it is not surprise that the Divine Feminine is rising in all major religions. As people are deconstructing away from patriarchal white Christian Nationalism in America, part of their reconstruction is embracing the Divine Feminine.
Scholar Elizabeth Schrader has opened up Pandora's Box suggesting that the editors of the Gospel of John tried to erase Mary Magdalene's influence over the early church by intentionally erasing Mary's influence from John 11. She says:
So, why does any of this matter? Because if Martha was added to the text in John Chapter 11, then it wasn’t Martha who made this Christological Confession. It was Mary, and if this was the same Mary who was also present at the tomb, and who was the first one sent out by Jesus—literally as an Apostle to the Apostles—to proclaim the Good News of the Resurrection—then that could have posed a very large problem to the male leaders of the early Christian church. (Giles Ibid)
In John's Gospel, Martha is the one that makes the Christological confession like Peter does in the synoptic Gospels. According to John's Gospel:
She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world." (Joh 11:27 NRSV)
Elizabeth Schrader's research has shown that the editors of John were intentional in erasing any influence that Mary might had over the disciples and just as much of a confidant as Peter, James and John.
Giles also highlights that Magdala is not a place but a nick name that Jesus had given Mary. Magdala means Tower. Just as Simon was called Peter or the "rock", Mary was called the "Tower". Archaeological evidence has not found a city on the Sea of Galilee called Magdala.
Summary
So far this book is very interesting and I look forward to finishing it and gleaming what can be obtained from it. Keith mentions that one of the themes in Mary's Gospel is Jesus humanity. I will explore some of the themes in the next post about this book.