Pistis Sophia

With wandering eyes and aimless zeal,

She hither, thither, goes;

Her speech, her motions, all reveal

A mind without repose.

She climbs the hills, she haunts the sea,

By madness tortured, driven;

One hour's forgetfulness would be

A gift from very heaven!

She slumbers into new distress;

The night is worse than day:

Exulting in her helplessness,

Hell's dogs yet louder bay.

The demons blast her to and fro;

She has no quiet place,

Enough a woman still, to know

A haunting dim disgrace.

A human touch! a pang of death!

And in a low delight

Thou liest, waiting for new breath.

For morning out of night.

Thou risest up: the earth is fair,

The wind is cool; thou art free!

Is it a dream of hell's despair

Dissolves in ecstasy?

That man did touch thee! Eyes divine

Make sunrise in thy soul;

Thou seest love in order shine:-

His health hath made thee whole!

Thou, sharing in the awful doom,

Didst help thy Lord to die;

Then, weeping o'er his empty tomb,

Didst hear him Mary cry.

He stands in haste; he cannot stop;

Home to his God he fares:

"Go tell my brothers I go up

To my Father, mine and theirs."

Run, Mary! lift thy heavenly voice;

Cry, cry, and heed not how;

Make all the new-risen world rejoice-

Its first apostle thou!

What if old tales of thee have lied,

Or truth have told, thou art

All-safe with him, whate'er betide-

Dwell'st with him in God's heart!

Mary Magdalene - George Macdonald (1824-1905)

And what about Mary? She was scarcely known and little talked about. So if storytellers were to make up, or at least to modify, the stories of Christianity's beginnings, would they invent the story that it was a woman who started it' Wouldn't they be more likely to celebrate the greatness of the illustrious apostle Peter? Wouldn't they show that although he had denied Christ at the moment of crisis, he had redeemed himself in the aftermath by being the first to realize that Christ had been vindicated by God, raised from the dead, and exalted to heaven? Why would someone make up a story about a virtually unknown woman discovering the empty tomb and proclaiming the resurrection? Especially if the point of the stories is to give evidence that Jesus' death was not the last word, that God himself had the last word by reversing the illicit judgment of the Jewish leaders and the Roman authorities by raising his son from the dead, would the "idle tale" of a woman be invented as evidence for resurrection? 

It seems unlikely. But then where did the stories of Mary Magdalene, either by herself or in company of other women, originally come from? If it is hard to imagine them being made up by a number of early Christian storytellers, then maybe the stories have a real historical basis. Maybe it actually was Mary who found the tomb empty on the third day and who proclaimed that jesus had been raised from the dead. I should emphasize that even though Christianity is based ultimately on the life and ministry of Jesus, it is much more than that. Tradicional Christianity is the belief that he died for the sins of the world and was raised from the dead. Technically speaking, Christianity could not begin until someone proclaimed Jesus raised from the dead. It appears that the first to do so was Mary Magdalene. If so[...], Mary really is the one who started Christianity. There could scarcely be a more significant woman for the history of Western civilization - or man, for that matter - who is at the same time less known than Mary Magdalene. 

Her role in the story came to be minimized in some places, especially as men became increasingly in charge of the church and the women leaders - some of them apostles - came to be silenced. In other places her role and reputation lived on, as evidenced in the scattered references to her in various sources from the early Christian movement, especially among the Gnostics. But for orthodox Christianity, Peter and Paul eventually triumphed. In what ways Peter's and Paul's understandings of the Christian faith different from Mary's? Unfortunately, we will never know for sure, since Mary left us no writings and is scarcely referred to in our early sources. We do learn from the early-third-century author Origen that Mary had followers devoted to her understanding of the religion. But unfortunately, we know nothing about what that have been - what she herself actually believed about Christ - except what we can inferred from certain facts in history. 

These include the fact that she was a Jewish woman from Galilee who was a devoted disciple of Jesus. She must have been drawn to his message, otherwise she would not have followed him and supported his mission from her own means. That means that she too must have been a Jewish apocalypticist, anticipating that this evil age of pain, suffering, and oppression was soon to be overthrown and god's kingdom was soon to arrive here on earth. In that kingdom there would be no more war, hatred, injustice, poverty, disease, demonic forces, oppression. It would be a paradisal age in which God and all he stood for ruled supreme. And it would be an age in which there would be no more oppression based on class, wealth, prestige, or gender. There would be no destitution, no underclass, no slavery, no sexual differentiation. Women would no longer be subject to the control of the men in their lives. They, along with the men, would be like the angels of heaven. In Jesus' message of the future liberation of the earth. Mary herself must have seen a message of her own liberation, in a future age filled only with what is good, when God would reign supreme.

Bart D. Ehrman - Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend (2006)

This hit from Jonathan Richman' The Modern Lovers is an instrumental version of Earl Zero' None Shall Escape The Judgement