Gospel of Mary

Everything substantial comes from Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, the Berlin Codex, a Coptic manuscript of the fifth century bought in Cairo in 1896 by the German scholar and diplomat Carl Reinhardt and taken to Berlin. Three other works share the codex: the Apocryphon of John, the Sophia of Jesus Christ and an episode from the Acts of Peter. Carl Schmidt prepared an edition, but on the standard account the printed sheets were destroyed by a burst water pipe at the Leipzig printers in 1912; the First World War, Schmidt's death in 1938 and the Second World War delayed matters further, and the edition was finally completed by Walter Till and published in 1955, by which time the Nag Hammadi codices had appeared and absorbed the attention the Berlin Codex might otherwise have had.

Two Greek fragments confirm a Greek original and second-century circulation: Papyrus Rylands 463, of the early third century, published in 1938, and Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 3525, also third century, excavated with the rest of the Oxyrhynchus material but not published until 1983. Both overlap parts of the Coptic, and both differ from it in wording, so the text was not stable.

The extent of the loss should be stated plainly, because it governs everything else. The work occupied about nineteen manuscript pages. Pages one to six are gone, and pages eleven to fourteen are gone. That is roughly ten pages missing out of nineteen: the whole opening, and the central section of Mary's vision, of which only the beginning and the closing stages survive. What is lost is precisely the content of the revelation that the surviving quarrel is a quarrel about. Any confident account of what the vision taught is reconstruction, and should be labelled as such.

What survives opens mid-conversation, with the Saviour answering questions about matter, about the nature of sin, and about where sin comes from, the answer being that sin as such does not exist but is produced by acting against nature. He tells the disciples not to lay down rules beyond what he has given them, warns them against being led astray by claims that the kingdom is here or there, commissions them to preach, and departs.

They are afraid. If he was not spared, they reason, how will they be. Mary stands up, turns their minds from grief and tells them his grace will protect them. Peter then asks her to tell them the words of the Saviour that she knows and they do not, since the Saviour loved her more than other women. She describes seeing him in a vision, and being told that where the mind is, there is the treasure.

The account of the vision then breaks off. When the text resumes, the subject is the ascent of a soul past a series of hostile powers that try to detain it. The soul answers each in turn and is released: darkness, then desire, then ignorance, and then a seventh power in seven forms, usually called wrath. To each the soul gives an account of what has been bound and loosed, and it rises to rest in silence.

The dispute follows immediately. Andrew objects that the teaching is strange and he does not believe the Saviour said it. Peter objects on different grounds, asking whether the Saviour really spoke with a woman privately and preferred her to them, and whether they are all now to turn and listen to her. Mary weeps and asks whether Peter thinks she invented it. Levi rebukes Peter for his hot temper, says that if the Saviour made her worthy the disciples are not entitled to reject her, and that the Saviour loved her more than them. The book ends with the disciples going out to preach, though the Coptic and the Greek differ on whether Levi goes alone or they all go.

The text calls her Mary and nothing more. The identification with Mary Magdalene is an inference, and a reasonable one: in a range of second and third-century texts, including the Dialogue of the Saviour, the Gospel of Philip and Pistis Sophia, a Mary who questions Jesus, receives teaching and is resented by Peter is the Magdalene, and this Mary occupies exactly that role. Karen King and most specialists take the identification as secure enough to use. A minority have proposed Mary the mother of Jesus. There is no decisive evidence either way in the surviving pages, and the honest formulation is that the figure is almost certainly meant as Magdalene but is not named as her.

On its classification, caution is again warranted. The Berlin Codex is otherwise a collection of demonstrably Gnostic works, and the ascent of the soul past hostile powers is a motif at home in second-century Gnostic systems. But the distinctive machinery, a demiurge, the fall of Sophia, a creation account that makes the material world an error, is absent from what survives. Esther de Boer and others argue the text is better read against a broad early Christian and Stoic background than as an artefact of a Gnostic school. Dating rests on this and on its apparent familiarity with John and with Paul: King argues for early in the second century, Christopher Tuckett for the first half of the second century but later than King.

Its modern career has been mostly outside scholarship. It is regularly cited as evidence that women exercised teaching authority in some early Christian communities and were opposed for it, with Peter standing for the party that objected. That reading has real support in the text, since the objection raised is explicitly about a woman and is explicitly overruled. What it cannot bear is the weight sometimes put on it: a fragmentary second-century text in which Peter functions as a literary foil is not a record of an institutional dispute in the first-century church, and the missing pages mean the vision at the centre of the argument cannot be assessed at all.