Mary Magdalene: Salvation on a Sucker’s Terms

Deconstructing “Go and Sin No More,” and How the Old Testament was changed when it was translated into Greek

By

David Gottfried

Today was Easter Sunday. The superfluity of sweet things – everything from saccharine shows on the Idiot Box to super-sized infusions of sugar in the form of Crayola Crayon dyed candy flavored with nothing but sugar – makes me feel as if I am about to suffer a diabetic coma. To snap out of it, I run towards the acidic steeds of my culinary salvation: Lemon and Vinegar. And, after having consumed two lemon sodas (I squeeze lemons into ice-cold carbonated water), I find myself ready to run roughshod over the sweet nothings of Christian conviction.

We are told that Jesus expresses the allegedly merciful prong of Christianity by telling Mary Magdalene, a prostitute, to “go and sin no more.” I’ll have to admit that that’s a thousand times better than stoning her. Hence, Christianity prides itself on mercy. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher, dowager capitalist demon extraordinaire, once praised herself for being a Christian because, she said, Christians like her had mercy.

However, something does not make sense here:

If Jesus wanted to say that Magdalene could start all over, with an unblemished record, or simply be given a second chance, he should have said words along these lines: “Sin No More.” Why – WHY – does he preface “sin no more” with “Go and.”

It appears as if he is saying get lost, you rancid, wretched slut – just “Go.” After all, isn’t that the usual treatment of sexual outlaws by religious folk. Not too long ago, the media was flooded with reports of young girls, in Ireland, who were virtually imprisoned in church operated laundries for the slightest suspicion of sexual awareness or loveliness.

The protestant tradition is just as grim. Indeed, Nathanial Hawthorne, in “The Scarlet Letter,” gives us a withering portrait of the arctic, acid reception a fervently religious community gives a “fallen” woman.

In the Muslim world, reactions approach the psychotic as women, as aged as eighty, have been whipped in the street for showing too much of their ankles.

Of course, I am sure some of my peers in rock n roll will contend that India must be different; after all, George Harrison was so much in love with India and incense and groovy peace and love philosophy. (I love Harrison’s music but can’t stomach his philosophy) However, in India, Fathers have been known to murder their daughters for the most minimal sexual transgressions or even no sexual improprieties at all: Some Fathers have murdered their daughters because they have been raped, and Indian Fathers have considered such daughters a living offense because the fact of their rape proves that their Fathers did not have the power to exercise constant, tyrannical control.

My own faith, Judaism, is roundly repudiated for being anti-female, but in this feminist age people, perhaps, tend to overlook the depredations committed against men. Although Maimonides is lauded as a wonderful Jewish sage, his ideation regarding sexuality is often sickening. He said that circumcision was a commendable rite because, in his warped view, the penis is often a war-like organ and deserves, at the very least, symbolic punishment in the form of circumcision.

How Christianity has exploited warped Biblical Translations

Of course, Jesus’s comment “Go and Sin No More,” is English. The words that Jesus actually spoke – if in fact there was a Jesus who really did utter those words – may have suffered a torturous trek of translation. Initially, the words may have been written in Aramaic and/or Hebrew, from Aramaic and Hebrew it had been translated to Greek, from Greek to Latin and finally from Latin to the various tongues of Christendom.

Actually, the enlightenment, one of the most important philosophical developments of the past four centuries, was in large measure instigated by the discovery of critical errors in translation when the Old Testament was translated from Hebrew to Greek for the benefit of the Jews of Alexandria.

Around the time of Jesus, there was a sizable Jewish population in Alexandria, Egypt. They were not conversant in Hebrew. They commissioned someone or some group to translate the Old Testament into Greek, the cosmopolitan language of Eastern antiquity. And an error in the translation sparked the Enlightenment, and ultimately modernism.

Christians had often argued that Jesus’ divinity was predicted or foreseen in the Old Testament. Among other things, some Christian advocates held that the Old Testament had said that the Messiah would be borne of a virgin and that this Old Testament prophecy demonstrated or buttressed the validity of the New Testament. However, one of the enlightenment philosophers – if my memory is correct, it was Voltaire – said that all the confusion resulted from a translation error. Voltaire said that the Old Testament, as written in the original Hebrew, said the Messiah would be borne of a young woman; in the Greek version of the Old Testament drafted for the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, young woman had been transformed into a young virgin. That Greek version of the Old Testament, which erroneously translated young woman to young virgin, was the basis for the Latin version of the Old Testament used by the Roman papacy.

Accordingly, it would be worthwhile to determine what Jesus, if he had existed, really did say to Magdalene. If the thrust of his message was, “Don’t sin anymore,” then Christianity, and its propensity to use the bible to belt people in the jaw, has betrayed Jesus. If the thrust of Jesus’s message was “Go and sin no more – and we want you to go because you are immoral scoundrels,” then the medieval Church was an accurate expositor of Christian beliefs.

Although careful, searching analysis might shed some light as to what Christianity really did stand for, some Christians recoil at the notion of analysis. For example, fundamentalist Christians are quite content to say that the bible is the word of G-d, and after they deify the bible, they don’t seem to feel the need to parse or probe or understand the Holy Writ. It is only something to revere and kill for.

Indeed, Pappy Daniels, a governor of Texas in the 1920’s, explained his refusal to provide court interpreters to Spanish-speaking criminal defendants by saying, “If English was good enough for our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for Mexicans.”