Mary Magdalene: Art's Scarlet Woman (BBC Four) is, says art critic Waldemar Januszczak, a film about a woman who probably never existed. "So why,” he asks, “are we so obsessed with her?” He delivers the answer in breathy, lugubrious tones as if sharing a dirty secret. The story, he says, is “sweaty, sensuous and naughty... For 2,000 years we’ve been fantasising about this most alluring and intoxicating presence.”
So keep watching, folks. and join the “many men who, through the ages, have drooled over her.” It's enough to make anyone switch off, which would be a shame because the story that unfolds is an interesting example of how, throughout history, saints and martyrs, and heroes and villains, have been created for propaganda purposes and the stories told about them modified according to need.
Why entrust a nobody with knowledge of the most crucial event in your ministry?
Mary’s reputation grew, says Januszczak, from that of a biblical bit player mentioned only four times in the New Testament to the patron saint of prostitutes, gardeners, hairdressers and the Provence region of southern France. En route, she became the embodiment of unbridled female sexuality; cue paintings of her as a voluptuous temptress exposing the luscious flesh that seduced so many virtuous men.
Januszczak follows the twists and turns of the story from the Holy Land to Aix-en-Provence, where she supposedly spent 30 years in a cave repenting for her “deeply regrettable and deeply attractive” sins and living only off celestial music; cue more paintings of her reclining in an erotic swoon since “in art, religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy are always difficult to tell apart.”
While focusing on the titillating details of the story, Januszczak fails to address a key question. Why, if Mary Magdalene was so insignificant, was she chosen as the one to whom Christ revealed himself after the resurrection? Why entrust a nobody with knowledge of the most crucial event in your ministry – an event that makes sense of your life’s work and thereby forms the basis of a new religion? His decision only makes sense if Mary was his most revered disciple.
Women are routinely written out of history and their achievements minimised or forgotten, but Mary Magdalene has suffered a more complex fate. She has been transformed from the one chosen to play a key role in the founding of the Christian Church into a lascivious whore made to atone for her (never his) sins. She thus becomes a counterpart to the Virgin Mary and the twin roles, of virgin and whore, reserved by the Church for women are established. The repression of women by church and state is a much less titillating story, because it is about power even more than sex, but it needs to be told.