Farrell Till

I am pleased to have Jerry McDonald as my opponent in a debate on the Mary Magdalene proposition, which Jason Gastrich steadfastly refused to accept. Having previously engaged in lengthy debates, both oral and written, with Jerry McDonald, I know that readers of this debate will see a much better representation of the negative position than if Gastrich had agreed to deny the proposition I will be affirming. That proposition is as follows.

Resolved: The depiction of Mary Magdalene in Matthew 28:1-10 is inconsistent with her depiction in John 20:1-18.

As the affirmant, I have the duty of defining my proposition so that readers will know exactly what the issue is. By depiction, I mean the manner in which Mary M was characterized. The proposition limits her depiction to her representation in Matthew 28:1-10 and John 20:1-8. By inconsistent, I mean “incompatible” or “not in agreement or harmony” or “lacking in logical relation.” Specifically, I will be arguing that the text in Matthew grammatically requires an understanding that Mary Magdalene was present throughout the angel’s visit and the women’s encounter with Jesus after they had left the tomb. Hence, it is inconceivable that a person who had had the experiences that Mary Magdalene necessarily had in Matthew’s narrative would have later told Peter and the other disciple that the body of Jesus had been stolen (John 20:1-2).

That the resurrection narratives in the gospel accounts contain inconsistencies and contradictions is recognized by all except inerrantists like Jerry McDonald, who cling to their discredited belief that the Bible is inerrant. They have resorted to all sorts of far-fetched speculative “solutions” to try to explain inconsistencies in these narratives. Few of these “solutions” can withstand logical scrutiny, but the one that remains the Achilles heel of inerrantists who have tried to harmonize the resurrection accounts is what I call the Mary Magdalene problem, as it was presented above in the definition of my proposition. I have yet to see any inerrantist give an even remotely plausible explanation of this problem, so I certainly don’t expect Jerry McDonald to succeed where so many others have failed.

The Mary Magdalene problem is simple. Mary M was presented in the synoptic gospels as having seen an angel or angels at the tomb, and heard him or them announce the resurrection of Jesus, after which she actually encountered Jesus and worshiped him as she was running from the tomb to tell the disciples what had happened. In John's gospel, however, Mary Magdalene is presented as having found the tomb empty, after which she ran to Peter and the disciple "whom Jesus loved" and told them that the body had been stolen (John 20:1-2). So the problem is why Mary would have told the disciples that the body had been stolen if she had seen and heard everything that the synoptic gospels claim that she saw and heard.

Readers who have been with http://iierrancy.com the Errancy e-mail list will recognize that the Mary Magdalene problem, which I am now challenging Jerry McDonald to solve, is an adapted version of a post that I have sent to Errancy many times, but no one has yet given a sensible explanation of the problem, so I don’t expect Jerry McDonald will be able to do any more than recycle the same old discredited “explanations.” Many inerrantists contend that Mary Magdalene simply panicked when she saw the empty tomb and ran to Peter before she had heard the angel(s) announce that Jesus had risen. This "explanation," however, is completely incompatible with Matthew's gospel account. Let's look at it first, and then I will explain why the explanation is incompatible with what "Matthew" clearly said in his account of events alleged to have happened on resurrection morning.

I have emphasized in bold print certain words to call attention to them. They will establish that Matthew intended for his readers to understand that Mary Magdalene didn't just hear the angel announce that Jesus had been raised from the dead but that she also saw him and touched him after she had run from the tomb. To establish this, let's notice that Mary Magdalene and the other Mary are the only women mentioned in Matthew's version. The fact that Mark and Luke--and I want McDonald to take special notice of this--may have mentioned other women has nothing to do with the obvious fact that Matthew mentioned only two women: Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. Therefore, "THE WOMEN" in verse 5 to whom the angel said that Jesus had risen must have necessarily included Mary Magdalene; otherwise, Matthew's text is incoherent and would not have conveyed an accurate picture of what had happened to early Christians who may have lived and died having had access only to this one gospel account. I assume that inerrantists are willing to admit that the NT in bound volumes didn't exist until many years after the gospels were written, so a reader of Matthew very likely would have been unable to consult Mark, Luke, and John to see if they shed any "additional light" on what had happened. If nothing else, Christians living at the time Matthew's gospel was completed could not have had access to Luke and John, since (as most biblical scholars agree) they were written after Matthew. Therefore, the picture they formed in their minds after reading Matthew's gospel could not have included anything that was written in gospels that came after Matthew's. The Mary Magdalene problem, then, centers on what Matthew said that she saw and experienced on resurrection morning, so all appeals by McDonald, which he will probably make, to what the other gospel writers--especially Luke and John--may have said can have no bearing on what Matthew meant when he said that “the women” or “they” did thus and so or to what Matthew meant when he said that this or that had happened to “them,” because the theys and thems in Matthew’s account would have necessarily included Mary Magdalene. If not, why not?

Needless to say, this is a point that I will definitely expect McDonald to address in any rebuttal that he posts.

Besides this, there are linguistic factors that inerrantists must consider. All rules of literary interpretation that I ever heard of (and I studied a lot of literature on the subject when I was teaching college English) would require readers to understand that “THE WOMEN" in verse 5 of Matthew's text were Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. No other assumptions can be made, since Matthew did not himself specify that any other women were with the two Marys. In other words, whether Mark and Luke mentioned up to five other women or 500 other women is immaterial to what Matthew's narrative said. If he mentioned only two women, then "the women" in his narrative grammatically had to be Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. Hence, any plural pronouns like they and them that obviously referred back to the women had to be references to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. By necessity, then, the grammar of Matthew's narrative requires readers to understand what whatever they did in this narrative or whatever happened to or was said to them were things done by or to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. I will emphasize again that this is a point that I will expect McDonald to address in his rebuttal.

The rules of pronoun-antecedent agreement will, therefore, require readers to understand that the antecedent of the pronouns they and them (emphasized in bold print) is "THE WOMEN." Since "THE WOMEN" by grammatical necessity had to be Mary Magdalene and the other Mary, the antecedents of they and them are indirectly (by necessity) Mary Magdalene and the other Mary. If McDonald tries to deny this grammatical conclusion, I will expect him to apply his linguistic skill to the text quoted above and identify the language in the text that would permit the exclusion of Mary Magdalene from the events that were seen and heard by the women and the exclusion of her as part of the antecedent of the pronouns they and them. This is a crucial point that McDonald must address. I apologize for repeating myself, but I want to leave no doubt about major points that must be satisfactorily explained before McDonald can claim that he has solved the Mary Magdalene problem.

It is a rule of literary interpretation that the substitution of antecedents for the pronouns in a text will not alter the meaning of the text but will, if anything, help clarify its meaning. With that in mind, I will now take Matthew's text quoted above and present it with the antecedents substituted for the pronouns they and them when they made obvious references to the women. Readers should keep in mind that where Mary Magdalene and the other Mary appear in bold print in this rewriting of the narrative, the pronouns they or them appeared in the actual text.

It is clearly evident that Matthew meant for his readers to understand that Mary Magdalene heard an angel announce that Jesus had risen and that she ran from the tomb with great joy after hearing this and that she met Jesus and touched him after she had run from the tomb. So my question to McDonald and any of his inerrantist cohorts who think that there are no inconsistencies in the resurrection narratives is a simple one: If Mary Magdalene had been told by an angel that Jesus had risen and if she had even seen Jesus and touched him after leaving the tomb, why did she go tell Peter that the body of Jesus had been stolen as the following text in John 20 claims?

Now why would she have said this if she had heard an angel announce that Jesus had been resurrected and then had soon afterwards met the resurrected Jesus, touched him, and worship him? After all, if Mary M couldn’t trust an angel of God whom could she have trusted, and was it no longer true at that time that seeing was believing? To solve this problem, inerrantists have resorted to all sorts of speculative solutions. Gleason Archer, for example, speculated that Mary was so confused when she met Peter and John that she “apparently had not yet taken in the full import of what the angel meant when he told her that the Lord had risen again and that He was alive” (Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, Zondervan, 1982, p. 348). Yes, and I guess that we are supposed to think that she was so confused when she met, touched, and worshiped Jesus after running from the tomb that she did not take in the full import of what was happening. Such is the kind of far-fetched, how-it-could-have-been “solutions” that inerrantists will resort to in order to keep from admitting that the Bible is not inerrant.

I don’t know if McDonald will resort to Archer’s speculative solution, but if he does, I will warn him to be prepared to convince us that a person as bewildered and confused as Archer claimed that Mary M was on that morning could, nevertheless, be considered a reliable witness to an event as unlikely as a resurrection from the dead. In other words, he will have to explain why a person in such an unstable frame of mind as Archer claimed that Mary M was at this time could be considered a credible witness to an event as sensational as a resurrection from the dead.

Other inerrantists have used the “panic theory” to explain the inconsistencies in the way that Mary Magdalene was characterized in Mathew's and John's narratives. They argue that Mary Magdalene panicked upon seeing the angel and ran from the tomb before she had hear the angel’s announcement of the resurrection, and so when she found Peter and John, she told them that the body of Jesus had been stolen, because she had neither heard the angel’s message to “the women” nor encountered Jesus in running from the tomb. My grammatical analysis of Matthew 28:1-10, however, will not allow for the absence of Mary M when the angel spoke to “the women” or when “they” ran from the tomb and encountered Jesus, so if McDonald resorts to this “explanation,” he must show us where the language in Matthew’s account would allow for the panic and early departure of Mary M. Even if he irrelevantly appeals to the other synoptic accounts, he cannot find any language that even remotely implies that Mary M panicked and left the scene early. If McDonald posits the “panic theory” as an explanation of the Mary Magdalene problem, I will expect him to address the problems that I just identified in this theory.

Still other inerrantists use a two-visits-to-the-tomb "solution" to try to reconcile “Matthew’s” and “John’s” characterizations of Mary M on resurrection morning. They argue that she made an early visit to the tomb while it was yet dark, which John's narrative related, and upon encountering an empty tomb but no angel, she ran to tell Peter and John that the body had been stolen. She later made a second visit to the tomb, in the company of other women, " when the sun was risen," and this was when she encountered the angel and then later met, touched, and worshiped the resurrected Jesus. As this speculative theory goes, “Matthew” and the other synoptic gospels reported this second visit to the tomb.

If McDonald tries to present this as a solution to the Mary Magdalene problem, he will have to deal with these two major problems in the theory.

1. John’s narrative, which proponents of the two-visits theory claim was an account of
Mary’s first visit to the tomb, reported that she encountered two angels in the tomb and then turned and saw a man who made himself known to her as Jesus (John 20:18). If, then, Mary M had learned during a first visit to the tomb that Jesus had risen from the dead, why did she experience fear during her second visit when another angel told her that Jesus had risen. Rather than becoming afraid at what the angel had told her, she would surely have said something like, “Yes, I know that Jesus has risen because I saw him during an earlier visit here.”

2. If the synoptic gospels were reporting a second visit of Mary Magdalene, after she had already visited the tomb, found it open, and encountered the resurrected Jesus, then how does McDonald explain the conversation that Mary and the women with her had on their way to the tomb: “2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they [Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome] went to the tomb. ³ They had been saying to one another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?" ⁴ When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back” (Mark 16:2-4). If this was a second trip for Mary M, she would have known at the time that the stone had been rolled away and that Jesus had risen from the dead. Why, then, did she participate in a conversation about how they were going to open the tomb if she knew at the time that the tomb had already been opened? Why didn’t she tell the other two women that rolling the stone away would be no problem, because she knew that the stone had already been removed.

Needless to say, if McDonald posits the two-visits theory, I will expect him to resolve these two problems in the theory. If he is able to do so--and he won’t be--I will have other problems in it to present to him in my next affirmative post.

John Kesler

Although Matthew mentions "many women" who looked on as Jesus was crucified, starting in 27:56 his focus is on the two Marys. Matthew was familiar with the OT requirement for at least two witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15), and Matthew's Jesus mentions this precept in connection with reproving a sinful "church" member (Matthew 18:15-16). It appears that Matthew's claim is that the two Marys satisfy this witness requirement: they witnessed the crucifixion; they witnessed the burial; and they witnessed the resurrected Jesus. It seems obvious, both contextually and grammatically, that the two Marys are the women of Matthew 28:9. To conflate Matthew's account with John's, or any other author's, does a disservice to what Matthew was trying to communicate.

Jedi Mind Trick

Is this to be debated in the formal debates forum here at II?

--looking forward to it!

Toto

certain off topic posts from and reacting to Chili have been split off here.

A word to the wise. . .

John Kesler

Here is Robert Turkel's response to the Mary Magdalene problem:

MiddleMan

Yes, and the only reasonable response to Robert (the Hutt) Turkel was already expertly penned by the writers of Monty Python's "Michelangelo and the Pope."

See: http://www.mat.upm.es/~jcm/michelangelo.html

Sven

It's funny - but did I miss another joke, or did Monty Python just miss that "The Last Supper" was painted by Leonardo da Vinci, not by Michelangelo?

Padre Bear

I believe it is meant to explain how we ended up with Da Vinci's Last Supper.

Roland

Man, I wish I'd had this guy for my English teacher! No rules of logic and grammar and everything goes!

Imagine Matthew's response if he turned in his account of events as a class assignment along with fellow students Mark, Luke and John, and got his paper back stamped with teacher comments such as "lacks coherence," "unclear pronoun references," "misleading reportage."

How do we know, then, how "true" all those stories in the Bible are that we have only one account of? After all, according to this guy's logic, if we only had Matthew's version of the rez events, we would be incorrect in our assumption that Mary M. did what Matthew clearly states Mary M. did. Then how do we know that Moses or Abraham really did what the writer of Genesis or Exodus says they did? Maybe if we had three other writers relating the same events to us, we would find that they really did something completely different.

I guess we now have a new category of believer: the non-literal literalist!

Roland

Moreover, if Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were to submit their various accounts as eyewitness testimony in a court of law, the case would be thrown out due to a lack of correspondence among the versions.