I recently finished re-reading The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene by the late Dr. Jane Schaberg. Jane was my Biblical Studies professor when I was an undergraduate majoring in Religious Studies back in the 1980s. Although she encouraged me to pursue graduate work in Biblical Studies, I went in a different direction. We became friends and had sporadic contact over the years.
She published The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene in 2002, and I first came across it about 2005, twenty years after receiving my bachelor’s degree. This was during a period when I was “deconstructing” my Roman Catholic religious beliefs for the second time. The first time was in my teenage years when I simply discarded it as of no interest. I returned to the faith in my mid-twenties, only to deconstruct more deliberately in my late forties.
At the time I had left my academic career in political science and belatedly began to pursue a Religious Studies degree at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley CA, with courses and teachers from a variety of religious orientations. I wanted to take a closer look at Christian and Buddhist religious traditions to determine what each of them meant to me at that turning point in my life.
I did a lot of reading on my own, utilizing the GTU library, and it was then that I read Jane’s two major books. It was fascinating to read her work for the first time and helpful in sorting through some of my thinking about religious texts and Catholic dogmas.
I reread her book this year, another twenty years later (!), because Mary Magdalene is a key figure in the gospel reports of the death and burial of Jesus and the discovery of his empty tomb. I felt like I was meeting Jane on an intellectual and personal level in a way I hadn’t before. It was like talking over a subject of mutual interest with an old friend.
Her unexpected gift to me was in understanding how much the figure of the “Son of Man” in Ch. 7 of the book of the prophet Daniel influenced the gospel attributed to Mark. I had to revise my page on the empty tomb once again to incorporate this insight. The empty tomb had the elements of an apocalyptic text similar to those in Daniel, with an emotionally troubled protagonist seeing something incredible, having it interpreted by an angelic figure, and then keeping quiet about it due to fear.
So I want to thank Jane for this insight, for her encouragement at different points of my life, and for her teaching me some of the basics of critical Bible study long ago. Although she died in 2012, I have encountered her again and learned from her. I don’t know whether her grave is empty or not, but I do know she is still with me on my journey.
Jesus Reconstructed 