Jesus, Mary Magdalene, and the Sex They Might Have Had

A different trinity

What Mary Magdalene may have looked like.

This is one of those topics where I feel one of two things.

Either everyone already knows and I have been living under a large rock, or no one knows, and I’m bringing you shocking, new information. 

But I’ve settled on a third thing: that you’ve probably heard rumors. 

Unconfirmed of course, because who can confirm Biblical times? With all its translations and books left out of the final version, not even the Bible can.

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My friend Molly told me about Mary Magdalene Revealed: The First Apostle, Her Feminist Gospel & the Christianity We Haven't Tried Yet. It’s by Meggan Watterson, who has a lovely speaking voice. I know, because I’ve been listening to her read her book on Audible. 

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Years ago, I was a Christian. My parents weren’t religious, but I was recruited to Campus Life (my school’s version of Young Life) during my sophomore year of high school. I was looking for some kind of social home, hungry for teenage acceptance and friends who wouldn’t leave me for someone cooler, so Campus Life and I pretty much welcomed each other with open arms. Our youth leaders, 20-somethings themselves, imbued our Bible studies with an older sibling vibe and helpfully, they scheduled all our meet-ups (Bible studies) for us. 

It was an easy, comforting way to click into a social scene. One that didn’t ask much of you, except your soul.

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Whenever we read the Bible together, which was often, Mary Magdalene registered to me as a kind of hazy, background person. I was always getting her confused with Jesus’s mother, Mary. But I learned to differentiate her from Jesus’ mother because Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. It didn’t say this anywhere in the Bible, it was just something people knew. Like how duckbill platypuses are actually mammals, and tomatoes are actually fruit, things you might be tempted to refute because things don’t quite add up, but anyway, people just know it. Ok? People just know it.

The thing that didn’t add up, though, was this:

I could never clock Mary Magdalene’s personality. She didn’t seem seductive, like I assumed you had to be as a prostitute. Or quirkily adorable like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. She wasn’t indignant like Peter, wasn’t a narc like Judas, she was just kind of…there. A prop person. An extra in a movie. There to give texture and depth to the main character, not a significant character herself, and the depth she gave was:

“Jesus so loved the world, he welcomed everyone. Even slutty prostitutes like Mary Magdalene.”

No one ever said this out loud, but it was the subtext of things, the message we were supposed to take away.

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I later learned that “Mary Magdalene was a prostitute” was a fiction made up by a man named Pope Gregory in 591, and that Catholics sort of corrected things in 1969 when Pope Paul VI removed that fact from the General Roman Calendar. But I say “sort of” because how often do you wake up and run your current worldview through the General Roman Calendar? I’ll be honest — I didn’t do that today.

As it turns out though:

Jesus and Mary Magdalene may have been a couple!

And I know this because Meggan Watterson has been telling me about it. And so have various early Christian texts that discuss Mary Magdalene being Jesus’s favorite (disciple / apostle / woman).

Ok. Stop — I’m aware I have a brain pickled by old animated Disney movies, where everything ends in a wedding. The hero’s journey reaches completion at the altar, the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp has its own dedicated neural groove in my mind, I remember watching the first non-wedding-ending Disney movie I ever saw (Brave) thinking, “wow! Radical!!”

But I promise, in this case, the case of Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene, it is not just me.

Here’s a passage from the Gospel of Phillip, one of the early Christian texts left out of the canonical New Testament. The second and third and fourth sentences are the most significant.

I mostly show you that passage for context. The kissing her on her mouth part is cool. But there was a lot of kissing going around in the New Testament — Judas identified Jesus to the soldiers who’d kill him with a kiss after all.

There’s also this, though, in the Gospel of Phillip:

His companion.

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I remember taking a course called “The Historical Jesus” as a college freshman, spiraling out of the Christian faith in real time as I realized three things:

1. Romans decided the books that would ultimately become the New Testament. 

2. None of those books featured women as main characters.

3. None of those books were written by women.

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This is the most under-appreciated fact I feel of the modern Christian church: that it reflects so much more about Roman patriarchy in the 4th century, when Christianity was becoming a state religion and all those Bible-deciding councils were happening, than the groovy radicalism of Jesus. 

“Of course you don’t remember much about Mary Magdalene,” my therapist said last week as I told her about Mary Magdalene Revealed. One of the many reasons my therapist is awesome is because she’s a humanities nerd like me.

“In Ancient Rome, women had about the same rights as slaves. Men were in power. Look around. In church men are still in power.”

I told her I was excited because I just read a part about recreational sex not being a sin. That this idea didn’t exist before the 4th century. I told her that in fact, Mary Magdalene rather explicitly tells the other disciples: “there is no sin.”

“Things would be so different if that were the message of Christianity,” I remarked. “If people weren’t always told how bad they are.”

“People are much harder to control that way,” she said.

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Since my session with her, I’ve thought a lot about pleasure. How personal it is, how it's stitched into your senses. I thought about all the times I heard the word “flesh” as a young Christian, and how I was meant to understand the body as something weak and hedonistic and not even really connected to my soul. Just this baggage I was born with that was always trying to get me into trouble. “Pleasures of the flesh:” beware! If I wasn’t careful, my flesh would grab the wheel and make me drink and do drugs and have sex before I got married. It was just that unruly.

Campus Life was chill compared to other forms of Christianity, but on the topic of sex, there was an implied chasteness to our dating. Lots of purity talk. But the purity always had a feminine ring to it — despite the Jonas brothers and their rings, it didn’t seem like anyone really worried about the purity of my guy friends’ bodies. I was never warned about boys tempting me, which was weird, because I wanted them to.

I also had hormones, and I also had eyeballs.  

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Still: I covered up. I cultivated a closet of khakis and Old Navy sweater sets. As a Christian teenager the boys did not come to my yard, but on the occasion they wandered there accidentally, we just kind of looked at each other and shrugged. Any fleeting interest quickly morphed into buds and high fives. 

And anyway, I wouldn’t get curious about my body, or specifically the parts between my legs, until my 20s. Between the ages of 16-19 I didn’t really think I was made for sex or sexiness, so why try? Why try rooting around for something I didn’t understand?

It took a few years for that ice to thaw, the chill between me and my reflection in the mirror. The way I blurred my eyes sometimes because I didn’t like my flesh all that much. On some days it seemed like that was the whole point as a Christian, but secretly I wished I was one of those girls who loved my flesh, that everyone loved it, but I kept it pure because I was just that Godly. People would be like, “there she goes, look at her gorgeous, gorgeous flesh,” and someone else would be like, “yet she doesn’t have sex,” and my hair would sexily float around like Ariel’s in The Little Mermaid and I would smile in a way that said, “imagine how my future husband will feel, getting to enjoy all this flesh?”

And somewhere, God himself would be like: “that’s my girl.”

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“Pleasure undermines power,” I scribbled in the notebook I use during my therapy sessions.

“And knowledge is power,” my therapist added, hearing me murmur. Shout-out Eve, the OG knowledge-seeker.  

We turned those ideas over for a while, that finding pleasure inside you – an orgasm, for example – is knowledge. It is power generated from within, to know your body is capable of that. And I can see why internal pleasure-knowledge would be threatening to an external state power. 

This bodily proof that you don’t need the state, or a spiritual intermediary like Jesus, to experience bliss. You don’t need anything external. 

As a state power, or a religious institution melded with state powers, the only intervention you can make, then, is to get into people’s heads.

To introduce shame. 

To tell them pleasure is bad, their body is bad.

To tell them they are bad, because they went ahead and incarnated with a body. With all this gross flesh hanging off their soul.

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To borrow a 2020s term, I’ve always found the church version of Jesus very unrelatable. 

This neutered, walking angel type — the most pure, the most perfect. Back in Campus Life, the stories about Satan tempting him always fell kinda flat, because if he was so Godly didn’t he have a force field of purity that temptations bounced right off of? I didn’t believe he had to work that hard to resist.

I find it much more inspiring to think of Jesus as a guy, a human man, who was kind and generous and a little weird, not interested in status or money, but very interested in healing.

A man who got food stuck between his teeth sometimes. A man who reeked of BO sometimes. A man who accidentally nailed his thumb sometimes and was like, “fuck! That hurt!” 

In her book, Meggan tells this story about being in seminary school, asking her classmates one day if they think Jesus had sex. Another student turns around in her seat just to glare at her.

“Do you think Jesus and Mary Magdalene had sex?” I asked my therapist during our session. She laughed.

“He was a 30 year-old man,” she said. “Show me a 30 year-old man who’s not trying to have sex.”

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Did you know that Mary Magdalene wrote a book too?

It’s called the Gospel of Mary. Similar to the no sin thing, she says we all already have God inside of us. 

We don’t need to “accept” grace from an external source, and we don’t need to accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Because grace is already there.

In fact, Mary’s whole thing is internal reflection. This idea that if you go deep enough, you’ll find the goodness that flickered there all along. And I love this, the idea that your body, a portal of pleasure and memories and a catalogue of pains, leads finally to an unknowable spiritual mystery that infuses the flesh. That makes so much more sense to me than flesh being flatly obscene, wrong for existing.

It also alchemizes the idea of sex, and here I mean consensual sex for pleasure, from “sinful” into something that also makes more sense to me. Something way more joyful. Something like permission to travel each other’s portals together. And what will we find there? Maybe goodness.

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After Jesus died, Mary traveled to France, where she spent a lot of time in this cave, meditating and (according to Meggan) living in community. Check out the shape:

The Grotte aux Oeufs or “Cave of Eggs” in Var Forest, in Plan-d’Aups-Sainte-Baume.

Maybe Mary Magdalene cried in that cave, still heartbroken after losing her partner. Maybe she and Jesus had a sexual connection, and she thought about it sometimes. Who knows.

Maybe Jesus considered her his companion because he got to express this aspect of his humanity with her. To want someone. To be held by someone. Maybe he kissed her on the mouth because they tried it once, and they both liked it, these flesh-born sensations of warmth and crackle and soothing, like a campfire.

And they didn’t feel ashamed about it at all.