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| Photo by Damon Bowe Photo |
Ursula Werner is the author of the new novel Magda Revealed. Her other books include the novel The Good at Heart. She lives in Washington, D.C.
Q: What inspired you to write Magda Revealed?
A: Oddly enough, it was a pedicure. I was 41 and I’d never had a pedicure (shameful, I know). As this expert salon worker washed and massaged my feet, I thought, “What a loving thing it is, to tend to someone else’s feet!”
Unexpectedly, Jesus then popped into my head, probably because people are always having their feet washed in the New Testament. And I wondered whether Mary Magdalene ever washed his feet, and thought, if she did, it was a clear sign of their love for each other.
Back then I was working on a book of poems about famous mythological or fairy tale figures in modern day (e.g. “Rapunzel in Rehab,” “Snow White the Soccer Mom”).
I decided to write a poem about Mary Magdalene at the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon, because I imagined she would be an expert in foot care. In my poem, Mary talks about the holiness of feet and concludes, “when the journey is the destination/ cherish the steps that take you.”
The poem got me thinking about Mary Magdalene, so I did a bit of research and learned that in fact, she was not a prostitute, as I (and many others) had been led to believe by the Catholic Church. The more I learned about who she really was and the myths that have grown up around her, the more fascinated I became, and it led to this novel.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: In the beginning, I tried to learn everything I could (which was ultimately very little) about the historical figure of Mary Magdalene.
Because her life was intricately tied to the life of Jesus, I realized I needed to learn about him as well. I tried to limit myself to the historical Jesus – what are the facts about Jesus’ life that historians have been able to piece together and largely agree on?
Ultimately, I wanted to recreate Magda and Jesus’ lives together in Judea during the first century.
I was surprised by many things. First, there are many “facts” about Jesus that people assume are true, but that historians disagree with – for example, people think that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but most historians place his birth in Nazareth.
Second, the story of how the Church officials who compiled the New Testament decided to include only four gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), and deliberately ignored an entire collection of alternative gospels, is a lesson in how history can be manipulated by those in power.
Third, I was surprised – and very gratified – to learn about the prominence of women among Jesus’ disciples (the current New Testament barely mentions them).
But my biggest surprise came when I compared a timeline of events in Judea during Jesus’ lifetime with what was going on in Rome.
When I looked closely at Emperor Tiberius and the political upheavals in Rome in the early 1st century, connected lines between Roman officials and Pontius Pilate, and placed all of that within the reality of the Passover feast in Jerusalem, I concluded that there was no way Pilate would have willingly ordered the execution of Jesus.
I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but Jesus’ death is very much a murder mystery, to my mind.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about Mary Magdalene?
A: The biggest misconception about Mary Magdalene is that she was a prostitute. She was not a prostitute! It amazes me how many people are convinced that the New Testament says she was, and when I challenge them to show me the passage in the Bible where that is made clear, they can’t find it.
The idea that she was a sex-worker stems from a speech given by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century – good Pope Gregory got confused by all the women named Mary in the New Testament, conflated them all into one Mary, decided she was Mary Magdalene, and slapped her with the label prostitute because it made for a good story of redemption.
Some people think Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife (especially after Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code), but most historians would say she wasn’t, primarily because there are no records of their marriage under Jewish law.
On this last question, I learned something interesting. Under Jewish law in the 1st century, if Mary and Jesus were married, and Jesus died, then all of Mary’s money (and most historians think Mary Magdalene was a woman of means) would have gone to Jesus’ family, and she would have had to marry Jesus’ elder brother.
So if Jesus knew he was going to die, he might have chosen not to marry Mary, in order to preserve her wealth, and to keep her from marrying someone she didn’t love.
Q: What did you see as the right balance between your character Magda and the biblical Mary Magdalene?
A: My aim, in writing the character of Magda, was to try to imagine what Mary Magdalene might have been like in real life, so I like to think there wouldn’t be much difference between the biblical Mary Magdalene and Magda.
The Bible doesn’t offer much information about Mary Magdalene, other than the following: 1) Jesus cast seven demons from her; 2) she was one of the women who followed him in his ministry; 3) she stayed with him during the crucifixion; and 4) she was the first person to see the risen Jesus after his death. Those are biblical “facts” which I include in my narrative.
I had a lot of leeway in imagining the character of Magda, as long as it was consistent with those facts.
My Magda necessarily is a strong woman, as I believe the real Mary Magdalene must have been, because it would have been unusual in those days for a woman to leave her family in order to follow an itinerant preacher around Galilee. She is also a spiritual seeker, again something that would have been necessary for a follower of Jesus.
Finally, my Magda is a close confidante of Jesus, a disciple he trusts more than the others for her knowledge and insights. I came to this conclusion because all four gospels say that Mary Magdalene was the first person to whom Jesus appeared after his death, so she must have been special in some way.
Also, the lost Gospel of Mary Magdalene posits Mary as uniquely capable of receiving and teaching the true message of Jesus. He entrusts her with spiritual knowledge that he hasn’t given anyone else.
On the question of whether Mary Magdalene and Jesus were in love or were married, I fall in the camp of those who think they were in love and physically intimate. (My take on Jesus is that, if he was God in human form, he wanted to understand all the sensual experiences that the human body is subject to.)
But I don’t let them get “legally” married because of the Jewish law provision I mentioned above, which would have made Magda destitute after Jesus’ death.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a mystery/crime novel with an alcoholic as a main character. It’s not The Girl on the Train, but I hope it will be as riveting.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Oh, there’s always more to talk about, but I’ll just say in closing that I’m grateful, in this time of fear and change, to have a vivid imagination that allows me to escape into an alternate reality.
I encourage anyone who is feeling stressed these days, for whatever reason, to go grab a good book and lose themselves in the world the author created. It might just save your sanity.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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