Steve Watson

Completing the Vision of Mary

The Gospel of Mary, recovered in fragments in Greek (Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, Rylands III 463) and Coptic (BG 8502) is part of the Nag Hammadi Library (Robinson, J.M. (1990 revd. edn.) NHL, Harper Collins, pp. 523-7. Intro: K. King, tr: G. W. MacRae & R. McL. Wilson) and is generally supposed to be a Greek composition of the 2nd C. It contains a report of a vision experienced by Mary that is remarkable in a number of ways. It represents the progress of a soul towards release from the world, which sounds vaguely Indian but is just a feature of the neoplatonically inspired gnostic ideology in which the body is the sinful wrapper of the soul that needs to be shucked off for perfection to be achieved. The author of Mary thus is one of those who considers sin to be a category of being rather than a possible characteristic of the soul – much less an affliction. The fact that Mary is the voice of authority is also pretty strange, given the patriarchalism of the general culture of the time, and that there are no convincing indications elsewhere of an alternative culture of female empowerment, so what is the point of this attribution? How would it help gain acceptance for the teachings here? Finally, and this is my own interest, that progress is interrupted by the opposition of guardian spirits (powers) at each level, another instance of a frequent feature of apocalyptic ascensions whose origin I find it difficult to explain.

The text is so short that I can copy the relevant section (of chapter 8 ) here.

There are apparently only 4 powers to be overcome – or levels intervening between the soul and liberation. And note that the 2^nd and 3^rd Powers are also the 2^nd and 3^rd Forms of the 4^th Power. I suppose we can guess that the 1^st Power is Darkness as it is the 1^st Form of the 4^th Power.

The challenges and responses and the powers involved don’t seem to have any rational relationship. The challenges concern themselves firstly with the origins and intentions of the progress of the soul. The challenge from the 2^nd Power may be completed as an accusation that the soul did not descend but belongs in the lower realm and therefore may not leave it. What the challenge and response to the 1^st Power might be can only be guessed. There don’t seem to be relevant models for this in other ascension narratives (and I agree that this is only partially an ascension narrative of the standard apocalyptic kind.) My guess would be that the challenge would be again ‘Where are you going?’ since it is explicit at 3 and 4 and implicit at 2. The likelihood also is that the challenge and response refer to the incarnation of the soul as do the 2^nd and 3^rd, while the 4^th and final stage describes the liberation that occurs. This topic is also that which concerns the first extant part of the Gospel. The response is probably drawn from material that immediately precedes the part of the text that we have, as the responses for 2 and 3 occur in the material that begins the extant section. It could probably be determined if we knew the particular cosmological ideology of the writer, which could be determined by identifying the Gnostic school to which he belonged.

(An alternative interpretation is presented in Rasimus, T. et al. (2010) Stoicism in Early Christianity Baker, ch. 10.)