The Gospel of Mary starts on page 7, in the middle of a question. Someone is asking the risen Savior whether matter will be destroyed, and we never learn who, because the first six pages of the only Coptic copy are gone. Four more pages vanish right when Mary starts describing her vision.

What survives is short enough to read over a cup of coffee. It’s also one of the most dramatic texts from early Christianity, and it ends with an argument that never really got settled. I wrote about who Mary Magdalene was in the Gnostic tradition back in January. This time I want to read the gospel itself, holes and all, because the argument at the end means more once you’ve seen what comes before it.

A Gospel That Isn’t From Nag Hammadi

People often lump the Gospel of Mary in with the Nag Hammadi library, but it was never in those jars. It turned up in 1896 in a Coptic book now called the Berlin Codex, decades before the Nag Hammadi find. Two small Greek fragments were later pulled from the ancient rubbish heaps at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt.

Those Greek scraps date to the early third century, so the gospel itself is from the second. Karen King, who translated it for Marvin Meyer’s Nag Hammadi Scriptures, calls it “the only extant early Christian gospel ascribed to a woman.” Between the missing opening and the missing middle, roughly half the book is lost. We have the Savior’s last teaching, Mary’s vision in pieces, and the fight.

The Savior’s Last Teaching

When the text picks up, the Savior is telling the disciples that everything material will “dissolve again into their own proper root.” Peter then asks him a question that sounds simple. What is the sin of the world?

The answer is one of the strangest lines in any gospel. “There is no such thing as sin,” the Savior says, and then he qualifies it. People make sin when they act out of what he calls adultery, which here means clinging to the body and the world as if they were the whole story. People get sick and die, he adds, because they love what deceives them.

Then comes the farewell. Don’t let anyone lead you astray by saying “look over here” or “look over there,” he tells them, “for the Child of Humanity exists within you.” He also warns them not to write up extra rules beyond what he gave them, “or else you might be dominated by it.” Keep that warning in mind, because the ending turns on it.

Mary Stands Up

After he leaves, the disciples fall apart. They’re weeping and scared, and they say it plainly: if the authorities didn’t spare him, why would they spare us?

Mary is the one who steadies the room. She tells them not to be distressed, because the Savior “has prepared us and made us human beings.” King points out that the Coptic word here is the generic word for a human, and not the word for “male.” In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says he’ll make Mary male. The Gospel of Mary says he made all of them human, men and women alike.

Peter then asks her directly to share what the Savior told her that the others never heard. He even acknowledges that the Savior loved her more than other women. It’s a friendly request at this point, and it’s worth remembering how friendly it was.

Seeing With the Mind

Mary starts with a detail about how visions work. She told the Lord she’d seen him in a vision, and he praised her for “not wavering at seeing me,” adding that “where the mind is, there is the treasure.”

She asked whether a person sees a vision with the soul or with the spirit. Neither, he told her. The mind sits between the two, and the mind is what sees. Then the manuscript breaks off, and pages 11 through 14 are simply gone.

Four Powers on the Way Up

When the text resumes, we’re in the middle of a story about a soul rising past a series of powers. The first one’s name is lost, though King thinks it was probably Darkness. The second is Desire, and their exchange is the best passage in the book:

“And Desire said, ‘I did not see you go down, yet now I see you go up. So why do you lie, since you belong to me?’ The soul answered, ‘I saw you. You did not see me, nor did you know me. You mistook the garment I wore for my true self. And you did not recognize me.’”

Desire only knows the body. It saw a body come into the world and assumes the soul is the same thing, so it claims ownership. The soul leaves “rejoicing greatly,” because being misidentified is exactly what sets it free.

The third power is Ignorance, and it tries a different tactic. It tells the soul it’s bound by wickedness and then, oddly, commands it not to judge. The soul turns the charge around and asks why Ignorance is judging it, when it hasn’t judged anyone.

Wrath, the fourth power, has seven forms. The list starts with darkness, desire, and ignorance again, then adds zeal for death, the kingdom of the flesh, the foolish wisdom of the flesh, and the wisdom of the wrathful person. Wrath calls the soul a “human-killer” and a “destroyer of realms,” and demands to know where it came from and where it’s going. The soul answers that everything that bound it has been destroyed, and it will now “receive rest in silence.”

If this sounds familiar, it’s because Gnostic texts return to this scene again and again. The First Revelation of James has its own version, with passwords the soul gives the guards on the way up. King suggests the seven forms of Wrath may stand for the seven planetary spheres. What makes the Gospel of Mary’s version unusual is that the powers are also passions, much like the demons the Secret Book of John assigns to each emotion. You could read it as a map of the heavens, but it works just as well as a map of a bad afternoon.

The Argument

Mary finishes, and then she goes silent, the way the soul does at the end of her story. Andrew speaks first. He doesn’t believe the Savior said any of this, because “these teachings are strange ideas.” Then Peter goes further:

“Did he, then, speak with a woman in private without our knowing about it? Are we to turn around and listen to her? Did he choose her over us?”

This is the same Peter who asked her to share a few pages earlier. Mary weeps and asks him whether he thinks she made it all up. Levi steps in and says the line that gives the whole book its shape: “Peter, you have always been a wrathful person.”

King’s note on this verse is the detail that made the gospel click for me. The word Levi uses for Peter is the same word as the name of the fourth power, Wrath.

Peter Plays the Power

Read the ending with that in mind, and Peter starts to look like one of the rulers from Mary’s vision. Desire told the soul “you belong to me” because it could only see the garment. Peter can only see that Mary is a woman, and so he can’t recognize the teaching as the Savior’s. Ignorance and Wrath both interrogated the soul and passed judgment on it. Peter interrogates Mary and passes judgment on her.

In other words, the disciples act out the vision in the same room where they just heard it. Instead of announcing who understood the Savior, the gospel lets you watch the soul’s ascent happen twice, once in heaven and once in a frightened group of friends.

Levi’s solution is the Savior’s farewell, almost word for word. They should “clothe ourselves with the perfect human,” preach the good news, and stop laying down rules beyond what the Savior gave. In the Coptic copy, they all go out to preach. In the Greek fragment, only Levi leaves, which is a gloomier ending and maybe a more honest one.

Carrying It Into Your Week

The powers in the Gospel of Mary don’t need a cosmology to be useful. A few ways to put the text to work:

  • Notice when something in you says “you belong to me.” Cravings and old grudges both talk this way. The soul’s reply is to remember that the thing making the claim has only ever seen the garment.
  • Catch the judge who tells you not to judge. Ignorance condemns the soul while forbidding it to condemn. Inner critics love this move, and naming it takes away half its force.
  • When a new idea sounds strange, ask whether it’s wrong or just unfamiliar. Andrew’s objection was that Mary’s teaching was strange, which isn’t the same thing as false.
  • Watch for your own Peter moments. Most of us have dismissed a good insight because of who delivered it. The next time you do, ask yourself what exactly you’re seeing, the person or the garment.

The Ten Missing Pages

I’d give a lot to read pages 1 through 6 and 11 through 14. We’ll probably never see them, unless another copy turns up in a monastery library or an Egyptian rubbish heap. What’s left still has a clear shape, though. A teacher leaves, a woman speaks, and a room full of his closest followers has to decide whether to listen.

Which part of the argument do you find yourself on? I’ve been on Peter’s side more often than I’d like to admit, and I suspect the gospel was written for readers like me.

The Gospel of Mary is quoted from Karen L. King’s translation of the Coptic text (BG 8502) and her introduction and notes in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, edited by Marvin Meyer (HarperOne, 2010). The Greek ending is from her translation of the Rylands fragment (P. Ryl. 463) in the same volume.