Mary the Tower: What Mary Magdalene Scholarship Taught Me About Authority and the Wisdom of Multiplicity

A talk given on June 8, 2025, for the Unitarian Universalist Church of Pensacola.

Click here to watch a recording of this talk

In our culture, we often have this idea of what spiritual authority looks like. Of what wisdom looks like. If we look at the kinds of people our culture tends to idolize, spiritually, it’s the ones who seem to have it all figured out. They have a handle on things. They can nail it all down. I’m thinking of people like Pat Robertson… Billy Graham… Joel Osteen… paragons of spiritual authority, right? And even though we might grimace at some of these names, if we’re honest, we kind of tend to approach our own sense of inner confidence in the same way, right? It might not be flattering, but we do. At least I do. I like to feel like I have a handle on things—like I’ve figured it out, especially in a crowd of people who may disagree. Politically. Spiritually. Socially. My ego wants to believe I’ve got a handle on these things—how to be a good chaplain or how to be a good writer. I want to sound confident and wise.

But of course, in the pantheon of spiritual traditions, thank God, this isn’t the only way. We also have this other, very different way to look at authority and wisdom—and it comes from trust rather than certainty. From openness rather than prescription. From embracing multiplicity and uncertainty while relying, as much as we need to, on what we’ve experienced to be true. There’s this famous saying that comes from the Buddhist tradition that goes, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him, because he’s not the Buddha.” In other words, the moment you think you have it all figured out—when you can look at the Buddha and say, “Yes! That’s him! I’ve got it! I can take a picture and show my friends!” that’s the moment you can be sure you’ve missed the point, because it becomes something less than the Buddha. The Buddha is living. Adapting. Sometimes contradictory. Something to be struggled with and experienced, not grasped. In that tradition, truth can’t be owned, only experienced and negotiated. To make an idol of it is to lessen it in the same way that pinning down a butterfly makes it something less than a butterfly, or holding your breath makes it something less than breath.

This is where I ground my confidence on my best days, but it is a practice. For most of us, it’s not our native language. Still, looking at people who embody this kind of authority, I have to come to the conclusion that the wisest people aren’t the ones who have it all figured out. They’re the ones who hold their knowing gently and keep showing up to the evolving story around them. That’s what I would like to explore this morning.

As I said, though, this latter approach isn’t how our culture tends to operate. Especially in the Christian tradition—the tradition I came from. So much Christian power has been built on rigid dogma. A closed canon. We’ve built huge, authoritative systems on particular understandings of the Bible because it is the solid foundation of truth. That rigidity, though, when we start to look at it, isn’t actually as solid as it seems. As often as folks like to say, “God’s word is the same yesterday, today, and forever…” there is delightful, infuriating, non-dual multiplicity within the Christian tradition, and while the tendency of the West has been to try to harmonize and flatten and solidify… Christian history is not nearly as solid as we pretend it is. I came across a story recently that reminds me of that. It reminds me that, even for traditions that want to look fixed and unchanging, they’re just as impermanent and fluid as the rest of them. So, I’d like to walk through that story this morning—to show how that certainty on which we build authority tends to fall apart, and to show how, ironically, embracing multiplicity and uncertainty can actually lead us to a deeper, more stable spiritual authority and confidence.

So, here’s the story. And let me say from the outset, we’re going to get into the weeds for a minute, but bear with me, because this is about more than it seems.

A few weeks ago, as part of my work with the Order of Hildegard, I read a sermon by Diana Butler Bass called “All the Marys.” She presented it at Wild Goose a while back, and that’s where I heard the story of Elizabeth Schrader (now Elizabeth Schrader Polczer). She was a graduate student studying Mary Magdalene, and as part of her work, she was studying a document called Papyrus 66—one of the oldest surviving copies of the Gospel of John. She was looking at the Lazarus story, which, if you’re unfamiliar, is a resurrection story involving a man named Lazarus and his two sisters: Mary and Martha. These sisters also famously show up in the Gospel of Luke in the story about one listening at Jesus’s feet while the other one gets mad because her sister isn’t helping clean the house. But in John, we don’t have that story. In John, these two sisters are interacting with Jesus and weaving in and out of the story, and as Dr. Polczer is reading the story about their brother coming back to life, she notices something fascinating. It’s something that other scholars have noted, but no one’s really done much with it. After all, Papyrus 66 was only found in 1952, and digitized much more recently to make it accessible, so no one’s really had the chance. What she notices is that the character of Martha is… inconsistent. In fact, the scribe seems to be frequently changing their mind—correcting Mary to Martha, changing singular verbs to plurals, editing phrases to say “sisters” instead of “sister…” And this isn’t the only early source that does this. As Dr. Polczer looks more deeply, she finds there’s actually significant instability around this character of Martha and whether she does or doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, across sources, Mary and Lazarus are constant. The theory she comes to is that it’s very possible we’re not dealing with two characters. We’re dealing with one: Mary, who—for some reason, over time—was split into two. These early sources show confusion as they try to decide.

Now, you don’t come here for Bible trivia, I know. So, why does it matter if we split Mary of Bethany into Mary and Martha? Well, I’ll tell you. Because here’s where it gets more interesting.

In the Gospel of John, Dr. Polczer goes on to note that Mary of Bethany has a remarkably similar arc to a different character: Mary Magdalene. The parallels are fascinating: Both have this same line, “Where have you laid him?” one about Lazarus, one about Jesus. Both see someone they love raised from the dead—one Lazarus, one Jesus. Both use this same, rare Greek word for “burial cloth.” In one section, Mary of Bethany anoints Jesus for burial, while at the end, Mary Magdalene is the one who shows up at the tomb. In fact, if you look at these parallels from a literary perspective, it’s strange that this would be two different people, unless the author is asking us to compare them, which they don’t seem to be. It would make more sense if this were one character’s arc. So, this leads Dr. Polczer to ask her next question:

What if Mary of Bethany wasn’t just split into two characters—Mary and Martha… What if she was split into three? Mary of Bethany, Martha, and Mary called Magdalene? In fact, what if all of these characters were originally just one—one who we know had some pretty serious authority in the early church? Mary Magdalene?

Now, again, you don’t come here for Bible trivia. So, why does this matter? It matters because if these three characters are actually one character… if we read this as one consistent character arc… then what we’d wind up with instead of three minor characters is one very significant person. We’d wind up with a starring character who has important theological conversations with Jesus… Who is the first to proclaim the gospel… Who gets her own nickname, on par with Peter. This is another part of Dr. Polczer's theory, by the way, which shows up in early church writings. The theory is that “Magdalene” isn’t a reference to the town Mary was born in, Magdala, but a reference to the Aramaic word “Migdal,” which means “Tower.” This would make sense, as Luke uses the same nickname patterns for characters who receive titles based on something about them. “Elizabeth called ‘Barren…’” “Simon called ‘Peter’” (or the Solid Rock)… “Mary, called ‘Magdalene’” (or the Strong Tower)…

So, in the end, you wind up with this central character, Mary the Tower, who seems to carry as much authority and theological weight as Simon the Rock… but who, for some reason, is diluted and split into three different characters.

Now, why isn’t this the case? Why would early editorial scribes have diluted Mary’s character? That brings us to the last part of Dr. Polczer's research on this.

To get this part, you have to know, there are plenty of scriptures that didn’t wind up in the Christian canon for one reason or another. These are texts that came from traditions within early Christianity that didn’t “win”—that weren’t considered orthodox by the majority—or at least the most powerful—and so were pruned and not maintained. Among these are texts like the Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Thomas, the Pistis Sophia, and the Gospel of Mary… and if you look at these, you see an interesting common element: In these stories, Simon Peter and Mary Magdalene don’t exactly get along. In fact, Peter questions her authority. Challenges her and her understanding of the gospel. Argues about whether wisdom comes from external authority or inner knowing. And whether or not you want to acknowledge these texts as authoritative—which few people do—you can’t deny that they seem to indicate that in early Christianity, there were different groups that didn’t quite get along. Some followed the way Peter taught. Others followed Mary Magdalene. What we see in these texts suggests two traditions growing up alongside one another. One survives. One is pruned. Now, I’m not suggesting some Dan Brown conspiracy to erase Mary Magdalene or cover something up, but this kind of thing does happen as traditions come to be. Dr. Polczer calls it “editorial reshaping,” and it’s just a matter of certain traditions choosing to pass some things on or not—to emphasize certain things or not. What survived and thrived is, in large part, the tradition that could support the Empire. In that tradition, Mary’s character is diluted and split while Peter’s is bolstered. Over time, that becomes orthodoxy. It’s complicated.

In the end, Dr. Polczer offers us a theory in which the Christian tradition is not nearly as fixed and solid as it often thinks it is, but one in which multiplicity and evolution are inherent to its DNA.

So, why do I share this story? I share it because this story isn’t just about one woman’s name. It’s about how the certainty on which we like to build authority is often an illusion, and to ask you to imagine an alternative. Rather than the approach we took, can you imagine if the Christian tradition had embraced the multiplicity? What would it look like today? What if we’d said, “Yeah, that’s how truth works?” Our wisdom would be more expansive, and our sense of authority wouldn’t be so fragile. This is what I love about the “Living Tradition” of the UU. I haven’t been a part of the Unitarian Universalist tradition for long, but even before I was, this was something I looked at with envy—this idea that you could acknowledge an open, living canon of wisdom and authority. The fact that you could embrace this holy multiplicity of truth that is evolving and breathing. You don’t want to own the Buddha, you want to keep meeting him anew. One UU publication says:

We live out [our] Principles within a ‘living tradition’ of wisdom and spirituality, drawn from sources as diverse as science, poetry, scripture, and personal experience.

[We] affirm and promote: Direct experience of that transcending mystery and wonder, affirmed in all cultures, which moves us to a renewal of the spirit and an openness to the forces which create and uphold life;

[We] affirm and promote] Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love;

[We] affirm and promote] Wisdom from the world's religions which inspires us in our ethical and spiritual life… Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves… Humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit… Spiritual teachings of Earth-centered traditions which celebrate the sacred circle of life and instruct us to live in harmony with the rhythms of nature…

The tradition is alive and diverse. And the thing is, while this sounds like a healthy way of embracing multiplicity across spiritual traditions, it’s also about more than that. It points to a way of being. A way that shows that we don’t have to cling to stories or truth. Politically. Spiritually. Socially. We don’t have to be attached to certainty in order to get in touch with a very real wisdom and authority about how we live. And this isn’t a willy-nilly, “anything goes” way of being—we do draw boundaries and make choices and trust in experience—but always with humility, always acknowledging how our understanding evolves, and multiplicity exists everywhere. It means we recognize that real authority isn’t protective. It’s participatory.

I say again, this leads me to the conclusion that the wisest people aren’t the ones who figure it all out—they’re the ones who hold their knowing gently, and keep showing up to the evolving story.

That’s the lesson I keep learning, as it keeps my ego in check. My ego really wants to know what’s going on, but I know that kind of inner authority is fragile. It’s fearful. My work is to keep showing up with an open palm, a non-dual way of seeing the world, and a trust in process rather than idols.

So, in closing, may each of us find that.

May each of us pursue wisdom and confidence and authority that come from open palms and open minds, trusting that the sacred doesn’t need to be grasped—only received.

May we recognize the beautiful, chaotic, creative multiplicity of knowing that there’s a Church of Peter the Rock and a Church of Mary the Tower, and they both have something to teach us.

May we move in a living world with a living tradition, and may it make us into the expansive, kind, and patient people we most truly are. Amen.