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This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Hi, I’m Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt, and I’m the Franklin S. Dyrness Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College.
David Capes
Dr. Jennifer McNutt, Jennifer, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. Your first appearance. It took two years for us to be able to, do this podcast. We kept missing each other between kids, travel and work. You’re a busy lady. In a minute, we’re going to talk about your book, “The Mary We Forgot,” and the subtitle is fascinating. We’re going to talk about what the “apostle to the apostles”, teaches the church today. It’s fascinating. I learned a lot just by reading the book and all the things I didn’t know about Mary Magdalene and her significance and her ongoing potential significance, in the church today.
Let’s start with you. For those who don’t know, who is Jennifer Powell McNutt?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
I’ll start with my teaching. I teach at Wheaton College in the Liftin Divinity School, and I run the master’s programs in theology and history of Christianity. You and I have worked together, so that’s delightful. And my husband and I are from California. Originally, I went to Westmont College and Princeton Theological Seminary and then the University of Saint Andrews. And I’m married to David McNutt. He is the senior acquisitions editor in theology at Zondervan. And we have McNuttshell Ministries. We love to work together and to do ministry together in our Presbyterian tradition, and we wrote a book together too recently.
David Capes
You’re an author, along with a lot of other things. You travel and you speak all over the place. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your McNuttshell Ministries. That’s really interesting, and I’d like to learn more about that someday.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Yes, we work to bridge the church and the academy.
David Capes
That’s what we do at the Lanier Theological Library. That is our mission. And that’s a little bit of a heavy lift at times, but at other times, at least these days, it’s working hand in glove. We’ like to get you down here sometime to be one of our speakers and maybe we’ll even bring David too! Okay, we’re talking about your book, The Mary We Forgot: What the Apostle to the Apostle Teaches the Church Today.
All I have is a promotional copy. So I’m asking you to send a signed copy my way. I’ll have the full version at that point. All right, let’s talk a little bit about the fact that you have done a lot of work in reformation studies, and now all of a sudden, you’re heading back to the early church, and that tradition. What was the impetus for you to move from a focus on later church history, back to the beginnings?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
For this book, it was just tracing the history of Mary Magdalene’s interpretation. And also, not only across time, but also across the different traditions and branches of the church. So, I’m looking at the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestant. But of course, I’m writing from a Protestant perspective and experience of her. We have to go back to the beginning to see these early interpreters and how they are addressing Mary Magdalene, how they’re highlighting her role, what they’re thinking about exegetically and theologically, about her presence.
Then I was hoping to see how that eventually gets us to the point where we are today. There were surprises along the way, and there were other things that we will be familiar with, especially this idea of her as a prostitute, which is very well known in our modern popular cultural world. I’m seeing how that happened, but then also some of the complexity behind the reading of her importance and significance and role in the Christian life.
David Capes
You begin with Jesus Christ Superstar, and any book that begins with Jesus Christ Superstar is going to get my attention. I was a musician back in those days and played it a few times and had fun with it. You know, it was an interesting bit of music. I didn’t understand it completely. I just thought it was about Jesus! I was into it for that.
So, you refer to her in the subtitle as the apostle to the apostles. What do you mean by that? That’s not a phrase a lot of people have heard,
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
It is interesting to discover that in our Western tradition, we do have evidence and examples, though inconsistently, of understanding her role in Jesus’s ministry as apostolic. I had always heard that that was only part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and that they were very clear on Mary Magdalene, not a prostitute but as apostle to the apostles. And so it was really exciting to discover in the Western tradition how she has, importantly, also been recognized as apostle to the apostles, and some of the reasons why that happens in the history of interpretation.
Part of it has to do with just the flourishing of medieval mysticism in the West and the attention that was put on the importance of preaching. And we see, the Mendicant orders, especially, really identifying with Mary Magdalene. Seeing her encounter with Jesus in the garden in John 20 as really the basis and foundation for sending her as apostolic witness. And that goes all the way back to Irenaeus of Leon, this reading of her role as bringing the good news to the other apostles and therefore being the apostle to the apostles.
So that was my first discovery. But then the second discovery was to see that even in the Protestant tradition, even among the reformers, there is recognition of her activity in the gospels as apostolic and again, inconsistently and certainly something that we have forgotten over time, but nonetheless, there and present. One of the other things that I’m doing in the book is to say that according to Scriptures own standards for apostolicity, Mary Magdalene qualifies. It’s not just in the history of our traditions, across the traditions, but also based on what the Bible sets out for us.
David Capes
Now, one of the things that people still aren’t settled on is the idea of Magdalene itself, just the name Mary Magdalene. First of all, Mary itself is a very common name, right?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
That’s right. It’s the most popular name, as I understand it, in first-century Palestine, for women. So, I really appreciated that as a “Jennifer” from the 80s.
David Capes
How many Jennifers are there in the 80s?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
About four in every class!
David Capes
We go through times when names become very familiar. Even the name Jesus, Joshua, Yeshua is a very common name at the time, so he had to be designated something other than Yeshua. So, he’s designated Yeshua of Nazareth. What about Mary? What does Magdalene mean?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
I’m using a lot of different research and biblical studies on this topic, but the reason why the name is highlighted in part, is to distinguish her from other “Marys”. But also, we would notice that she is being connected to a location rather than to a man. Instead of to a husband or to a father or to a son. We know her by her connection to this place. But also, because in Luke 8 especially, she’s Mary called the Magdalene. There is a sense that there’s another meaning to her name. In Aramaic, migdol means tower, and so she may carry this nickname of “the tower”. This is a conversation going on in biblical studies right now. But what’s interesting is to see that this is how the church has read her name in the tradition. Not just in the early church, but also in the Reformation. She was called “the tower”, and that was intended to signify her strength of faith, that she was known as a model of faith.
