Below is a guest blog that NT scholar Dennis MacDonald asked me to post here on Κέλσος. MacDonald argues that both Mary Magdalene and Judas Iscariot are fictional characters that never historically existed, but were created by the author of Mark. This post is heavily related to my previous essay, which discusses the creation of fictional characters in the Alexander Romance, namely prince Nicolaus of the Arcarnanians and Lysias the divider.
I should note that my posting of MacDonald’s essay here does not constitute endorsement, since I also think that Mary and Judas could have existed as historical persons (or been invented for reasons other than Homeric mimesis). Nevertheless, I likewise think that MacDonald’s hypothesis is interesting and certainly plausible. Below is MacDonald’s essay:
I’ve had enough! I’m writing this paper at 4:00 a.m. March 28, 2016, the day after Easter. Throughout Holy Week New Testament scholars, many of whom are not only my colleagues but my friends, have naively proposed in various popular media some variation on the historical Judas and Magdalene and how later tradition reshaped and contested their legacies. I heard no one challenging the presumption that such characters actually existed, even though the earliest Christian records don’t mention them, namely the authentic epistles of Paul and the lost Gospel Q, which I prefer to call the Logoi of Jesus. They both first appear in Christian texts in the Gospel of Mark, and every single reference to them later issues—whether directly or indirectly—from that single work. The existence of both characters thus depends on one’s assessment of what Mark says about them. This not to say that later both characters became exceedingly and controversial dramatis personae in Jesus narratives and their interpretations, but both first appear in Mark, who frequently created character with significant names.
According to Mark 5:9, Jesus asked the ferocious demoniac, “‘What is your name?’ And he says to him, ‘My name is Legion [Λεγιών], for we are many.’” The transliteration of the Latin Legion surely associates the two thousand demons with the Roman army. To the sons of Zebedee Mark’s Jesus gave “the name Boanerges,” just as he “gave the name Peter to Simon” (3:16-17). “The epithet [Βοανηργής] probably transliterates Aramaic בני רגשא (‘sons of noise’) [1].” Its significance for Mark lies in his translation “Sons of Thunder,” which links him to the famous Greek mythological twins Castor and Polydeuces, who shared the name Dioscuri, “sons of Zeus.” They, like James and John, were fishermen.
The name Jairus (᾿Ιάϊρος) transliterates the Hebrew יאיר, “he will brighten.” This “leader of the synagogue” is the father of a girl whom Jesus raises from the dead; Jesus thus brightens his life. The episode of the raising of the girl and the embedded story of the hemorrhaging woman are imitations of the death of Sarpedon and the unstanchable wound of Glaucus (Il. 2.876 and 16.593), whose name derives from the adjective γλαυκός, “gleaming.”
The place name Dalmanoutha (Δαλμανουθά) is not independently attested; the name is not historical or traditional but compositionally significant and derives from the Aramaic particle ד, “of,” למן, “the harbor,” a loan word from the Greek word for harbor λιμήν, and ותא, probably an Aramaic ending for place names. Mark’s bilingual reader thus may have understood 8:10 to mean that Jesus and his disciples sailed “into the region Of-the-Harbor.” The conflict that takes place at Dalmanoutha modestly resembles one that takes place at a dangerous harbor in Od. 10.
Barabbas (Βαραββᾶς) is not the rogue’s birth name; it is a nickname: ὁ λεγόμενος (15:7). Even Mark’s Greek readers would have known that this name in Aramaic means “son of a father [בר אבא ].” Mark translated βαρ- as υἱός in 10:46 and αββα as πατήρ in 14:36. So when readers come to Jesus’ trial, they see that the Jewish authorities are given a choice between two sons of God, Jesus and “son of [the] Father” (15:7). Some manuscripts of Matthew name the rogue “Jesus Barabbas,” which may indeed preserve Matthew’s original reading (Matt 27:16) [2]. If so, at least one of Mark’s ancient readers seems to have noticed the contrast with Jesus, Son of God, and made the comparison even more obvious by adding the name Jesus before the patronymic [3]. Barabbas is a mimetic descendent of Homer’s Irus, a beggar whom Penelope’s suitors favored in a fight against Odysseus in disguise. Like Barabbas, Irus’s nickname is significant insofar as it is the masculine form of Iris, the messenger of the gods; the suitors gave him this moniker because he did their bidding. “Irus all the young men called him” (Od. 18.6).
No writing earlier than Mark ever mentioned the city Arimathea, the hometown of Joseph. Scholars have not unreasonably stretched for possible analogies, but to a Greek ear the place name would sound like “excellent discipleship” (αρι-μαθαια). Joseph, who shares his name with the traditional name of Jesus’ father, plays the role of Hector’s father who famously acquired the body of his son for burial in the final book of the Iliad.
The names Judas Iscariot and Mary of Magdala also are significant. No one in antiquity apart from Judas (and his father Simon in the Gospel of John) was called Iscariot (᾿Ισκαριώθ). Mark apparently created this neologism by combining the Greek preposition εἰς, into, with a transliteration of an Aramaic word for city (καριωθ, קריתא) to evoke Homer’s villain Melanthius, “blacky,” whom the reader of the Odyssey first encounters on his way “to the city” to provide goats for Penelope’s suitors. Judas repeatedly plays a role similar to Homer’s Melanthius. Here is a distillation of the parallels that I propose in The Gospels and Homer (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014):
