Mary Magdalene: Encyclopedia II - Mary Magdalene - Easter Egg tradition

Mary Magdalene - Easter Egg tradition

For centuries, it has been the custom of many Catholic services by sharing dyed and painted eggs and proclaiming to each other, "Christ is risen!" The eggs represent new life, and Christ bursting forth from the tomb. This began one tradition of coloring Easter eggs.

One tradition concerning Mary Magdalene says that following Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, she used her position to gain an invitation to a banquet given by Emperor Tiberius Caesar. When she met him, she held a plain egg in her hand and exclaimed "Christ is risen!" Caesar laughed, and said that Christ rising from the dead was as likely as the egg in her hand turning red while she held it. Before he finished speaking, the egg in her hand turned a bright red, and she continued proclaiming the Gospel to the entire imperial house.

A modern lithograph by Richard Stodart (born 1945) of Mary Magdalene displaying an egg illustrates this tradition illustration.

There is also a supposed tradition that the remnants of Christ's heart remain inside an egg-like vessel, and that this vessel is the basis for "the Sacred Heart" motif in Catholicism. In some legends the Sacred Heart exists as a guarded sacred object or a metaphysical essence, passed from hand to hand, with Mary Magdalene being listed among noteworthy caretakers.

A group of scholars have suggested that for one early group of Christians Mary Magdalene was a leader of the early Church and maybe even the unidentified Beloved Disciple, to whom the Fourth Gospel commonly called Gospel of John is ascribed. The most familiar of the scholars is Elaine Pagels.

Ramon K. Jusino offers an explanation of this unorthodox view, based on the textual researches of Raymond E. Brown, a biblical scholar, in "Mary Magdalene, author of the Fourth Gospel?", 1998, available on-line. Ann Graham Brock (see ref.) summarized this reading of the texts in 2003. She demonstrated that an early Christian writing portrays authority as being represented in Mary Magdalene or in the church community structure.

These scholars also observe that the Mary Magdalene figure is consistently elevated in writings from which formal leadership roles are absent, while the Paul figure is more involved in a tug-of-war between these two opposing systems of church government.

Scholars of the Mary who appears in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts have identified her with the Magdalene, even though she is merely given the (Coptic) equivalent of "Mary". However, Stephen J. Shoemaker, thinks that this Mary is actually the Blessed Virgin Mary (Shoemaker 2001), that this fits in better with the notions that Mary was intimate with Jesus, was his greatest disciple, and was to be the center of Jesus' religion; Shoemaker has made a study of Marian liturgies and devotion in Early Christianity.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Easter Egg tradition", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki