Wednesday, May 13, 2026

Mary Magdelene: ChatGPT offers some revisionist depictions

Here's how the Wikipedia entry for Mary Magdelene opens:

Mary Magdalene (sometimes called Mary of Magdala, or simply the Magdalene or the Madeleine) was a woman who, according to the four canonical gospels, travelled with Jesus as one of his followers and was a witness to his crucifixion and resurrection. In the heavily disputed Gnostic writings, Mary Magdalene is depicted as Jesus’s closest disciple who uniquely understood his teachings, causing tension with Peter, and is honoured as the “apostle to the apostles”.

Mary Magdalene is regarded by believers as a historical figure, possibly from Magdala. She is seen as a prominent follower of Jesus who was believed to have been healed by him, supported his ministry financially, and was present at his crucifixion and burial. She played a key role among his female disciples. Overall, there is limited information about her life.

The entry continues:

Apocryphal early Christian writings often portray Mary Magdalene as a prominent, spiritually insightful figure favoured by Jesus, challenging traditional patriarchal norms. These texts have inspired modern reinterpretations of her role. During the Patristic era, Mary Magdalene was mentioned only briefly by early Church Fathers, with her image evolving from a minor gospel figure to being conflated with other women in the Bible. Eventually she became viewed in Western Christianity, largely due to Pope Gregory I's influential 591 sermon, as a repentant prostitute, despite there being no biblical basis for this portrayal.

Somewhat later:

According to the Gospel of Luke,[19] Jesus exorcised "seven demons" from Mary Magdalene. That seven demons had possessed Mary is repeated in Mark 16:9, part of the "longer ending" of that gospel – this is not found in the earliest manuscripts and is possibly a second-century addition to the original text, possibly based on the Gospel of Luke. In the first century, demons were believed widely to cause physical and psychological illness. Bruce Chilton, a scholar of early Christianity, states that the reference to the number of demons being "seven" may mean that Mary had to undergo seven exorcisms, probably over a long period of time, due to the first six being partially or wholly unsuccessful. [...]

Because Mary is listed as one of the women who supported Jesus' ministry financially, she must have been relatively wealthy. The places where she and the other women are mentioned throughout the gospels indicate strongly that they were vital to Jesus' ministry and that Mary Magdalene always appears first, whenever she is listed in the Synoptic Gospels as a member of a group of women, indicates that she was seen as the most important out of all of them.[...] That women played such an active and important role in Jesus' ministry was not entirely radical or even unique;[32][34] inscriptions from a synagogue in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor from around the same time period reveal that many of the major donors to the synagogue were women.

As witnesses:

All four canonical gospels agree that several women watched Jesus's crucifixion from a distance, with three explicitly naming Mary Magdalene as present. Mark 15:40 lists the names of these women as Mary Magdalene; Mary, mother of James; and Salome.[40] Matthew 27:55–56 lists Mary Magdalene, Mary mother of James and Joseph, and the unnamed mother of the sons of Zebedee (who may be the same person Mark calls Salome). Luke 23:49 mentioned a group of women watching the crucifixion, but did not give any of their names. John 19:25 lists Mary, mother of Jesus, her sister, Mary, wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene as witnesses to the crucifixion.

The Gospels make no mention of her skill at riding a motorcycle. 

A note about the images. All of them are by ChatGPT. In the first one ChatGPT uses its default photorealistic style. I asked for a Jack Kirby style image for the second. The third is a generic graffiti style, though if you look closely you'll see Ben-Day dot patterns in the skin tones that were probably inherited from Roy Lichtenstein version that I haven't uploaded (boring). The fourth one is in the style of Salvador Dali while the last is Picasso, where I specifically mentioned Guernica

Notice that in the Picasso version the woman is straddling the bike while she's standing next to it in the other versions. Also, she looks more directly at Christ than she does in the others and her jacket is unzipped. I didn't ask for those changes.

1 comment:

  1. Possibly one of the muses for Evil Knievel?

    ReplyDelete