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Meggan Watterson is a Harvard-trained feminist theologian. I love her. In our conversation today, I share more about how I found one of Meggan’s earlier books and how her perspective completely shifted my thinking, and helped me to find faith. Fun fact: Meggan and I started a little book club, just me and her, during COVID—I’ll have to link our reading in the show notes. And now I’m very, very excited that Meggan has a new book out called The Girl Who Baptized Herself. It’s excellent.

Today, we talk about the importance of being embodied, as well as a few pretty crazy examples of the way that culture is edited and passed down to us.

Meggan tells the little-known story behind the Gospel of Mary—the only gospel in the name of a woman. And what really happened to Mary Magdalene. We of course talk about where my work meets her work, with the birth of the seven powers, which become the seven cardinal vices, and later the seven deadly sins.

And Meggan shares the incredible story behind the acts of Paul and Thecla. Which is so beautiful.

The Girl Who Baptized Herself

Mary Magdalene Revealed

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MEGGAN:

It reminds me of that saying that you can never find God in the exact same way that you have to perpetually find new ways to reach the divine. I feel like the intensity of the world that we're in and the pitch to everything is asking so many people that I love and who connect authentically, genuinely to the divine in some way. Their ways don't work in these conditions, can't. There's too much devastation and there's too much that feels like everything is just wrong. And so it's forcing everyone I know to search for new ways to connect.

ELISE:

I sometimes wonder if when we're consumed by fear, and obviously there's a lot of fear right now vibrating around that it's impossible to sort of get into any creative. I mean, I know that in some ways your work would say the opposite. That's when people are on their knees praying, but it feels like,

MEGGAN:

Yeah, it's a masterclass in dysregulation. It's a masterclass to be embodied, which to me is in my experience, in my practice, that's compulsory. You can't reach the divine without being embodied. So that's the opportunity in this crisis. You know that word, the definition of crisis, that's the opportunity in this moment is to keep finding new ways to remain within, even as we're constantly bombarded by terrors, personal and global.

ELISE:

I love Richard Rohr and I love The Wisdom Pattern, and we talk about how history repeats itself, but then you think about it as this ever evolving pattern where you can go back to these scriptures in your case and be like, oh, we've been here before. We might've had a different vantage point or been lower on the spiral of evolution. But yes, we're all on this same themes. Spiral.

MEGGAN:

Yeah, it's barely different. I mean, it's barely different. That's not funny. But themes that are in the Gospel of Mary and the acts of Paula and Thecla are all still right here in every headline. They're all still right here, the exact same issues. So it's both disheartening and also for me, exciting because all that we're missing from these scriptures is to take them seriously. That's the only thing we're missing is that they've just been so discounted. And the worst aspect about that is that then we discount what we hear within us because that's what they would've provided for us.

ELISE:

Yeah, I was going through my notes this morning on the book and just even the fact that very recently it was the Southern Baptist Convention said, we're expelling every church led by a woman because there's no precedent in the New Testament and your point for female leadership and Christianity, and your point of course is, guys, it's right here. It's just edited out. So let's start there. I think that I've talked about you, but you have been incredibly formative to my own. I was just talking about you yesterday with Holly Whitaker. Actually. She was asking me where I found faith, and I was saying how I remember being. I primarily was raised Jewish in Montana, but in a very chill, progressive way when it came to the Torah and the stories of the Bible. Not that there weren't great stories, but I was like, this is misogynistic BS.

I'm not buying this and I'm not interested in this. Even though throughout my academic life I kept coming back to many of the same themes, which will surprise no one. I just wasn't conscious of it. But I remember when I was at Goop and your book, Mary Magdalene revealed that red book landed on my desk as in a pile to consider, and I had repellent. I just was like, oh, no, what is this doing here? And I think I took it to the giveaway table twice and I just kept ending back up on my desk until finally I was like, fine. I looked at the subtitle, which I think was a feminist or the woman you've never heard of, and I was like, huh. And then I was like, let me just read it. At that point, I had done enough work with the universe where I recognized pay attention to these things that are popping, and so I just took it on a trip, flute packed it as one of the books that I took to New York, and I begrudgingly opened it and was like, whoa, wait, what? It just unlocked something in my mind. You were incredibly important figure to the last, I don't know, when did that book come out? 2017, 2018. 2019.

MEGGAN:

Right

ELISE:

Before

MEGGAN:

The pandemic.

ELISE:

Yeah, right. We were in New York right before the pandemic together. But when you have those moments where everything in your mind, it all just shifted where I was like, oh, right. Culture is dictated, culture is edited and passed down to us, and it's not a wholesale truth, not that I felt that way about the New Testament, but I just assumed that somehow it arrived in tact. So thank you. And then I loved through COVID our little, we have to finish. We're halfway through Marguerite Porete.

MEGGAN:

The Mirror of the Soul Yeah.

ELISE:

So let's start there and I tell a little bit of the story and on our best behavior, but you tell it in much more detail. Take us back to these two pieces of scripture, which are the center of your newest book, The Girl Who Baptized Herself, and let's do Mary Magdalene first and then the acts of Paul and Tecla, but tell us about this incredible gospel.

MEGGAN:

So Mary's gospel, which is unique to all the other gospels, first it's written in the name of a woman. Second, it's a metaphysical gospel. So it's teaching us essentially how do we receive directly from within? So you're cutting out essentially the middleman. It's a metaphysical, mystical text where Christ is giving Mary specifically and intentionally a woman these secret teachings because she was the one who could hear him. So we have this scripture that is ultimately proving and providing evidence that Mary was not only not a prostitute, but was the most significant figure in Christ's life, whatever the nature of their relationship was, which we can never substantiate, but whatever that relationship was, it was extraordinary. And he gives secret teachings to her in particular. And so she's in a place of spiritual authority and also she is capable in a way that is unique to the men, to the other disciples at least.

There's something about the way that she perceives Christ and is able to communicate with Christ that is singular and specific to her. Now, what ends up happening is by the end of the gospel, we get a foreshadow of what's going to happen within the institution. Peter, who's the one initially who asked Mary to reveal these secret teachings that were given to her by Christ at the end, doesn't believe her. And another disciple Andrew as well, doesn't believe her. He is like These teachings are strange, but Levi comes to her defense and says, if the Savior considered her worthy, there's that word worthy. Who are you to disregard her? And Peter, he mentions that Peter's always been an angry person.

You so need to anger management man. This is not about you. And so Levi comes to her defense, but ultimately what ends up happening with the Gospel of Mary is that in the fourth century when Christianity began to be reformed and recreated remolded and recast under Constantine as the empire's tradition, so it was completely changed from how it existed for hundreds of years after Jesus. And so during that time, it began in 325, but there were a series of councils. It wasn't just one council where everything was decided, but it began in 3 25 with the Council of Nicea, which this is the jubilee year by the way. They're celebrating 1,700 years since. So it's so magical to me that this book, the girl baptized herself, is coming out on a jubilee year because turning that whole celebration on its head. But so during the fourth century, Mary's gospel was labeled heretical and this word apocryphal, which means of doubtful, authenticity. So that doubt that Peter had inner gospel at the end of it becomes institutionalized by the fourth century. And then by the sixth, the story has been crafted within the formation of the institution of Christianity that Mary was the penitent prostitute. And that's in Pope Gregory's Homily 33, where she's established from then on out as the prostitute

ELISE:

And the carrier of the seven cardinal vices

MEGGAN:

And the carrier of the shame, the carrier of a lack of worth, which is why it gives me chills that Levi says that he addresses the fact that if the savior considered her worthy, who are you to disregard her as if he had a flash premonition that maybe this would sow the seeds for millennia of women struggling with that word worth and what it means in their life and how to reclaim it. So it's essentially deemed apocryphal of doubtful authenticity. To this day, I have to fight tooth and nail to try to establish any kind of rapport where we're talking about the Gospel of Mary on a level of taking it seriously, taking it as seriously as any of those scriptures that were codified by a group of men, only men in the fourth century.

ELISE:

And it was marked to be destroyed and a handful of monks buried copies, some of which have been recovered.

MEGGAN:

It was in the late 1800’s that the fragments began to be found in different places, three different places in Egypt, all in Egypt, but not at Nag Hamadi, which is interesting.

ELISE:

And then Nag Hammadi is like Gospel of Philip and Thunder Perfect Mind. And is that where the acts of Paul and Thecla was founded?

MEGGAN:

The acts of Paul and Thecla? Yeah.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I mean, love you mentioned, it's like they were planted in the desert like seeds as such a beautiful metaphor for maybe this is the time that we start to actually work with these texts. And I think for people who don't know in the cannon as established by these men, Mary Magdalene is one of the people who's there when Christ resurrects, and that's where she gets this particular teaching. She comes back from the tomb and says, I saw him and this is what he told me,

MEGGAN:

But it's for me why I have been obsessed with her gospel since I first encountered it is because it then made that moment make sense to me that only that moment that we have that is preserved in the traditional New Testament of Mary being there at the tomb. This wasn't a right time, right place situation. If you take the Gospel of Mary seriously, do you see how excited I get? I have to.

ELISE:

I love it. Keep going.

MEGGAN:

I get so excited. But if you take the Gospel of Mary seriously, then you understand Mary's there because she was the one who could perceive him.

She was the one who had clarified her heart and was seeing with her heart with that word that Christ refers to twice in her gospel as the treasure, the word new NOUS. It's translated as mine, but that doesn't accurately, I love your obsession with words. I have the same, but that word new is best kept in the Greek because it's translated as the spiritual eye of the heart. It's more an aspect of the soul that we can perceive in this body in this lifetime. So the new is what Christ is teaching Mary in her gospel, how to see with, and then she's the one who's there, the tomb when he resurrects.

If you really take the Gospel of Mary seriously, it's like, yes, this is the fulfillment of her gospel. This is the fulfillment of that moment that he has taught her how to be a bridge between the world, right? How to use this embodiment in a way where love never ends and love never dies because you remain connected. She's still mourning the fact that his physical body is gone. We can't skip over the grief of that. She's mourning and searching after his physical body, which I love her for. That's the humanity in her. But then the other aspect of her is the fact that she sees the angels and then she sees Christ. And this is what I deeply, deeply ardently know is what is contained in her gospel is the instructions on how to do

ELISE:

That right? And there are fragments missing. So it's an incomplete, it's very interesting to me that they're all missing the same fragment, right? There's three copies. Is that right?

MEGGAN:

They're all missing what I think must have been the most incendiary bit of the whole transmission that Christ was giving Mary, because it comes right after chapter seven when Mary's like, so Christ, I saw you today in a vision. And he's like, blessed are you for not wavering at seeing me for where the mind is. So there's that word new. There is the treasure, and he's blessing her because it gives you this indication that there's a lot of people he may have tried to come to, but they freaked out. They either freaked out or they didn't believe what they were seeing within them. So he's saying, blessed are you for not wavering at seeing me, for where the mind is, there is the treasure. And then Mary's like, which I mean I just have always been madly in love with Mary, but this moment is my favorite moment in her gospel to me.

It's when she rolls down the window and asks for directions, not enough of an answer for her. She's like, so when a person sees a vision, is it with the soul or the spirit? So she wants the nitty gritty. She wants to really fully understand when I see you within me, from within my heart with the spiritual eye of the heart, how is that possible with what aperture? How is this happening? And Christ says, it's neither with the soul nor the spirit, but the mind. There's the second time he uses that word new. It's the new that exists between the two that sees the vision. So it's the spiritual eye of the heart that sees the vision. Then we have the missing. Then it goes dark.

ELISE:

And then he describes his own descent before his ascension and going through these, I know Cynthia Bourgeault calls them climate zones, powers. He encounters these seven forces. And so for people who are curious, you can also understand if this gospel is circulating with all these other gospels, it also makes sense that Evagrius Ponticus obviously is an early father of the seven deadly sins, but this is associated with Mary. And in the atmosphere before these are deemed heretical. So of course in some ways she would be associated with them, but not in this way. Can you explain these seven powers? I love them. They're so juicy and human and

MEGGAN:

Yes. And I just want to pin that moment of how complete her erasure is, how complete the erasure of her gospel. Because you alluded to Vous, and there's also John Cassian talking about these seven powers which are never listed in a connate way all throughout the New Testament. There's no other place where they're the gospel of Mary. And yet when these male theologians start talking about it never once, at least from the evidence that we have now in scholarship, is there credit due to Mary?

ELISE:

Nothing? No, it's its own totally messed up game of telephone with no sourcing distortion over time and translation. And to be fair, Evagrius wasn't writing for the lay person, he wasn't writing for us. He was writing for other desert monks who stood in five feet of water overnight to purify their bodies. Different context.

MEGGAN:

Exactly. Except it's also because the seven powers, we sort of just land in the middle of Christ talking about that after that big gap. But what's still looming is that question that Mary asked Christ, right? It would follow that he's still in a way answering that question that this ascent further up is farther in this ascension of going through these powers has to do with being able to perceive a vision. So it's this aspect of clarifying, this is how I read it.

ELISE:

That's interesting.

MEGGAN:

And then also with a Evagrius and John Cassian, these are Egyptian desert fathers. These are monks that are in Egypt, so we can't overlook that as well because there's a very, very large chance that they would've had access to the Gospel of Mary before it was destroyed and buried, or they had this secret copy that they kept under a mattress in somebody's room. But to me, that link has been so profoundly erased. It's like how anonymous is always a woman.

Just to me it's that moment of her erasure. But so the seven powers to me have always read an ingredients label for what we sign up for when we are in a body, when we're agreeing to be here and to be fully human. So within the context of the church, of course, as you mentioned, it becomes the seven deadly sins or the seven vices is how they were originally referred to. But within the Gospel of Mary, they're just referred to as powers, which I like because it doesn't have the stickiness of the shame around that. And also within the church, there's a dichotomy that's so entrenched that the body is somehow more sinful and the soul is more holy. Whereas when we encounter this text, there isn't that kind of language. There isn't that kind of dualism in the same way. And my interpretation of it, the way I integrate it in my life is that these seven powers give us an opportunity to become aware of how human we are, not so that we can berate and get angry at ourselves and feel like a failure.

Like, oh shit, I'm knee deep in rage again. And then feel like, okay, I'm failing at being spiritual. The whole point for me is to be human, which means dealing with these seven powers and at different points of our lives and sometimes concurrently several of them all in one day, but the opportunity that we have then is to awaken while we're knee deep in one of these powers and make a different choice. And for me, it means fully feeling them, allowing myself to really be taken over by them, but not taking action on them. And that's the distinction rage, for example, that I mentioned because I think it's the one that we're all the most aware of. It's the seventh power I think, is so derailing because it so often can feel righteous. We have a right to be this enraged, especially when someone personally harms us.

And so we feel like we have this, have a right to be angry, and that anger then is also keeping us safe from that person harming us again. But the important aspect of really sitting and allowing ourselves to feel the rage is that it will provide us all this information about what we care most about. And then the important and the most critical difference is not to perpetuate the pattern of acting from, because these are powers of the ego. So if you get triggered by someone using their rage on you, raging at you, and then you rage back from your ego, you're just perpetuating that cycle. Whereas if you can sit with your rage, get separate from whoever or whatever situation, you feel it, but then the ideal then is to turn back to your heart, turn back to that voice that knows itself completely within you before an action plan.

ELISE:

Right? Yeah, no, and I like that word climate too, because it suggests that it's outside of it's informing you, but it is not you and it's a substance that you are going to encounter and then have to learn how to negotiate with it.

MEGGAN:

Exactly. You don't have to identify with it. If you can take the time for yourself to create that space, you don't have to identify it as you.

ELISE:

Yeah, and I love that the first power is darkness, which is

MEGGAN:

So critical,

ELISE:

And I love that in this book you managed to bring in Mary do whole acts of Jesus on that. And then simultaneously take us through the acts of Paul and Thecla, which I had never heard of. I do have The New New Testament by Hal Taussig, I dunno how to say his, but until you told me what you were working on however many years ago, I had never heard of Thekla. Is she mentioned anywhere else?

MEGGAN:

Not that I know of. No. Other than in her. It could be that she was edited out though, because there were a lot of female prophets and saints and early leaders within the church that were through redaction criticism over the years were edited out

ELISE:

Or turned into men.

MEGGAN:

That's some of the research that Libby Schrader is doing. The erasure has been complete

ELISE:

For people who don't know. So before Christianity, these early Jesus people, and Jesus was a Jew, and the apostles were Jews and they were a persecuted group, and it was mostly women who would host them in their homes.

MEGGAN:

They would have no church because they would be caught by the Roman Empire. They were persecuted for hundreds of years until Constantine made it the Empire's religion. So they had to meet in very small groups, these little supper clubs, which sheds new light on the last supper when you look at this research. But they had to meet in these unassuming little supper clubs. Meanwhile, they were speaking about the teachings of Christ and how there was a power greater than the emperor as they were breaking bread and taking care of each other.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and I think it's fascinating to me how many people don't realize that these are all branches of one. The Abrahamic religions are all three of one, and that Jesus was a Jew and never said, what did he say? He came to evolve the law but not overthrow it. But obviously, I mean, that's a whole nother conversation about politically what was happening in terms of prophecy and he didn't quite fit the prophecy and et cetera. But it's also why, I mean, everything could be so different too, which is such an interesting thing to think about

So at this point, there's no evidence that Thecla, although she's in a painting with Paul the cave.

MEGGAN:

Yes, that's from 500 AD, but her name is essentially missing. A lot of people go to visit the cave of St. Paul and don't even realize that they're looking at Thecla. They're looking at a road to Damascus moment that none of us have ever even heard of before because we've never heard of Thecla.

ELISE:

Yeah. So Paul, who is Saul of Tarsus, right? He's a Jew, persecuting the sect.

MEGGAN:

Exactly.

ELISE:

And then Christ on the road to Damascus reveals himself to him. He sees him through his own new and then

MEGGAN:

Find, which I love, so

ELISE:

Beautiful, then becomes Paul, Paul of the New Testament. Alright, so Thecla, okay. Tell us the story of Thecla and then we'll get into the way that you relate to her.

MEGGAN:

Well, so there's that moment, the moment that she overhears Paul telling stories about Christ, she's sitting in this little red brick house, and this is what's depicted in the cave of St. Paul. It's a fresco that's there. And so you can see Thecla in her little red brick house by the window, the window's open. She's just hearing about the stories of Christ from Paul through a crack in her open window. So she has a three days and three nights too, which Paul's story does as well. He's blind for three days and three nights until this healer restores his sight. And then he goes from Saul to Paul to mark the transformation. And for Thecla, we meet her when she's sitting by the window and she is beginning her spiritual journey. But what it looks like for her is just doing absolutely nothing, which I get so excited about because there's something so radical and revolutionary about that. When I've mentioned this to anyone over the years in talking about the Axa poll, everyone has said back, I couldn't do that. I couldn't just sit still and stop my life for three days and three nights. My whole world would fall apart. What so many people have said.

And because so many people depend on Thecla in that moment, her mother is depending on her to get married, to be a dutiful daughter. Her fiance is expecting her to fulfill the law, Roman law, which was that she would have to get married as a teen girl. And she refuses and she sits down and she just does nothing but listen to these stories that the scripture says Christ is making sweet for them stories about the beloved. And to me, this is this moment of going inward and asking, who am I, which

Two of us have ever been able to do? And it's not just who am I? It's who am I when I am releasing all of the expectations that everyone around me is projecting onto me. Who am I? If I am not pleasing anyone? Who am I? Who do I want to be and what do I want to do in this brief time that I have here to live it? I feel like so too few of us have that time or give ourselves that time to go inward and do something so radical is to actually hear what we want to do and be from within, not from these external expectations, but that's what Thecla does. And her fiance and her mother completely freak out and they keep saying things. Her mom's throwing shade and calling her like a spider by the window, and her fiance is saying, where is my Thecla? Where is my Thecla gone as if she doesn't exist anymore? Which I think is really fascinating because what it says to me is that she's not existing in relation to the conditions they had set for them to love her, right? She's refusing to take part in that economy of worth. She's disengaging from that idea that she has to be something or do something in order to earn and prove their love for her. She's saying, I'm disengaging with the external conditional world and I'm entering the realm of what's unconditional. And that's what begins her story.

ELISE:

I also love it because as it contrasts with Paul's conversion, which is so dramatic and so absolute, but that hers is this slow pilgrimage inside that looks like nothing,

MEGGAN:

And she refuses to speak. They're asking her all these questions, she refuses to answer their question, which again to me is because she's only focusing on that one question, which is who am I? Who am I really at my core? And I love that she refuses because I think we see that so rarely. We often feel like when we're not doing what others expect us to do, we have to explain ourselves. We have to give all of the excuses as to why we are doing what we feel called to do versus what everybody else wants us to do. And Thekla just sits there. She doesn't answer any one of their questions, which I love.

ELISE:

You make a point of the fear that they speak of her fiance and her mom, and it's that fear of not being able to control someone anymore is so, it's so subtle but interesting how her silence would freak them out,

MEGGAN:

Completely freak them out and create terror. And it's exactly that. She's demonstrating what every single one of us is capable of doing, which is refusing to be controlled. We all can do that. And so for people who are depending on us to be manipulated or to be convinced that we have to jump through this hoop or whatever else in order to be loved, that's incredibly threatening to think that we have that power to refuse to be owned or controlled by anyone.

ELISE:

And so then she goes and she gives away her very symbolic adornments to go and sit at the feet of Paul. Is he in prison at that point?

MEGGAN:

So he is ordered to be, he's whipped and put in prison, whereas Thecla is sentenced to burn at the stake. But at the end of her three days and three nights, she goes to visit Paul. That's how she breaks that fast, is that she's really answering what it is that she needs to do. She goes to Paul. And I've always been obsessed with that theme of getting spiritually naked. I think it's really at the core of so many world religions, at least mystical traditions as it relates to releasing all these illusions and ideas that are really keeping us from just being able to be the truth of who we are. And so at the prison, she has to take off her bracelets in order to get into the front door, and then deeper in the prison, she gives away a silver mirror, which I also love. These are all symbols of the gender norms and the trappings of what it meant to be a girl in her world. And she takes those off in order to then reach Paul. And then she kisses his chains, which I think is so beautiful.

ELISE:

And then as you mentioned, she's caught and then her mom says, burn her, which is just a lovely detail.

MEGGAN:

Yeah. Well, I love her mom as the absolute ultimate example of the patriarchal mother. This is the mother who has fully, fully drank the Kool-Aid and is so embedded in the idea that her worth can only be established via crumbs of her husband who might be powerful, or she might have children who then she can leverage for more power by marrying them off to more powerful families. It's like these scraps. And she's an example also within myself, that voice that wants to doubt. For me, I really felt like I had to exorcize my inner Thecla because there were a lot of times throughout this book where I questioned putting my own personal story in it, and I questioned myself as a writer, which is, that's been a theme throughout my life. But for this book, it was really, really loud and you think it would get better over time, but you meet new versions of it, louder hairier beast steer versions of it.

And I feel like for me was really interesting because I had that example of her mom, I could really recognize her within me. It was a certain tenor and a certain awareness that I was able to really thread out that voice that usually I'd be slightly unconscious of. And so I would start to diminish what I want to say. I would start to feel like, oh, I can't do this. And I would fall into a funk or a writer's block. And with this, I just was really aware of when she would enter my space and I would just hear her doubt and her conform write the way that male theologians write or write the way that is more socially acceptable or digestible. And it was really interesting to be able to reach a place where I could make peace with that and move beyond that. So she represents really the ways that we have integrated the patriarchy inside us to silence ourselves in what might be true for us in the way that we need to do it, right? Because we have so few female theologians throughout millennia, and for me it was so critical to include the body, my personal physical experience and transformation with this text. So

ELISE:

Well, and I think that you see this in the church, the hypocrisy of people who profess to be really religious is that they go and they have this theoretically, this vertical experience, and then they repent or they do whatever they do. I don't even know really what happens, but they go to church, hear or listen, I'm not sure which, and then go out into their horizontal daily life and they don't live. It becomes this abstract idea punch card of Look at me, I go to church. And then they are not living those values, let's just say that in their daily life. And it's hard, right? It's hard. Being human is messy and hard.

MEGGAN:

Of course. But it's exactly that. It's that separation that I feel if we can integrate both the reality that we are fully human and fully divine, to me, it has never felt honest, authentic, to write in a way where I'm editing out my humanity, even in a spiritual or theological text.

ELISE:

No, you have to live it. And part of that is the proof of how hard it is to live these things. It goes back to the seven powers and encountering those climates in your life every day, your own darkness, your own clinging, whatever it is, this is what it is to be human, and this is the practice. So to that end, I think it's so important to humanize all of this stuff that otherwise feels theoretical.

MEGGAN:

Yeah, yeah.

ELISE:

Alright, so Thecla doesn't burn. She's saved by a miracle. Hers is a story of these many, many miracles, right?

MEGGAN:

There's three official miracles. But I think what's so interesting is that that first one arrives when essentially she saved herself. You could really read this text as one of the messages is that we have to save ourselves. Not only that, she ends up baptizing herself in the end saving herself, but it's the simple gesture of her faith when she's stripped naked and about to get onto the pyre, she makes the symbol of the cross and then this strange, who knows what sudden monsoon comes and pours down and puts out the fire. But essentially it's her actions, it's her alignment with what she is hearing from within her. It's her following steadfast to what she knows she has to do in her life. That's what keeps saving her, is that fidelity to that inner voice, even when the whole world around her is telling her she's heretical and villainous for doing it

ELISE:

Well, and then I want people to buy the book. So we're not going to tell you the whole story of Paul and Thecla and the Miracles, but then at the end, one of the miracles, right? She's saved by the women.

MEGGAN:

Exactly. Exactly.

So the third miracle that arrives happens after the women join in the effort of feckless saving herself. So she baptizes herself, and by doing that, it's like she's modeling the authority that she's reclaimed. And the scripture says specifically that it's the women in the arena that contribute suddenly with whatever they happen to have on hand, which is just so scrappy and gorgeous this moment, they're throwing rose petals and cinnamon and nard and the wild beasts are lulled to sleep. And so Thecla is saved. And to me, that moment is so timeless because within the context of the first century, women did not have the right to vote and they couldn't hold political office and they were essentially property. They weren't viewed within the Roman Empire as whole human beings, which I think is so important that the gospel of Mary keeps referring to the disciples as true human beings.

It's really interesting because there's this acknowledgement that no matter whether you're male or female or Jew or gentile, landowner freed or slave, you are a true human being. You're all one in Christ. That was a very loud message that they were practicing by coming together and breaking bread together in these small little rebellious groups. And in that moment, it was those with the least amount of power, the fact that it was the women in the crowd that stood up to try to participate in her freedom in saving Bela. To me, it's this formula that there's no amount of powerlessness that's without power once unified, because that's also a theme within the Gospel of Mary. That's a message that's trying to be conveyed to us, is that it's the unifying that then allows us to reclaim that power that was always ours to begin with.

ELISE:

So beautiful. And this brings us back to the beginning of our conversation with this idea that there are, as the Southern Baptist Convention would say, there's no female leaders, no precedent, but so she baptizes herself. And at one point earlier in the story, Paul's like, you're not ready. Right? You're not ready. And then there rejoined. Yeah. And he sits down and lets her speak, which is so appropriate, obviously, but also very beautiful, right?

MEGGAN:

Yeah. Oh yeah. He's modeling something tremendous to hear. Finally, from those with less power, what it means to reclaim power, what it is for them, because that's a story we haven't heard before and it's why the scripture was so popular, is because it's ultimately about the ascendancy of the powerless, and that's what makes it so important. But then after Thecla goes through all these trials, she cuts her hair short and she creates garments for herself in the fashion of a man, which I love. And then she's really playing with gender, which was also characteristic of these early groups is really challenging all of these gender norms that the Roman Empire depended on for people to follow. And then she goes to see Paul because she misses him and he thinks she's knee deep in another trial, a whole bunch of people following her, and he is like, oh God, not again.

But Thecla is like the power that worked with you in your baptism is the same power that worked with me and mine. To me, that's such a mic drop. She essentially is saying that she realized this authority, this spiritual authority to be able to then speak about Christ always existed inherently within her. It was something that had called to her from within the very beginning. And it's what made her so threatening to men in positions of power is because she remembered this truth that we are only as far from power as we are from our own embodiment.

So when she gets there and she gives this talk, everyone there had expected to hear from Paul, and then instead Paul's like, I want you to hear from Thecla. And Thecla tells her story, and the scripture says, Paul greatly marvel whatever she said, and I love imagining what she might've said, but then he says that he wants her to go and preach the word of Christ. And so that is the moment of official transmission from Paul to Thecla. So I get chills whenever I talk about that moment because hundreds of years later, it will be established that there is a absolutely unbroken chain of male succession of that spiritual authority going all the way back to Christ. And here we have, I think the most dangerous moment and why the acts of Paul and Thecla was not included in the New Testament is that Paul is one of the most infamous, not infamous, the most famous, well-known, infamous is bad, right?

ELISE:

Yeah.

MEGGAN:

Okay. Well, so in feminist circles, that rings a little bit true because Paul supposedly said that women should be silent in church, but it's very unlikely that it was actually him.

ELISE:

Wasn't it written much later and added?

MEGGAN:

Yeah, it was written much later, and it was I think one of those moments where the church wanted to bring him to heal. They wanted Paul to sound more like the kind of patriarchal structure that was being created within the church rather than the Paul that's here in the acts of Paul and Thecla, who's this somewhat reluctant, but a mentor to Thecla becoming a minister and then ultimately gives her the transmission to go and preach the word of God. And so I think that moment is really what the church now even today would find so threatening about the scripture, which is why I think she was ultimately erased, is because she was given transmission. She's one of the earliest ministers

ELISE:

Question. In our final final minutes we opened talking about fear and its relationship to faith or not, and it seems like Bela expresses no fear at any point, even when she is about to be burned alive and about to be ripped apart by wild animals. What is that just an absolute faith?

MEGGAN:

Yeah, I thought of that a lot because I don't identify with that at all.

ELISE:

Yeah, me neither scare shitless.

MEGGAN:

That's everything. I think I feel those moments when, I don't know if you've ever had them, but when you're so deep in meditation, you reach that place where everything's all right and everything's been all right. Not because it will be right, not because things are going to work out in a way where we are going to feel all right, but because we somehow tap into a love that can hold it right. The love that we know is going to meet us there, even in that moment when everything goes wrong, I definitely identify with that. It's just so hard to get to and it's so hard not to be pulled from in our world. But I do think that is a really profound example of embodiment, of just deeply the opposite of what we have ever been taught and have ever been told, right? The of Holies is actually inside our own heart.

I feel like she's such a model of what that can look like, that kind of just, she's naked often in her scripture. And for me, that's symbolic, right? That's where it's not that she isn't terrified, it's that she isn't terrified of her own vulnerability of the fact that she's so incredibly vulnerable and she embraces that so fully that it's like there's nothing left. All that's left is what remains. No matter what happens, which is the love within her, that's it. She's just that walking ember of that vision within her of love. It's really what guides her.

ELISE:

I love Meggan and I really indebted to her for one her work, but also just being my friend and answering all of my questions over the years as I've been trying to muddle through this, because while she is a Harvard trained theologian, I'm not. I wanted to come back to the powers briefly because I think they're so fascinating and I love the way that Megan interprets them. Okay, so the seven powers are darkness, desire, ignorance, eagerness for death, the realm of the flesh, the foolish wisdom of the flesh and wrathful wisdom and in honor best behavior. I offer Chris's interpretation of these seven powers, but I also love the way that Meggan interprets them, darkness being relatively straightforward, and she with desire, which is the next one, she renamed desire to clinging because which I think is really important because I think for women in particular who are compelled to not want anything for ourselves or to not desire, it feels like a little bit of a cul-de-sac for us, but clinging, which is actually very Buddhist as well, I think I like her reframe.

She keeps ignorance as it is, which is in her mind the classic inability to see ourselves fully to only focus on what's wrong with others and not what might need healing or to be changed about ourselves. The fourth power is described as eagerness for death, which she thinks is gluttony in the list of seven deadly sins. And she essentially says it's excess when we want excessive amounts of anything, anything that threatens our health. The fifth power is the realm of the flesh. This just renamed as lust, but I think that she renames it forgetting, which I like, which is that the opportunity with this power each time we forget to remember that the body is the soul's chance to be here. The sixth power is foolish wisdom of the flesh. And she doesn't like this because I think for so many of us, we've been dissociated from our bodies and as she says, and so many others do, Bessel Van Der Kolk, the body doesn't lie.

So she renamed it the body and that it's about listening inwardly to how the body informs us. The seventh power is wrathful wisdom and it's really rage, which she talked about a little bit. And that rage isn't to necessarily be acted on, but to give us clarity about when our boundaries are being crossed. So obviously there's a big Venn diagram between Megan's work and my work and Mary's gospel. And the seven deadly sins are the meta structure of on our best behavior. And she has a big formative power in that book. So The Girl Who Baptized Herself is her latest, and then also Mary Magdalene Revealed, which is her first and is also a very powerful book. If you like today's episode, there are several ways to support the show. I produce it myself, so this helps me to continue to make it. First, please rate and review the show on the platform where you listen and consider sharing this episode with a friend.

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