Jesus, Salome and playing the dozens

 
Yesterday, it being Easter, we read the account of Jesus’s resurrection in Mark. Mark is not my favorite gospel, but I like the rawness. I like the side references to witnesses, as though Jesus was seen as a fait divers, a story in True Detective.  Mark’s is truly the tabloid gospel, and it has a tabloid ending, complete with various provincial, cultish promises by the risen Jesus. For instance, that you can take up snakes and they won’t bite you – which is not exactly the most useful quality one can imagine –  that you can heal the sick and cast out demons – which is again a nice thing, but not exactly cosmically important - and that anyone who doesn’t believe is condemned. On the whole, Mark’s story seems to just miss the occasion.
This time, I read the names of the women who come to the tomb and find the rock rolled away and realised how strange they are. “When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body.” In the King James version, which has the sound, the vibe for me, the sentence reads: “And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.”
When I was a boy in my Southern Baptist bible school, I dutifully learned that there was twelve disciples. They are painted by Leonardo, they are proverbially twelve in our phrase and fable, and I did not think about it. Of course, more aware of gender as I hope we all are, we know that the actual count is at least 15, as the above women should  also be counted as disciples. They seem to have ventured more, in following Jesus from Galilee, since wandering women were, in an Eastern Mediterranean society like Judea, viewed with an evil eye.
Salome, according to a study of 247 recorded names of Jewish women in Palestine in the century around Jesus’s life, was the name of 61 women, and Mary was the name of 58 – almost half of the women, then. But this Salome – not to be confused with the dancer so beloved of the decadents – is a floating signifier in the mythos. There is some tradition that she is Jesus’s stepsister, if you buy the story that Joseph was married and had kids before, as a widower, he met Jesus’s mother, Mary. Others call her Mary’s sister, which would make her Jesus’s aunt.
She is given some odd lines in the apocryphal writings. The oddest is in the Gospel of Thomas: “Jesus said, "Two will repose on a couch: one will die, one will live. Salome said, "Who are you, O man? Like a stranger (?) you have gotten upon my couch and you have eaten from my table." Jesus said to her, "It is I who come from that which is integrated. I was given (some) of the things of my father." <. . .> "I am your female disciple." <. . .> "Therefore I say that such a person, once integrated, will become full of light; but such a person, once divided will become full of darkness.” This passage, admittedly, sounds like the first draft of some Leonard Cohen song. It probably has to do with the notion of the androgyn, the overcomer of the sexes – a right pertinent person in this age of persecuting the transsexual. Lets just say that the Gnostic Jesus would not have approved of the latter.
Clement cites some text which some scholars believe was originally in some version of Mark. This is another enigmatic dialogue. The banter between Salome and Jesus has a certain screwball comedy speed, as if they were doing the dozens:
“Salome asked the Lord: “How long shall people die?” He answered: “As long as you women bear children.” Salome said: “I did well then in not bearing.” The Lord answered and said: “Eat every herb, but that which is bitter do not eat.”
This, I suppose, makes a little more sense when projected against the dictum that there is no giving or taking of husbands and wives in the Kingdom of Heaven.  But it makes most sense if we suppose that by this part of the road movie, Jesus and Salome have a question and answer patter down. “As long as you women bear children” seems less magisterial than wisecracking, and Salome’s answer, mutatis mutandis, would def find a place in a Preston Sturges’s Lady Eve.
I’m playing the rimshot here. Hope all had a happy Easter.