Gender and gnosis: Making Mary male, making Jesus female

In the final saying of the Gospel of Thomas (logion 114), Jesus speaks of needing to make Mary male so that she can enter the kingdom. Similarly, the male/female dyad is interpreted spiritually as a positive/negative opposition by many of today's traditional societies. This paper explores maleness with respect to Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary from literary, symbolic and scientific perspectives, and considers recent medical rationalizations of Jesus's miraculous conception. Unexpected Gnostic and Christian parallels are found in the mythic/ritual structure of the Gimi people of Papua New Guinea, which encompasses the necessity of uniting sexual opposites in male form, as well as virgin birth. We also identify gender concepts relevant to the Coptic Gnostic writings in ancient Egyptian religion. The medieval feminization of Jesus – mainly achieved by interpreting the wound in his side as a vagina or breast – provides a later counterweight to the Gnostic masculinizing of Mary. Ultimately, it seems preferable to interpret the side-wound as a surgical incision through which the rib/Eve can be reinserted back into Adam, a transformation to a "dual-gender male" that restores the primal unity. For women, this unity is probably more constructively imaged as a female with a male core, a "phallic female" form of Eve; the template for this dates back at least to Neolithic times. Refractory paradoxes like these warn that gender-based analogies of spirit are inherently limited and must be transcended.