alabaster jar

Beginning in the Middle Ages, Mary Magdalene's primary emblem in [art] has been a jar or box, usually made of alabaster. She is never named specifically in the Gospels as a woman who carries an alabaster jar; there are two potential paths by which this attribution took place:

• Mary Magdalene was one of the women who went to anoint Jesus' body after the crucifixion:

  "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." (Mark 16:1)

  "Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them." (Luke 24:1; Mary Magdalene was named as one of these women in Luke 24:10.)

• Mary Magdalene was associated with [Mary of Bethany] as the woman who performed the [anointing], an event during which an [alabstron], or alabaster vessel, was used to pour perfume on Jesus. The anointing scene appears in all four New Testament gospels, but the alabaster vessel only appears in the [synoptics]. In John, no mention is made of the container used during the anointing.

  "There came unto him a woman having an alabaster box of very precious ointment, and poured it on his head, as he sat at meat." (Matt 26:7)

  "And being in Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at meat, there came a woman having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head." (Mark 14:3)

  "And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of ointment..." (Luke 7:37)

Mary Magdalene's legendary alabaster jar (or box, as it appears in the King James Version of the Bible) became a subject worthy of its own interest during the Middle Ages as a relic. Christian pilgrims visiting Saint Victor in Marseilles were able to catch a glimpse of the famous jar(1). Other locations claimed the unguents that had been contained in the vessel(2), and one of the apocryphal infancy gospels even reported that Mary Magdalene's alabaster jar held an altogether different kind of relic: the holy foreskin.(3).

Today, the alabaster jar is almost inseparable from the figure of Mary Magdalene, particularly since the popularity of Margaret Starbird's 1993 book, The Woman With The Alabaster Jar. Starbird discusses the possibility that Mary Magdalene herself was the vessel for Christ's blood in the form of his children, thus making her the [Holy Grail]. The alabaster jar is thus not only a reference to Mary Magdalene's role as anointer, but also a symbol by which Starbird's readers can understand Mary Magdalene's hidden identity.

Footnotes:

1. Jansen, Katherine Ludwig. The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages, p. 329. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

2. ibid.

3. ibid.

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