PRINCESS AND PROPHET

Kakay Pamaran's work on Salome is a brilliant thesis using Historical Jesus Research methods. She argues that the "princess's dance which led to the prophet's death" tradition is part of a much bigger extra-canonical Salome Corpus that is still waiting to be collected, catalogued, and celebrated.

Salome and Mary Magdalene are two of the most attested interlocutors of Jesus in extra-canonical Christian literature. There are scholars whose research have shown how Mary Magdalene has been systematically erased from orthodox traditions. Kakay's research pursues a similar trajectory. There are copies of Mark where Salome completely disappears from the list of the women who discovers the empty tomb. Matthew’s and Luke's accounts do not mention Salome.

Many people today would call Magdalene a prostitute or adulteress and Salome a temptress or seductress. All these are false. Fake news. Kakay's work calls the church to repent of its violent sins of systematic erasuring and institutional forgetting.

More importantly, Kakay's work challenges the church to open the canon and discover the diverse, pluriform, and multivocal Christian traditions that make up the 99% that orthodoxy have marginalized.

Friends, please read Sunday's lection. Please read it in Greek if you are able. Salome, in the passage, was a GIRL. A LITTLE GIRL.

*Kakay Pamaran, Salvae Salome: Corpus, Myth, Canon, and the Quest for Salome (Union Theological Seminary, Philippines Master of Theology thesis, 2021).