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Presents an Interesting Point of View in a Scholarly Manner

Reviewer:Timothy Kearney (Roslindale, MA United States)

There has been quite a deal of interest in the person of Mary Magdalene in the past year due in no small part to Dan Brown's THE DA VINCI CODE.

Chances are if you see Karen's King's THE GOSPEL OF MARY MAGDALA: JESUS AND THE FIRST WOMAN APOSTLE in any bookstore, it will be grouped with other books about Mary Magdalene as a way of promoting Brown's book.
King's book is not meant to be fiction and readers looking for support of the information in Brown's nook will be somewhat disappointed. People with an interest in early Christianity and Biblical scholarship will not be disappointed, however.

King's book is a scholarly presentation of an early Christian document called "The Gospel of Mary." The portrait presented in this gospel is rather different from that of the Bible.
In the Gospel of John, the only follower who truly understands Jesus is "the Beloved Disciple" and in The Gospel of Mary, only Mary truly understands "the Savior" and the other disciples are fumbling around a bit. While this may be accurate, Peter and the apostles' foibles are well documented by the four evangelists, the Gospel of Mary is a post-resurrection account.

If we look at writings such as "The Acts of the Apostles" we see the Christian community as one where harmony with occasional misunderstandings is the order of the day. An alternate view is presented in "The Gospel of Mary." In this writing we see the befuddlement of some of the male apostles. As anyone should expect in a study of any ancient text, King provides context for understanding "The Gospel of Mary," looks at it as an individual piece, and compares and contrasts it to traditional Christianity.
She also includes a thorough bibliography, a tool much appreciated by people involved in research, and a glossary of sorts that will assist people who are not familiar with early Christian writings (or those of us who have not studied them in recent years). It is probably not necessary to state that King does not hold the point of viewe that Mary of Magdala was a reformed prostitute, a point of view that was correctly debunked years ago.

When I purchased this book, I was not looking for a new approach to Christianity, nor was I looking for hidden or lost documents of Christianity that will shed light on the errors of mainline Christianity for the past 1500 years. I am a Catholic with a keen interest in biblical studies looking for something that will give me a new perspective on scripture.
I have found in the actual "Gospel of Mary" spiritual snippets that are interesting, and King's scholarship gives me a slightly different perspective of early Christianity.

The book is interesting, but has not radically reshaped my understanding of Christianity, but I have always looked at the history of Christianity from a realistic and human point of view.

I also realize that some people interested in this book may be aware that "The Gospel of Mary" would have been considered heretical by Christian leaders in its day. Of course we need to remember that some of Origen's writings were deemed heretical at one time. Meister Eckhart was likewise called a heretic. Even Thomas Aquinas, who many consider the ultimate in orthodoxy, was considered questionable in his day.

Looking at "The Gospel of Mary" in a new way is appropriate and something King does rather well. With this in mind, I am not certain that the "Gospel of Mary" is necessarily a document that was suppressed without a good reason. First of all, it is not really a gospel. The canonical gospels and even The Gospel of Thomas are not post-Pentecost settings. The latest event in the canonical gospels is the Ascension. This is not the case of "The Gospel of Mary which seems to be post Ascension. "The Acts of Mary" rather than "The Gospel of Mary" may be a more accurate title of the work, since it resembles other early Christian writings in the "acts" genre.

Also, in an age when many people are feeling excluded in mainline Christianity, an ancient writing that proposes a different way of looking at Christianity is intriguing, but those who originally adhered to this work would have been exclusive, so to speak, seeing others as not understanding.
So this work that some are embracing because it is inclusive from our point of view, are actually embracing a work that in its day would have been exclusive. While the individual approach expressed by "The Gospel of Mary" is somewhat what we believe the interior life, which is so important in Christianity is all about, there is also a communal dimension which the canonical gospels stress, but is not really found in the fragments used in the translation of "The Gospel of Mary."

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