The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene - Softcover

Roberts, Michelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099507692 ISBN 13: 9780099507697

Publisher: Vintage Books, 2007

Synopsis

Once, there were four Gospels — by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Now there is a fifth — the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene.

In the parched soil of Provençe, a fifth gospel has been discovered. It is Mary Magdalene’s account of the teachings of Jesus, and her relationship with him. It is a book of revelation, for it unveils a new Christianity, one that embraces the female equally with the male and acknowledges and celebrates women’s spirituality. It is also a passionate story of love and search, of separation and rebirth, centred on Mary as the wellspring of womanhood.

The Secret Gospel of Mary Magdalene is a brilliant and moving vision that is also startlingly modern in its conclusions.

About this title

About the Author:

Michèle Roberts is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She was short-listed for the Booker Prize for her novel Daughters of the House.

From Publishers Weekly:

Inspired by the Nag Hammadi gospels, Roberts (Reader, I Married Him) has imagined a Gnostic gospel according to Mary Magdalene. Her Mary is a composite of three women mentioned in the biblical gospels, and she tells many of the same stories, albeit from a different perspective, as do the canonical gospel writers. In particular, a number of the miracles recorded in the Bible appear in this novel, and Roberts's intriguing take on these events follows no boring or predictable pattern. The Jesus of this novel is a genial, nonjudgmental sort who preaches inscrutable homilies, and happily keeps company with the excessively abstemious Simon Peter as well some more sexually liberated followers. While Roberts's Jesus and Mary both express some powerful ideas about the feminine aspect of God, the unity of the spiritual and the physical, and the legitimacy of ecstatic, revelatory experience, the novel leaves readers befuddled as to what the alternative Christianity this Jesus preached would look like. Nonetheless, it does succeed to some extent as an exploration of what early Christian feminism may have looked like, and is perhaps strongest and most poignant at those moments when Jesus' closest female companions find themselves subtly but inexorably excluded from leadership in the early church.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0099507692
• ISBN 13: 9780099507697
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256