For fans of the Da Vinci Code, a prequel by the heroine

Seriously, had you heard that Mary Magdalene's finally gotten a chance to give her side of the story?

Well, sort of. The manuscript of the Gospel of Mary was discovered in 1945, one of several stories of Jesus' life from the first few hundred years after his death, now called the Gnostic Gospels. Funny how archaeology always seems so boring until something like this happens. Funny how the people who immediately built a spiritual practice around the new discovery were based in Los Angeles (true). Most of all, it's mind-boggling to think of how much more manifold the study of Jesus' life could be. It seems a little unfair to me, actually: most of us could readily spend the rest of our lives studying the Bible without achieving mastery or complacency, and continuing to learn. And to add more to the available body of knowledge? Come on!

The Gospel of Mary focuses on Mary Magdalene's leadership in the early Christian community, making it the only noncanonical (or, obviously, canonical) Gospel to deal so much with a female disciple. In a classic seventies-feminist storyline, it shows how Mary's authority was publicly questioned and undermined by Peter and other baddie male disciples, although Levi stood up for her (never mind, Mary, you don't need male affirmation to perform your ministry; you just keep doin' what you're doin'.)

Certain elements of the Gospel of Mary sound familiar, like Peter putting his foot in it: how classic is that? Others, though, are noticeable departures from the style of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For example, Jesus' mystical, nonconcrete quotes in the Gnostic Gospels are far from the grounded, reassuring voice of the familiar parables and teachings. Also, this is a bit more personal, but Mary Magdalene never struck me as the kind of person to cry over a leadership dispute. Neither she nor any female disciple are mentioned as crying at the foot of the cross or outside the tomb: they bravely placed their witnessing before their own feelings.

The Gnostic Gospels have the potential to blow canonical cohesion out of the water. I mean, talk about the Book of Judith and the Apocrypha (whatever, Protestants); no one even cares about those books, but here we have long stories about Jesus' life, containing things he may have said and done that we're not familiar with. Some people do think we should study and pray these books as we do the canonical Gospels, while others prefer to keep them in the historical realm, venerating only the texts with the sheen of long historical veneration.

It's a bit nerve-wracking to think about how easily the Bible could have been different from what we know today. Power struggles in the third century, really--but that doesn't mean I don't believe in it, or that I don't revere it as the word of God. Do I deposit you too often on the doorstep of "Good thing we have what's called faith?" Yup, I know I've seen this house before. But sometimes they give out good candy. And we do have to allow ourselves to come back and back to faith: not to give up on the wrangling of ideas or to pretend that they are not important, but to allow ourselves to know that only the most fundamental answers--the ones that we know so deeply we can't argue them--are the ones that really matter.


Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels is an exciting, thoughtful introduction to these texts, a modern classic. If your reaction, like mine, on reading it or reading this is to want to see the entire Gnostic Gospel texts, there's a comprehensive archive at gnosis.org, run by the L.A. people, actually, whom I didn't mean to diss.