Karen L. King, _The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle_

A LARGE MAJORITY of scholars think that the Mary of the Gnostic text "Gospel of Mary" is Mary Magdalene, but it is not at all likely that Mary Magdalene herself or anyone who knew her firsthand wrote the "Gospel of Mary." Insofar as the title of King's 2003 book implies she is writing about the actual woman mentioned in the Gospels, it's a little misleading; her book is actually a thorough analysis of the 2nd century "Gospel of Mary." It's a fascinating and illuminating analysis, however.

The book includes a translation of as much of the original text as survives (most of it is missing), a careful, cross-referenced analysis of the text's relationships to other Gnostic texts and to the New Testament, and a historical argument about what the text reveals about the early Christian church.

"The portrait of Mary as a repentant prostitute is pure fiction with no historical foundation whatsoever," King rightly emphasizes--as Susan Haskins and Philip Almond explained, that whole story was a bit of hermeneutical acrobatics by Pope Gregory I. When King goes on to say "The historical Mary of Magdala was a prominent Jewish follower of Jesus, a visionary, and a leading apostle," though, I was pulled up short by the last two nouns. 

The Mary of "Gospel of Mary" is certainly a visionary and a leading apostle, but to say the historical Mary was those things is to float presumptions as airy as Gregory's. One can imagine that some oral tradition of the historical Mary lies behind some of the details of "Gospel of Mary," perhaps. But we have no actual evidence of such an oral tradition. King or an editor should have tapped the brakes here, I think. 

But King's argument in Part III--that the Christian church of the first few generations was much less unanimous, much more roiled by controversy, than the usual narrative about those beginnings suggests--is utterly convincing. The grouching in 1 Timothy about keeping women from preaching only makes sense if we grant that women actually were preaching, King argues, and "Gospel of Mary" probably does give us an idea of what that preaching may have been like.