Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic Women: Ancient Practices from the Lost Gospels (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798296477859)

Mary Magdalene was named the apostle to the apostles before she was named anything worse. This book recovers her, and the women alongside her, from the sources that prove it.

For nearly two thousand years, the women of the early Christian movement have been remembered through a single distorted image: the penitent harlot, the silent witness, the supportive wife. The actual record tells a different story, and the record has been available, in print and free of cost, for over a century. It has simply not been read.

This book reads it. Drawing on the public-domain sources recovered by the great editor-scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it presents nine women of the first three Christian centuries as the surviving texts actually describe them: as teachers, visionaries, theologians, and martyrs whose authority the institutional church found difficult and in most cases suppressed.

You will meet Mary Magdalene as she appears in the Coptic Pistis Sophia in G.R.S. Mead's translation of 1921, asking thirty-nine of the forty-six questions put to the risen Christ. You will meet Salome in the fragments of the lost Gospel of the Egyptians preserved by Clement of Alexandria, asking the Lord how long death shall reign. You will meet Sophia, the fallen and recovered divine Wisdom, as Irenaeus and Hippolytus described her in the patristic refutations they wrote against the schools that taught her. You will meet Helena of Tyre as the prototype of that fallen Wisdom in the Simonian system that may be the earliest Gnostic theology we have. You will meet Martha and Mary of Bethany as Meister Eckhart read them in his famous sermon, where Martha is the more mature. And you will meet Perpetua of Carthage in her own words, from the prison diary she wrote before her death in the arena in 203, in J. Armitage Robinson's 1891 edition.

Each chapter closes with a contemplative practice drawn from or consonant with the tradition it describes. The practices make no promises. They are disciplines of attention, drawn from the older tradition that judged such work by whether, over time, it made the practitioner more humble, charitable, and patient.

What this book is not. It is not a channeled message, a sacred-sexuality manual, a secret-bloodline thesis, or another assembly of the modern New Age elaborations that have grown up around these figures. The Nag Hammadi codices recovered in 1945 are noted as a confirmation of what the earlier sources had already established, but they are not used as a source for any quotation or doctrine. Every text on which the book rests was available in print and in the public domain before 1928. The full list of sources, with editions and the public archives that hold them free of charge, is given in the appendices.

For the reader willing to be patient. The contemplative life is slow work, undertaken over years. The reader who comes looking for transformation by Tuesday has misunderstood. The reader who comes looking for the names, the texts, the dates, and the discipline behind what these women preserved will find them here, sourced, named, and traceable to free archives where they may be verified.

The recovery of the women of the early Christian centuries did not require the manuscript discoveries of 1945. It had substantially been accomplished by 1928, by scholars whose names this book has been at pains to honor. What was needed was a careful reader to bring the recovery forward. That reader is invited here.