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Resurrecting Mary Magdalene: historians, mystics and artists debate her significance amid a new surge of popular devotion.

Article Excerpt
Two years ago in France, shortly after my 50th birthday and two years after a painful divorce, I became a pilgrim. Though I did not put a scallop shell on the brim of my cap or walk with a staff, I asked Mary Magdalene to be the patroness of my quest for renewed faith and a healed heart.

Her unfailing love for Jesus inspired my attachment to her. The mystery of her identity, however, impelled me to study the growing debates over her identity and relationship with Jesus.

Mentioned more times in the New Testament than any other woman, she has arguably been the most misrepresented of all Jesus' disciples. She is the subject of intense interest these days; indeed, I discovered a movement of devotees who for different reasons have turned to her as a muse, a champion and a spiritual friend.

Over the past two years, I have interviewed and corresponded with these followers as well as some of the leading scholars, writers and artists inspired by Mary Magdalene. As a result of those interactions, I see her now represented in four distinct "faces," a woman of many epithets.

For centuries, she was considered "the woman with the alabaster jar," a reformed prostitute, despite the absence of biblical reference to her as such. This Magdalene has few advocates today.

In early Christian communities, she was seen as a woman of courage and wisdom. Called "Apostle to the Apostles" for bravely bearing witness of Jesus' resurrection, she was also known among Gnostics as "the embodiment of Sophia."

Since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), she has been officially affirmed as "Apostle to the Apostles," both in the new Catholic missal of 1969 and by Pope John Paul II in his 1988 encyclical Dignitatum Mulieris.

In medieval Europe, particularly among the Cathars and some aristocratic families, it was widely believed Mary Magdalene was Jesus' lawful bride, a sister to Martha and Lazarus of Bethany, mother to a "holy bloodline."

Some contemporary authors, such as Clive Prince and Lynn Picknett in The Templar Revelation, even assert Mary Magdalene was probably a priestess of the Egyptian goddess Isis and a member of a still-existing sect known as the Mandeans, now located in Iraq, who believe John the Baptist to be...