The Complete Idiot's Guide to Mary Magdalene

These days, with Mary Magdalene pretty much all the thing, we really do need someone to help us through the morass of information, misinformation, fact and fantasy going on in her name. Ms. (Miss?) Lesa Bellevie appears the perfect person to be that guide. I'm very happy with my copy.

Lesa Bellevie's book surveys and critiques a broad, comprehensive, and diverse array of studies and theories about Mary Magdalene, including the recent wave of scholarly and popular books on the subject. Bellevie utilizes well the clear format provided by the Complete Idiot's Guide series, such as multiple section headings on each page, making it easy to jump in anywhere and rapidly skim.

I'm a novice when it comes to Mary Magdalene, and I needed a place to start. This is it. A great big overview of the whole topic, and Mary Magdalene is certainly a topic. I'm using this one book to follow paths to other books of worth. Lucky me, starting here. By the way, I found it in the library at the university...now I have to buy it.

Mary Magdalene has come a long way since the bad old days of prostitution and weeping all over Christ's feet. We won't even discuss why prostitution exists in the first place...we'll just leave men to their needs, and then allow them to debase those who give them what they need, shall we? People really are odd. But as I was saying, the Magdalene has come a long way...and now it seems she might even be the mother of the children of Jesus. Although, if Jesus is God, aren't we all his children? Never mind that. Here we are, with a Mary Magdalene who begins to be all sorts of things to all sorts of people...and it's getting so complex, not to mention messy, it seems we need a guidebook to keep track of it all. And thank goodness, here's that guidebook. Who was the Magdalene anyway? Will we ever know? Even more importantly, who is she today? It's not really so much what she was that matters, but who she's becoming. As ever, we need our myths and in these days of rejecting the Stern and Judgmental Father, we're turning to the Mother. Hot damn...we're seeking the Goddess again. In the nick of time too. And since we need guideposts to take us back to Her, this is a damned good one. A must on everyone's Magdalene shelf. My shelf now holds this book, and about ten others...all chosen with great care. One of those others is Ki Longfellow's The Secret Magdalene: A Novel which I shall keep bleating on about until it gets read by everyone looking for a Magdalene that looks like THE Magdalene.

Prior to this, I had not read any of the books in the Idiot's Guide series, my closest estimation of what to expect being my experience with the computer oriented Dummies books. While I think that those books work as great introductions to material, they never seem to go beyond 'Hello World' enough to satisfy my needs. This book appears to go well beyond 'Hello World', and if one's expectations are limited to just the Biblical Mary Magdalene or to the matter of the Da Vinci Code, one will either be pleasantly surprised or possibly overwhelmed. With 2000 years of Mary Magdalene material to draw from, alot is covered here. Many views of the subject are presented, from the Biblical and 'Gnostic', to the more recent work of author Margaret Starbird, which The Da Vinci Code is partly based upon, and the 'feminist' Apostle of the Apostles view. There is also an entire chapter devoted to lesser known modern ideas surrounding Mary Magdalene. There are also different parts of the book that explore Mary Magdalene as a cultural figure, such as in art, books and movies, or how she is viewed in different branches of Christianity and different parts of the world and how one might personally celebrate her Feast Day. There is quite a bit of important supporting material, such as information used to illustrate the place of women in the 1st century, ideas that Mary Magdalene has been used to represent by early church fathers, and information about the other Biblical figures named Mary who Mary Magdalene has often been confused with. While sometimes this information doesn't always directly relate to Mary Magdalene, it does help to set up the world which she may have lived in. The book is extremely readable except for a few difficult parts, where the matter is otherwise pretty confusing anyways, such as when dealing with all the different Mary characters in the Bible. Fortunately this is rarely the case and the book is very accessible. The Appendices include a guide to looking up where Mary Magdalene is mentioned in the Bible and other places like Gnostic texts, which I have found very useful. There's alot more 'bang for the buck' than I expected and I think this title works as a great introduction to the rich history surrounding Mary Magdalene. Based on this I would also venture to check out other titles in this series.