The Magdalene Gospel

This wonderful book has served as inspiration for women in my parish who value the positive examples of the discipleship of women and used them to enhance their role as modern women disciples despite the sexism of the institutional Roman Catholic Church.

The Bible tells us that females were there, also, when Jesus walked the Earth and proclaimed the Kingdom of God. Though men wrote the Gospels and have received most of the attention among Jesus' disciples, there were the women, also, and it's their perspective that Mary Ellen Ashcroft takes in this slim hardcover. In a quick, easy-to-follow read, Ashcroft adopts the first person for each character who speaks in this novel: Mary Magdalene, Salome, Martha, Joanna, Rhoda and others. Each tells the effect Jesus had on her life. The tone is dark, dramatic and loving, and the women show emotions that reflect not just a student attitude toward their Teacher, but also motherly and sisterly feelings. The most captivating story to me was the telling of the Biblical woman (Ashcroft names her Lydia) with a longtime discharge of blood, who pushes through a crowd to touch Jesus' robe and be healed. Like novelist Margaret George, Ashcroft sees a Mary Magdalene who is a smarter-than-average female of her time, and is tormented by various nightmares and demons before Jesus calls her to follow Him. Ashcroft address the age-old assumption of Mary Magdalene as prostitute: "Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute," she writes, "but a young woman straining at the confines of her culture's restrictions on women, and God alone knows how many women like her have been driven to madness over the centuries. Her reputation as a prostitute has been propagated by men who wanted to believe that anything might be possible of a woman who won a place so near the Christ." From a female perspective ... nice. This book is fiction, a glimpse at what the women who followed Jesus MIGHT have felt and said to each other. I found it respectable, plausible and enjoyable.

Reading this book was a profound faith experience. Through her fictional narrative, Mary Ellen Ashcroft takes the reader beyond the stark simplicity of the Gospel accounts and explains the depth of meaning of the lives of the women in the Gospels. The "woman with a hemorrhage," for example, is given life through Ashcroft's moving descriptions of what it MEANT to a first-century Jewish woman to live with a "hemorrhage" - how it made her ritually unclean, shunned by all society, and how her unauthorized touch of Jesus' robe made HIM ritually unclean as well. For readers unfamiliar with the intricacies with the ancient Jewish faith, this book breathes life into Jesus' story, making him a real, true friend of women and a radical thinker with regard to "women's rights" - a concept which didn't even exist at the time.

Sometimes the truth smacks us hard between the eyes. It hurts, but we are better for the encounter. That's the way it is with Dr. Ashcroft's work.Drawing extensively upon Biblical, archeological and sociological resources, Professor Ashcroft draws a vivid picture for us of the women who followed Jesus. Her end-notes are generous and irrefutable.Dr. Ashcroft helps us to understand how Jesus' message and ministry liberated these women from unjust cultural and religious bonds. His presence led to freedom for them just as surely as it did for the poor, the sick, the demon possessed, the Gentiles, and all the others oppressed by the religious and secular authorities of his day.Many Biblical scholars have argued that Jesus' angry exchange with the money changers in the Temple led to his crucifixion. Dr. Ashcroft, subtlely, demonstrates that the incident in the Temple courtyard was part of a larger constellation of his empowering the oppressed and standing against the oppressors, which ultimately led to his execution. In the end, the powerful men of first century, Pallestinian, Jewish society simply could not afford to allow this trouble-maker to hang around. He was just too threatening to their interests to be allowed to live.Dr. Ashcroft, implicitly, argues that we have not often heard this liberating Gospel, because in a Church controlled by men it is both inconvenient and embarrassing. If that is so, then we have forgotten why Jesus came. If that is so, then we are as wrong, and as subject to judgement, as were the scribes and the Pharisees.

Outrageous. Unthinkable. The Gospel as experienced through the lives of the women who followed Jesus, that is The Magdalene Gospel. As a woman feeling out of sink with the rest of the world, no matter where she turns, how refreshing to realize we each in relation to Jesus have our own stories to tell. The Gospel accounts are filled with Jesus' friendships, encounters, even dependence upon women and yet most of my own focus has often been on the men who surrounded Jesus. Why is that? This book touched something deep inside me as a disciple of Jesus Christ, a story crying out to be heard, my own story aching to be told, how I see things, how I express my own relationship with Jesus, different from men and yet just as important and precious in Jesus' eyes. Truly an affirming book. I found myself identifying with Mary, Martha, Mary the Mother of Jesus and others as they each stood at the cross watching their dreams come crashing in around them, sharing their stories as they wait for the break of day, only to be first at the tomb to care one last time for his body in gratitude for all that He had meant to them and all that He did for them. They were no lesser disciples. They were His and they sought to follow their Master no matter what. Well researched. Well written. Readable and affirming for not only women but also men. We can be who we are as we follow the one who came to make us all we are meant to be.