An international team of twenty scholars under Edmondo F. Lupieri’s direction produced Mary Magdalene from the New Testament to the New Age and Beyond. While the historical figure of the Magdalene may be lost forever, the construction of her literary images and their transformations and adaptations over the centuries are a lively testimony to human creativity and faith. Different pictures of Mary travelled through time and space, from history to legend and mythology, crossed religious boundaries, going beyond the various Christianities, to become a “sign of contradiction” for many. This book describes a special case of biblical reception history, that of the New Testament figure of a woman whose presence at the side of Jesus has been disturbing for some, but proves to be inspiring for others.

Using New Testament "gematria, " symbolic number values encoded in the Greek phrases, the author reveals that the sacred couple was one of the essential pillars of early Christian teachings, before being denied by the architects of institutional Christianity and obscured by later Church doctrine.

Tells the story of Mary Magdalene from its beginnings in the New Testament up to the present time. This book is the first major work on Mary Magdalene in thirty years. It explores the many different Mary Magdalenes created for each age.

An expansive compilation of New Testament apocrypha in English translation, featuring fascinating but heretofore unpublished texts. New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 3, continues to unearth the vast diversity of Christian Scripture outside of the traditional canon. This new collection encompasses a broad range of languages—Greek, Church Slavic, Old English, Coptic, and more—and spans centuries, from the formation of the canonical New Testament to the high Middle Ages. The selections here represent some of the least studied apocryphal texts, many of which have not previously received an English translation or a critical edition. Notable newly edited and translated selections include The Martyrdom of Zechariah, The Decapitation of John the Forerunner, The Birth of John, The Revelation about the Lord’s Prayer, and The Dialogue of Mary and Christ on the Departure of the Soul. Each text is accompanied by a robust introduction, bibliography, and notes. Scholars of apocrypha, Scripture, and hagiography from a breadth of disciplines will find this an indispensable reference for their research and teaching. Contributors: Carson Bay, Mark Glen Bilby, Rick Brannan, Christian H. Bull, Slavomir Čéplö, Alexander D’Alisera, J. Gregory Given, Nathan J. Hardy, Brandon W. Hawk, Stephen C. E. Hopkins, Alexander Kocar, Brent Landau, Jacob A. Lollar, Christine Luckritz Marquis, Ivan Miroshnikov, Tobias Nicklas, Samuel Osborn, Stephen Pelle, Bradley Rice, Julia A. Snyder, Janet E. Spittler, James Toma, Péter Tóth, Sarah Veale, J. Edward Walters, Charles D. Wright, Lorne R. Zelyck

By comparing the intersecting histories of interpretation of Mary Magdalene, a first-century disciple of Jesus, and La Malinche, a sixteenth-century Mesoamerican woman enslaved by the Spanish conquistadores, Jennifer Vija Pietz critically evaluates the use of past lives to address contemporaneous concerns. She demonstrates how the earliest sources portray each woman as an agent in the foundation of a new community: Magdalene’s proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection helped form the first Christian community, while La Malinche’s role as interpreter between Spanish and native people during the Conquest helped establish modern Mexico. Pietz then argues that over time, various interpreters turn these real women into malleable icons that they use to negotiate changing conceptions of communal identity and norms. Strikingly, popular portraits develop of both women as archetypal whores who represent transgression—portraits that some women have experienced as harmful. Although other interpreters present contrary portraits of Magdalene and La Malinche as admirable emblems of female empowerment, Pietz argues that the tendency to turn real people into icons risks producing stereotypes that can obscure past lives and negatively affect people in the present. In response, she posits strategies for developing historically plausible and ethically responsible interpretations of people of the past.

From faithful apostle and seductress to feminist icon, Mary Magdalene's many complex roles in Christian history have fascinated us for 2000 years. Illustrated in full colour, this visual history reveals how images and presentations have created a Mary who is often far different from the real woman, the first witness of the Resurrection in the gospels, or even from her appearances in the works of the Church Fathers. Beginning with the earliest sources, uncover who the real Mary was, and what she meant in her own time, before embarking on a fast-paced tour of Magdalene's depictions in great works of art, forgotten masterpieces and contemporary visual culture. Considering relics, statuary, paintings, sculpture and recent works for stage and screen, discover how Mary Magdalene has been seen across time as a witness, a sinner, a penitent, a contemplative, a preacher and a patroness. Above all her complex roles, Mary has emerged as a powerful feminist icon, the closest person to Jesus himself, with a visual history as rich and varied as the roles she has fulfilled in numerous contexts of faith and worship for two millennia.

The annual Review of Biblical Literature presents a selection of reviews of the most recent books in biblical studies and related fields, including topical monographs, multi-author volumes, reference works, commentaries, and dictionaries. RBL reviews German, French, Italian, and English books and offers reviews in those languages.

Dehumanization has led to serious misinterpretation of the Gospels. On the one hand, Christians have often made Jesus so much more than human that it seemed inappropriate to ask about the influence other human beings had on him, male or female. On the other hand, women have been treated as less than fully human, their names omitted from stories and their voices and influence on Jesus neglected. When we ask the question this book does, what Jesus learned from women, puzzling questions that have frustrated readers of the Gospels throughout history suddenly find solutions. Weaving cutting edge biblical scholarship together with an element of historical fiction and a knack for writing for a general audience, James McGrath makes the stories of women in the New Testament come alive, and sheds fresh light on the figure of Jesus as well. This book is a must read for scholars, students, and anyone else interested in Jesus and/or in the role of ancient women in the context of their times.

Gnosticism is a countercultural spirituality that forever changed the practice of Christianity. Before it emerged in the second century, passage to the afterlife required obedience to God and king. Gnosticism proposed that human beings were manifestations of the divine, unsettling the hierarchical foundations of the ancient world. Subversive and revolutionary, Gnostics taught that prayer and mediation could bring human beings into an ecstatic spiritual union with a transcendent deity. This mystical strain affected not just Christianity but many other religions, and it characterizes our understanding of the purpose and meaning of religion today. In The Gnostic New Age, April D. DeConick recovers this vibrant underground history to prove that Gnosticism was not suppressed or defeated by the Catholic Church long ago, nor was the movement a fabrication to justify the violent repression of alternative forms of Christianity. Gnosticism alleviated human suffering, soothing feelings of existential brokenness and alienation through the promise of renewal as God. DeConick begins in ancient Egypt and follows with the rise of Gnosticism in the Middle Ages, the advent of theosophy and other occult movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and contemporary New Age spiritual philosophies. As these theories find expression in science-fiction and fantasy films, DeConick sees evidence of Gnosticism's next incarnation. Her work emphasizes the universal, countercultural appeal of a movement that embodies much more than a simple challenge to religious authority.

What can contemporary media fandoms, like Anne Rice, Star Wars, Batman, or Sherlock Holmes, tell us about ancient Christianity? Tom de Bruin demonstrates how fandom and fan fiction are both analogous and incongruous with Christian derivative works. The often-disparaging terms applied to Christian apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, such as fakes, forgeries or corruptions, are not sufficient to capture the production, consumption, and value of these writings. De Bruin reimagines a range of early Christian works as fan practices. Exploring these ancient texts in new ways, he takes the reader on a journey from the 'fix-it fic' endings of the Gospel of Mark to the subversive fan fictions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and from the densely populated storyworld of early Christian art to the gatekeeping of Christian orthodoxy. Using theory developed in fan studies, De Bruin revisits fundamental questions about ancient derivative texts: Why where they written? How do they interact with more established texts? In what ways does the consumption of derivative works influence the reception of existing traditions? And how does the community react to these works? This book sheds exciting and new light on ancient Christian literary production, consumption and transmission.