Over the phone, Frykholm read aloud to me some of the passages that she had translated. “I am going to go up into one of those boats they have hired, and they will take care of me, even if they don’t want to,” the scribe reports Mary saying. “For I have this body that they will receive instead of passage.” The sexually explicit nature of the text startled me and provoked a laugh. After paying for her passage in sexual favors, Mary of Egypt arrived in Jerusalem. Yet when she attempted to accompany the pilgrims inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which sits on the storied site of Jesus’ Crucifixion and burial, she found herself barred from entering the church by a mysterious force. “She pushes and she shoves and she tries to get in, but she can’t,” Frykholm said. Then Mary of Egypt heard a voice calling her to cross the River Jordan into the desert. There, she lived as a hermit. Her clothes fell to shreds. Her flesh wasted away. Eventually, only her long locks covered her body, as, for forty-seven years, she prayed.
“Tradition has her an icon of repentance, but to me it’s much more interesting to view her as an icon of desire,” Frykholm said. “For her, one desire leads to another desire, and then this leads her to God.” Finally, in the desert, a monk named Zosimas encountered her. Zosimas, in the throes of a spiritual crisis, was seeking a wise man to give him counsel; he met Mary of Egypt, instead. “The great moment of the story is he’s going in search of a desert father, and finds a mother,” Frykholm said.
No one knows for sure what monastery Zosimas came from, but the monks of St. Gerasimos, which lies a few miles away, claim him as a spiritual father. This was why my father wanted to take me to St. Gerasimos, so that I could hear the story of Zosimas and Mary of Egypt directly from the monks. We never made it. My dad’s health continued to falter, and when he died, two years ago, I stopped sleuthing among the Marys. It had principally been a way to play with my dad, who found humor in the human errors that are rife in supposed matters of Biblical certainty. “Divine truth can as easily be revealed through myth and poetry as it can be through literal truth,” my dad liked to say, paraphrasing Charles Gore, a Bishop of Oxford.
Before my father died, he pointed out one more error by which Mary Magdalene had become entwined with Mary of Egypt. It began with the ancient naked icon. During the course of centuries, this image of a shriven prostitute became conflated with Magdalene. In approximately 1455, the Italian master Donatello carved a wooden figure called the “Penitent Magdalene”: emaciated, barefooted, and dressed in what looks like feathers but is, in fact, hair. In 1460, Antonio del Pollaiuolo followed suit, painting Magdalene ascending to heaven as a kind of human sheepdog with well-muscled arms. Around the year 1565, the Venetian Renaissance painter Titian updated the “Penitent Magdalene,” representing her as a zaftig figure with milky skin, her eyes still cast skyward in prayer, corkscrew curls cascading into her décolletage. A decade later, El Greco depicted his Penitent Magdalene with a nipple peeking out.
This visual narrative, of Magdalene as a half-naked woman in prayerful penance, continues through Caravaggio’s sexy and ambiguous “Mary Magdalen in Ecstasy,” from 1606, and Peter Paul Rubens’s tableau “Christ and Penitent Sinners,” in which a foregrounded Magdalene, wound in tresses of her hair, kneels at Jesus’ feet. In December, 2024, the Italian art restorer and researcher Sara Penco discovered a figure she argues is Mary Magdalene on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Michelangelo’s version, Magdalene’s golden hair flows over her shoulders, exposing a bony clavicle as she leans forward to kiss the cross.
The most intriguing elements of Magdalene’s story remain the most mysterious. Among them is a Gospel written in her name, first discovered in a Cairo bazaar in the late eighteen-hundreds. Although, like so many Biblical narratives, the Gospel of Mary was excluded from the canon, scholars contend that the text was in wide circulation among Jesus’ early followers.
What I love most about the Gospel of Mary is how it ends: with an argument. After Jesus’ death, Mary Magdalene comes to his disciples to tell them that he has given her secret teachings. But Andrew and Peter question whether Jesus would really have done such a thing. “How is it possible that the Teacher talked in this manner with a woman about secrets of which we ourselves are ignorant?” Peter asks. “Must we change our customs and listen to this woman? Did he really choose her and prefer her to us?”
On close reading, this is funny. Peter isn’t just questioning her; he’s complaining about how much work the disciples will be required to do if they have to change their practices based on these new teachings. In response, Magdalene begins to cry. The Coptic gives us, “Mary wept.” The sentence mirrors the moment that Jesus wept when he found out that Lazarus had died. Her tears seem to soften the disciples, who listen as Mary Magdalene begins to lay out the teachings. She recounts asking Jesus how to reach God: through the psyche or the spirit? Neither, Jesus tells her. God speaks to us through what Jesus calls the nous, which is often translated from the Greek as “mind,” but is perhaps more accurately thought of as consciousness.
This alternative vision of Mary Magdalene as a companion to Jesus and as a spiritual teacher lends itself to modern interpretation. One summer evening, I joined Meggan Watterson—a Magdalene scholar who holds a degree from the Harvard Divinity School—at MNDFL, a meditation gym in Brooklyn. The author of the book “Mary Magdalene Revealed,” Watterson was there to offer the ancient instructions of Mary’s secret gospel. Beyond an airy entry hall, where the gym sold turmeric tea and pricey strands of prayer beads, about thirty women leaned against black BackJacks or sat upright on meditation cushions. Watterson, with her chin dropped to her chest, directed the group to glance into their hearts to search for the nous, much as she believed the ancient group of Christians called the Hesychasts did. The practice allowed the meditators to view their devotion as closely tied to Magdalene. “I’m always intrigued by how people identify with Biblical characters, whether it’s Jesus’ mother or Mary Magdalene,” Pagels told me. “It’s an intimate relationship. They become like family members.”
Authenticity, however, like certainty, can be a trap. For serious scholars, cautionary tales surrounding claims of Mary Magdalene abound. None is more painful than that of Karen L. King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, who, in 2012, held a press conference near the Vatican to announce the discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment. The fragment, which she called the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, substantiated her theory that Mary Magdalene may have been Jesus’ confidant and disciple. The papyrus scrap contained only fourteen lines. Many were broken. It read, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife . . .’ ” It went on, “She is able to be my disciple.” King argued that there seemed to be enough evidence to suggest that Jesus was speaking of Mary Magdalene, and probably defending her authority to a group of men. In 2016, a journalist named Ariel Sabar revealed that the fragment was almost certainly a fake, crafted, perhaps, to draw in King specifically, because her hypothesis about Magdalene’s role in Jesus’ life was well known. After reading Sabar’s investigation, King acknowledged that it “tips the balance towards forgery.”
More recently, after publishing part of her master’s thesis in the Harvard Theological Review, a relatively new Magdalene scholar, Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, has garnered significant attention. Based on her reading of Papyrus 66, thought to be the world’s oldest complete copy of the Gospel of John, and other crucial manuscripts, Schrader Polczer, an assistant professor of New Testament at Villanova University, argues that a second-century scribe deliberately suppressed the role of Mary Magdalene. A textual analysis of John 11 and 12, in which Jesus travels to the city of Bethany to visit Lazarus’s family, shortly after his friend’s death, reveals “some very strange scribal activity,” Schrader Polczer said. Her scholarship has helped decipher some largely forgotten clues in the ancient papyrus, discovered in Egypt in the early nineteen-fifties, about why a woman’s name has been crossed out and her character split in two.
Schrader Polczer followed an unlikely path to becoming a Biblical scholar. A former singer-songwriter from Portland, Oregon, she won the first Pantene Pro-Voice competition, in 2001, several months after graduating from Pomona College. That summer, as part of the prize, Schrader Polczer, who went by the name Libbie Schrader, opened for the pop star Jewel onstage in New York City’s Central Park, performing a song called “Blood Red Moon.” “It was about a late period,” Schrader Polczer told me.
Schrader Polczer moved to Brooklyn and spent the next decade trying to break through in the music business. She had some successes—she appeared on an episode of “Gilmore Girls”—but mostly supported herself by teaching piano and playing college gigs. Facing a professional crossroads, Schrader Polczer, who’d been baptized in the Episcopal Church, walked through the wrought-iron gates of the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph, in Prospect Heights. There, she prayed in the garden, surrounded by disintegrating statues of Jesus’ mother. Asking for direction, she heard a clear, if surprising, response: “Maybe you should talk to Mary Magdalene about that!” In 2011, she began working on an album called “Magdalene.” In a music video for the title track, Schrader Polczer, wearing jeans and a white crocheted top, returns to the cathedral churchyard “to ask for the blessing of the Magdalene,” as her title song instructs. She sings,
