"She was the sinner who washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair." "Her name was Mary Magdalene." "But has Mary been the victim of one of the worst character assassinations in history." "New evidence reveals not only that Jesus kissed her on the mouth but she may even have been the one chosen by him to pass on his message." "In this film we'll paint a new picture of the world's most famous prostitute." "Mary Magdalene's story is intimately linked with Jesus." "She plays a starring role in one of the most powerful and important scenes in the Gospels." "When Jesus is crucified by the Romans, Mary Magdalene is there at the foot of the cross, supporting him in his final terrifying moments and mourning his death." "Mary Magdalene... was there at the beginning of a movement that was going to transform the West." "Mary is not only present at the crucifixion." "She also discovers the empty tomb;" "and she is a witness to the resurrection." "She is the paradigm of the true Jesus follower." "But the Mary Magdalene that lives in our memories and especially in art is quite different." "She is often semi-naked or an isolated hermit repenting for her sins in the wilderness." "An outcast." "Her primary link with Jesus is as the woman washing and anointing his feet." "But we know her best as a prostitute." "The whole story of Mary as a... prostitute" " who is, fallen and redeemed, is a very powerful image of redemption... a signal that no matter how low one has fallen ...one can be redeemed" "Now new evidence suggests that Mary Magdalene was a very different woman to the one we think we know." "So who was the real Mary Magdalene?" "Although we know something about Jewish society in ancient Palestine 2000 years ago, we know very little about Mary herself." "She appears in all four of the gospels." "But the Bible provides no personal details of her age, status or family." "Her name, Mary Magdalene, gives us the first real clue about her." "It suggests that she came from a town called Magdala." "We do know there was place called Magdala in the ancient literature." "It occurs on not only of course in the New Testament," "But it also occurs in Jewish texts." "In fact there is still a place called Magdala, 200 kilometres north of Jerusalem, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee." "The full name of the town was Magdala Terichaea," "Magdala seems to mean tower and Terichaea means salted fish, so its full name might be the tower of salted fish" "And if the name of the town was 'Tower of Salted Fish', its no surprise that its main business was fishing." "As a woman living in Magdala, Mary may have worked in the fish markets." "If so, it would have been a hard life." "But is there any historical evidence for Mary as a prostitute?" "The first place to look in the Bible itself, yet surprisingly it never says she is one." "So the idea must have its roots elsewhere possibly in the reference in a Jewish text to the town of Magdala itself." "The Jewish text in question about Magdala is called 'lamentations raba' ...and all it says is that Magdala is judged by God and destroyed... because it was a place of fornication." "This may account for Mary's bad name." "It is possible that the description of Magdala as a place of fornication is the origin of the idea that arose in western Christianity that she was a prostitute..." "A spiral of social pressures might have caused Magdala's moral decline." "We know there were brothels elsewhere in the Mediterranean and Galilee was probably no exception." "It was part of the Roman Empire;" "which placed a heavy tax burden on families and often women paid the heaviest price." "The Roman conquest, and then the Roman lmperial Rule would have made quite a dramatic impact on Galilee... economically it would have brought the people into greater and greater tax burdens, and that would have put pressure on families." "As the families would begin to disintegrate we could begin to imagine the consequences of this spiral of indebtedness." "We could even imagine that the family sent a girl out as a debt slave." "When tax burdens were at their worst and a family could no longer pay off its debts, children were sometimes given up as slaves" "perhaps this was Mary Magdalene's fate and once she got under the control of a creditor, who had power over her life, power over her body, ...we could imagine the possibilities that bring us to a woman" "in Mary's potential situation." "With such a tough background, it's not hard to imagine that" "Mary might have been a prostitute." "But the evidence is purely circumstantial." "Her name, of Magdala, could suggest something else altogether." "Simply that she was unmarried." "A married woman would have carried her husband's name." "But Mary didn't, which implies that she was single." "There is nothing in the limited amount of material we have about Mary in the Gospel traditions that suggests she is married, she's not described as being a widow, and she also is not said to have any children." "2,000 years ago, an unmarried woman was viewed with suspicion, perhaps this isolated Mary but it wouldn't fully account for her negative image." "Could anything else in Mary's life have made her an outcast?" "The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary, which meant she was possessed by evil spirits." "The story begins when Jesus is preaching and healing people in Galilee." "Jesus was known as an exorcist." "In all of the gospels, one of the principle things he is doing in his campaign to do a renewal of Israel is exorcisms, alongside of healing, alongside of teaching, preaching that the kingdom of God is at hand." "At that time if someone was possessed, it was thought that they'd brought it on themselves." "So Mary would have received little sympathy for her problem." "People believed that the demons possess people who have done something wrong, and deserve to be possessed, whereas good virtuous people are protected from demon possession." "Many cultures, took possession to be a kind of message, where God was informing you that you had done something wrong and you needed to respond to that message by repentance or changing your style or a sacrifice at the temple, but there was some supernatural remedy." "Back then that's what people believed." "But now experts think it might have been a reaction to bullying and abuse." "Often, in anthropological studies, it's found that brutally oppressed young women have no recourse whatsoever, ...and if they try to fight back they'll just be beaten even more." "The only way they can effectively fight back is to adopt a demon personality;" "...it's the same kind of thing as our insanity defence, or that phrase, the devil made me do it" "...and it's a possibility that Mary Magdalene was responding to oppression and fought back by demon personalities." "And if so this might explain why Mary was single." "The fact that she was possessed by seven demons could indicate that she wasn't a very likely and very attractive marriage partner for anybody." "Whatever the cause of her possession according to Luke's Gospel Mary's exorcism is the catalyst which makes her sign up with the Jesus movement." "As a single woman, Mary would have had nothing to lose by leaving home and Jesus message might have been just what she was looking for." "...certainly the message that Jesus is said to have preached, is one that does seem to have particular appeal for people who are in the margins of society, I mean sayings where Jesus says things like" ""the first shall be last, and the last shall be first."" "and people who do not have strong family ties, might be attracted to a movement that valued other things than family ties" "The evidence so far gives us an image of Mary Magdalene which doesn't conform to that of a prostitute" " all we can guess is that she was a woman on the margins, possibly single, a possessed woman healed by Jesus and who became one of his followers." "But the Bible isn't our only source." "A chance discovery of long lost books is revealing new and surprising insights into Mary Magdalene." "In 1945, at Nag Hammadi in Southern Egypt two men came across a sealed ceramic jar." "Hoping to find treasure, they decided to break it open" "Inside they discovered a hoard of ancient papyrus books." "This was a tremendously exciting discovery, the kind of thing that archaeologists and historians of ancient Christianity dream about" "They never really received as much public attention as, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls, everybody knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls but these actually turn out to be much, much more important for writing the history of early Christianity," "because they are a cache of Christian texts." "While the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed unknown Jewish history, the Nag Hammadi books tell us about early Christians." "They were written in Coptic, the language of early Christian Egypt." "As most ancient Christian writings have been lost, this discovery was exceptional" "Stephen Emmel is a world expert in Coptic and was closely involved in restoring and translating the books." "It's an entirely new body of literature from the early Christian period, and they open a window for us into different parts of that early Christian world that otherwise we have no access to." "The discovery includes the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and the Acts of Peter." "None of these texts were included in the Bible because they didn't confirm to Christian doctrine and they are referred to as apocryphal." "Apocryphon is a of book from the early Christian period that did offer secret, hidden knowledge." "For example, in the New Testament gospels it's said that after the resurrection, in some cases, Jesus spent some time talking with the disciples, but you don't learn much about what he said." "Well, in the gospels of Nag Hammadi you can read what he said." "Although they're not Bible texts, experts still believe that they give significant insights into Christian history." "This of course is the great interest of this kind of literature, the possibility that in these apocryphal texts we might have genuine traditions about Jesus that for one reason or another didn't find their way into the New Testament" "And for the first time in hundreds of years there was a new source of information about Mary Magdalene." "But the books also reveal something surprising about her standing in Jesus' circle..." "Mary Magdalene appears very frequently, as one of the prominent disciples of Jesus" "In passages where Jesus is in discussion with his disciples," "Mary Magdalene asks many informed questions." "Whereas the other disciples at times seem confused." "She is the one who understands." "This is a challenge to the traditional image of Mary Magdalene" " a reformed prostitute hanging around the fringes of the Jesus movement." "But even greater surprises were in store." "One of the documents discovered at Nag Hammadi is the Gospel of Philip, in which Mary Magdalene is a key figure." "It has been the cause of one of the most controversial claims ever made about her." "During their long burial in the desert, some of the books were attacked by ants." "In this Gospel, the ants made a hole in a very crucial place." "This 'lacuna', or gap, has tantalised scholars for decades." "This passage clearly has to do with Mary Magdalene because even though the ants have eaten away about half her name enough survives to make it absolutely clear that its about her." "'Maria'... 'tamag'... 'da' is lost and then 'lene'." "So... 'Maria Tamagdalene'" " Mary Magdalene." "And here we have 'the Saviour loved her'." "The question is -what comes next?" "From the way the text proceeds on the next page we can a restore part of this." "The disciples asked the Saviour why he loved Mary Magdalene more than them." "And that makes it possible for us to restore this 'lacuna'" " 'The Saviour loved her more than all the other disciples'." "This implies that Mary and Jesus had a special relationship - that she was his favourite companion, closer than the other disciples." "And the ant holes hint at an even more intimate connection." "'And he kissed her', that we have at the beginning of this line, 'on her', then there is a 'lacuna'." "And, of course, this 'lacuna' this missing text has been the object of quite a bit of speculation by scholars" " where exactly did he kiss her." "Most likely on the mouth and that can be restored here on the basis of Coptic grammar and the length of the 'lacuna' with a great deal of confidence." "This was a revelation -would it mean that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers?" "My own sense of who Jesus might have been would probably have excluded really close relations with anyone." "He was someone who was already living with one foot in the next world, and most of the people, contemporaries that we know of that sort, who also indulge in very worldly types of behaviour, are hypocrites" " and I don't believe for a minute that Jesus was a hypocrite." "Indeed there may be another explanation for the kiss." "This tradition in the Gospel of Philip that Jesus loves Mary and kisses her," "I think it's "frequently on her mouth", is one that I think to sort of modern Western readers looks very erotic." "But the image suggests not necessarily sexuality, but the transmission of divine knowledge." "The kissing becomes a symbol for an intimate reception of teaching, of the word of God, of really learning." "In the Gospel of Philip it seems that, unlike the other disciples," "Mary received private, one to one teaching from Jesus." "I would say... it's very likely that in fact Mary Magdalene... heard things from him that others didn't hear." "And perhaps Jesus had these private conversations with Mary because she understood his message so well." "Mary Magdalene appears in this text also not only as the disciple he loved most but she also appears as a symbolic figure of heavenly wisdom." "These stories of Mary as Jesus' closes companion and a symbol of heavenly wisdom are in sharp contrast with the Mary Magdalene of popular imagination." "They are sometimes... so different and representative of such a very different view of the world that, traditional Christianity has said it's in fact not Christian." "Such controversies might explain the more common meaning of the word apocryphal." "'Apocryphal' took on very negative connotations, especially in comparison to what became the Bible." "It often means that it's not to be read, not to be taken seriously, not to be considered, not true." "The contents of these books are regarded by many people as legends." "So can we believe the Gospel of Philip?" "Was Mary really Jesus' closest companion." "Well, there is other evidence for this, and some of it is even in the Bible itself." "The Bible says that Mary Magdalene was present at the two most important moments in the life of Jesus." "The New Testament Gospels give a lot of space to the story about Jesus' arrest, his trial, the crucifixion and the resurrection." "A group of women, including Mary, were present at the crucifixion." "At the crucifixion here are Mary Magdalene and the other women, the disciples have long since fled in their fear, the women have hung by Jesus, they are there as witnesses to the crucifixion." "In some Gospels they observe in horror from a distance;" "in others, they are weeping at the foot of the cross." "The Gospel of John says that Jesus is given something to drink" " we imagine by one of the women, perhaps Mary." "We don't know historically whether the Romans would actually have allowed followers to attend executions." "But if the women were there, it must have been agony for them to endure this scene." "Jesus suffering was prolonged and finally the man whose teaching has transformed Mary's life was dead." "And the movement might have died with him without its leader his following might easily have fallen into disarray and then collapsed altogether." "But we all know this wasn't the case because of what happened next." "And this, according to the Bible, is when Mary Magdalene took centre stage." "After his death Jesus' body was placed in a rock tomb." "We're told that Mary Magdalene was one of the women who kept vigil at Jesus' tomb." "It's not hard to imagine the emotion she must have felt when she went to anoint the body of her Messiah." "It was customary at this time for Jewish women to prepare bodies for burial." "Corpses were considered unclean, and so it was always a woman's task to handle them." "Mary is already in deep mourning; she has witnessed Jesus' horrific execution, perhaps at some risk to herself, but now according to the Bible, when she goes to the tomb, Jesus' body is no longer there." "The fullest account of Mary's role after discovering the empty tomb is in the Gospel of John." "She is in a state of shock and runs to where the disciples are gathered to tell them the news." "When she reports to the disciples she is not believed, and I think that just reflects perfectly their attitude about a woman witness." "They are just thinking well she is hysterical or something so we needn't believe this" "It is quite understandable why the disciples refused to believe Mary." "She was a woman and I'd go on to say a woman who had until recently been considered stark raving mad." "Because they don't believe her, Peter and another unnamed disciple return with her to the tomb, to see for themselves." "Peter reacts to the sight of the discarded linen burial cloth with anger and dismay." "But the other disciple understands what has happened and concludes that" "Jesus must have risen from the dead." "The two of them leave without a backward glance at Mary." "Then, something even more extraordinary happens." "It is Mary Magdalene's biggest moment." "Mary is alone when someone asks her why she's crying." "She believes it's the gardener, and says," "'They have taken my lord's body and I do not know where he is.'" "The figure says her name." "And then she sees Jesus." "She is overwhelmed and says' 'Master!" "' and goes forward to reach out to him." "But he stops her." "He says 'don't touch me'" "Instead, she must go to the others and tell them that he has risen from the dead" "It's an awesome moment." "Jesus stands before her, yet he's beyond her reach." "We cannot say if Jesus really stood before her resurrected, or if Mary simply believed she had seen him." "But either way in this one moment," "Mary's experience took the Christian movement in an important new direction." "A new concept developed, which had nothing to with what Jesus himself was preaching, and this is the concept that" "Jesus didn't die -or in other words he die but he was raised from the dead because he was God's son, which suggests of course that there's no reason for the movement to disintegrate." "It is not a failure." "It is in fact a great success." "This idea is the idea of Mary Magdalene." "Jesus' resurrection was the turning point for Christianity." "This was when it changed from a small movement to a whole new religion and Mary Magdalene was a key figure in this event." "You might think, then, that at the very least" "Mary would be recognized as an apostle" " one of the early missionaries who founded the religion" " as she seems to meets all the criteria set out in the Bible." "And if we look at the Gospel of Luke, it states very clearly that the" " the qualification for becoming an apostle was to have been with Jesus during his mastery, to have been a witness to the death and resurrection, and to be able to then go out and teach the true gospel, which he gave." "Mary Magdalene fills that role perfectly." "Yet that's a role the Bible never gives to her" " nowhere in the New Testament is Mary Magdalene named as an apostle." "To find out why, we have to return to a long-lost apocryphal text." "In a Cairo bazaar in 1896, a German scholar happened to come across a curious papyrus book." "It was bound in leather and written in Coptic, the ancient language of early Christian Egypt." "But the origin of this document was very mysterious." "Unfortunately we know almost nothing about the discovery of the manuscript." "The story that was told at the time is that it came from Akhmim in Upper Egypt ...and something was said about it having been found in a niche in a wall." "The town of Achmim was home to a persecuted Christian community in the early centuries." "So the document might have been carefully hidden by a martyr, heretic or monk." "On closer examination, the text revealed itself as something truly remarkable:" "It was the Gospel of Mary." "Like the books found at Nag Hammadi, the Gospel according to Mary Magdalene is also considered an apocryphal text." "The story it contains begins some time after the resurrection." "The disciples have just had a vision of Jesus." "Jesus has encouraged his disciples to go out and preach his teachings to the world but they are afraid to do so because he was killed for it, and they say if they killed him, they are going to kill us too." "And it's Mary, and that's Mary Magdalene, that's quite clear, who steps forward and says, don't be worried, he promised he would be with us to protect us." "So she's the one who can step in and remain calm, and not be frightened... and it says she turns their hearts towards the good and they begin to discuss the words of the Saviour." "In books like the Gospel of Philip, Mary was presented as a symbol of wisdom." "But in the Gospel of Mary, she is the one in charge, telling the disciples about Jesus' teachings." "Previously, we were merely told that she was wise." "In this Gospel we can see it for ourselves." "Now, at this point Peter asks Mary to tell them some things that she might have heard, but which the other disciples haven't." "...and she says... 'yes, I will tell you what has been hidden from you'." "And so she talks about a vision she had of Jesus and a conversation that she had with him." "As the Gospel tells it, Mary then relates the details of this conversation, which has to do with spiritual development and the souls life long battle with evil." "But at this point, okay, controversy arises, and Andrew steps in and he says -well," "I don't know what the rest of you think, but these -these things seem very strange to me, and it seems that she's telling us teachings that are different from the Saviour." "This is clearly a point of contention." "At least one disciple doubts the truth of what Mary says." "And there is worse to come" "Peter then chimes in and he says are we supposed to now all turn around and listen to her?" "Would Jesus have spoken privately with a woman rather than openly to us?" "Did he prefer her to us?" "Matthew defends Mary and quells Peter's attack on her." "In the text Peter's problem is that Jesus selected Mary above the other disciples to interpret his teachings." "Peter sees Mary as a rival for the leadership of the group itself." "She's portrayed as the disciple who really gets it, if you will ...who really understands what's going on, understands his teaching" "The text makes it clear that what qualifies her to lead the group is her spiritual maturity." "The irony is, of course, that most people think of" "Peter as the rock upon which the church was established." "He is the main or major disciple figure, and Mary Magdalene is, at best, a kind of side figure in the cast of characters." "But the Gospel of Mary is such a challenge to our view of Mary Magdalene that we have to be sure it is authentic." "After all, no one really knows where it came from, and unlike other early Christian texts, there was no references to it before it was found." "What's fascinating about the discovery of the Gospel of Mary is we didn't even know it existed, we didn't even have the title itself." "So how do we know that it is an authentic ancient document, and not a forgery?" "It would help to know its age." "Coptic text is difficult to date accurately." "But amazingly, two other fragments of the Gospel were found in a rubbish heap, and these were written in Greek, which made dating much easier." "The Greek fragments can be dated on the basis of their handwriting." "That suggests that the Gospel of Mary, was probably composed already in the early part of the 3rd century, or perhaps already in the 2nd century." "And as a leading Coptic expert," "Stephen Emmel believes it must be authentic." "For someone to have purposely fabricated these manuscripts in modern times would required, a kind of genius that I think just doesn't exist." "This is someone who would have to be able to manufacture papyrus using techniques that have been lost for more than a thousand years..." "They would have had to have had a knowledge of Coptic that goes far beyond anything that the greatest specialists in Coptic have ever had." "They would have had to have conceived of an entire world that no one else knows anything about in every detail." "It's not credible that someone could create such a fabrication." "If the gospel of Mary is genuine it might provide the real reason that" "Mary Magdalene vanished from the Bible." "Controversially it offers a very different view of the disciples." "One of the absolutely fascinating things about the Gospel of Mary is it really asks us to rethink that story about Christian history:" "did all the disciples get it?" "Did they really understand and preach the truth?" "Now, this is very radical and, perhaps, you know, I think heretical" "And perhaps the Gospel of Mary was just too radical." "It presents Mary as a teacher and spiritual guide to the other disciples." "She's notjust a disciple;" "she is the apostle to the apostles." "and yet we only know her as a prostitute." "So how was her reputation so drastically distorted?" "The authorship of the Gospel of Mary holds a clue." "Mary didn't write the Gospel herself - she had been dead for a long time." "But experts now have an idea who did." "I would guess that it was a woman;" "I think one has to assume that it was written by someone who belonged to a Christian community, in which women had a prominent role, but where that role was being disputed." "The Gospel of Mary grew out of the way that the first Christians came together and the make up of these groups was shaped by where they met." "The early churches met in houses and attracted people who were friends and so forth." "Eating together, was one of the primary practices of these communities." "And as houses were the domain of women they naturally played a prominent part within these communities." "Women played all kinds of roles, as apostles, teachers, heads of house, churches so on and so forth, we see for example from Paul's letter to Corinth" "That there were women prophets with the Christian community." "But in the second and third centuries, differences were already emerging, between groups led by men, and groups led by women." "Within some groups of early Christianity Mary Magdalene became a key figure, a kind of prototypical figure, especially representing the female Christian." "She takes on the role of representing women in general, versus men in general, and the disciples who are the men sometimes try to reject her from their company, and she stands up for herself and, by implication, women," "...but the representative of men who says no to her, generally, is Peter." "Mary's relationship with Peter came to symbolise this conflict" "There's a wealth of early Christian writings in which the tension between Peter and Mary is quite apparent." "And you see this not only in the Gospels that are now in the New Testament, but you see it in a whole range of early Christian sources, which do not find their way into the New Testament." "As Peter and the ideas he stood for became dominant in the growing movement, so Mary's role as an important disciple was undermined." "And as the Church became more institutionalised, women leaders were squeezed out." "What happens to that Mary?" "Well she must be the victim of a power struggle, must be the victim of the way history gets written" " and who writes history?" "Men write history." "By the time we get into the 4th and 5th Century, ...simply for women to exercise public leadership is, itself, heretical." "So women cannot be ordained, for example, to become a bishop or a priest and so forth." "And from that perspective, Mary Magdalene becomes a real problem because she can be used and to validate women's leadership in the church." "This was an image of Mary that wasn't popular with leaders of the growing church in Rome." "Mary Magdalene was about to meet her downfall." "The Christian Church wanted to limit religious doctrine to the Bible, so it had to stamp out unorthodox ideas." "Obviously, the Nag Hammadi books and the Gospel of Mary were part of the problem, so the books disappeared." "We have to imagine, here are people in the 4th century who have books containing these works, the church officials are now saying, uh-uh, don't read those, don't own them, what do you do with them?" "Well, perhaps you would throw them away or you would burn them, or perhaps you would say I'm going to hide these away somewhere and maybe go back later and get them, and if you don't go back later" "and get them, they lie there in the desert." "But hiding the texts did not bury Mary Magdalene." "She couldn't be removed from the stories of Jesus altogether because she already existed as one of his followers in the four Gospels." "So another role had to be found for her." "What was needed was an alternative story for Mary Magdalene." "So what we see is the invention of the story of Mary as a prostitute." "And I don't think this was innocent." "In fact a close examination of the Bible reveals a startling truth." "The case of Mary Magdalene becoming known as the most famous prostitute in the world has to do with a certain reading of the gospels." "There are many women named 'Mary' in the Gospels, and unfortunately for Mary Magdalene she was one of them." "This made it possible to re-cast her" " wrongly -as the fallen woman so familiar to us." "What we see happening is that the woman who anointed Jesus in Luke Vll, who's called 'The Sinner', she anoints Jesus with her perfume and dries his feet with her hair, and she weeps." "This Mary is then associated with Mary in the Gospel of John, who is the sister of Martha, who anoints Jesus for his burial." "Now, this Mary is then confused with Mary Magdalene, so that Mary Magdalene becomes 'The Sinner' woman who anointed Jesus." "And from this, it's only one quick step to identifying Mary Magdalene with every unnamed sinner woman in the gospels" "The question is if she's a woman, what kind of a sinner would she be, and they decided that she was a prostitute, because this is the typical sin that a woman would commit." "However, one of the ways in which you can insult a woman leader is basically by linking her with improper sexuality and prostitution." "Mary's transformation from apostle to sinner and then to penitent was underway." "And by the 6th Century, Pope Gregory the Great can, in a sermon, deliver what is really the moral outcome of this point of view." "At the Basilica san Clemente the Pope declared that" "Mary's original seven demons had signified all the vices, but then she had repented and turned the mass of her crimes to virtues." "So Mary Magdalene the apostolic leader, becomes Mary Magdalene the repentant prostitute." "Mary Magdalene now had a new role." "The growing church was encouraging converts to the faith to reflect on their own sinful pasts, and this new Mary was the ideal role model." "She became a very important figure because she could be used to show that women needed to repent, that women sin was sexual and she could then be contrasted with the Virgin Mother." "And they become, along with Eve, the basis for understanding women and women's sexuality in the West." "In her role as a penitent, Mary Magdalene still had many faithful supporters." "But unfortunately her re-invention as a sinner left a stain on her name." "Claiming that she is a prostitute is just not ever a positive statement, even in a tradition which sees penitence as very important, and sees repenting of one's sins as the thing that all human beings should do" "The Catholic Church did declare a saint's day in Mary's name - and dedicated churches to her, but she was a saint who stood for repentance." "Perhaps it's time to review Mary's legacy." "We should remember her not - not only as a follower of Jesus and someone who had a vision of Jesus, but also someone who was quite likely a leader in the early Christian Movement." "And I think too, we should remember the story of how she was made into a prostitute, because that story has lessons for us in many, many ways." "But it's not her." "I think we should view her as having played a very prominent role in this Jesus movement." "Consider that, she is the witness to the crucifixion and the resurrection." "She and other women were there from the beginning, consider that she is later such an important counter-figure to Peter, we have to imagine that she was every bit as important as those 12." "Mary Magdalene may once have been as significant as the other apostles, but she has never taken her rightful place alongside them, nor, as some experts believe, been given the full credit she deserves." "Mary Magdalene is an extremely remarkable woman, because it is she who in my opinion single-handedly brought to light and brought about Christianity" "In 1969 the Catholic Church acknowledged that Mary Magdalene had been wronged." "They withdrew the label 'penitent' from her saint's day, but many still only know her as the prostitute." "The campaign against Mary Magdalene goes back so many centuries it's hard to reclaim the truth." "But perhaps one day this extraordinary woman will be recognised for what she really was -one of the founders of the Christian faith."