I, Mary of Magdala

A woman’s name was spoken at dawn-and history has been answering ever since.

In this rigorously researched, lyrically told narrative, Mary of Magdala speaks in her own voice, guiding readers from the lakeshore of Galilee to a garden before sunrise, through upper rooms and basilicas, caves and reliquaries, icons and canvases. The result is a portrait that is sensory yet restrained: intimate without invention, faithful to what the earliest witnesses say and honest about what later centuries remembered, embellished, or forgot.

Anchored in the canonical Gospels and Acts, informed by non-canonical dialogues (Gospel of Mary, Pistis Sophia), and attentive to legend, liturgy, art, and archaeology, the book traces how a steady presence at the cross became the first proclamation of Easter-and how that witness was variously muted, magnified, and reimagined across two millennia. Along the way, readers meet the women who stayed, the brothers who disputed, the artists who taught theology with color, and the pilgrims who built roads around bones and boxes.

Neither conspiracy nor hagiography, this is historically responsible imagination: endnoted, transparent about sources, and animated by a single conviction-that responsible history can enlarge devotion, and that devotion, disciplined by evidence, can keep memory humane.