The Secret Magdalene ebook

This book is amazing. It's smart funny and a good read, I recommend it to anybody interested in mary, jesus, religion or people.

SPOILER ALERT! The good thing about this novel is that it is well researched and has an imaginative approach to the story of Magdalene and Jesus. There's lots of interesting detail. As an inner dialogue of a girl and then young woman, however, this book consists mostly of confessional prose that is often rather melodramatic in nature: a quality not inappropriate to the main character/narrator, but still I did often find myself aching for something more to happen. Also, there are so many characters that you start getting confused, and the qualities of these characters are much more often reported by Magdalene than actually evinced in the narrative. But my chief objections are as follows. First, although the Gnostic Gospels tend to portray Magdalene as the chief apostle and Jesus' most advanced initiate, we see her receiving no significant teachings from her teacher. With this Magdalene, everything is personal and emotional. She seems like nothing more than a highly intelligent and sensitive young kid. Secondly, as a Buddhist who thinks that the most highly developed yogis and masters of all traditions (read Yogananda's "Autobiography of a Yogi") have miraculous powers, I found it disappointing that the author adapted her story to modern materialistic audiences and made it seem as though there were natural or autosuggestive explanations for Jesus's miracles. You know: "Jesus was cool but most of that miracle stuff was just rumors." Thomas Jefferson, a deistic rationalist, also put together a New Testament without miracles. Anyway, I wouldn't have gone that way myself. Thirdly, she correctly (in my view) has Jesus survive his crucifixion...only to pointlessly die a few days later, thereby ignoring the writings, inscriptions, and traditions in at least seven languages indicating that Jesus continued his mission in various other countries and died in Kashmir. (His tomb is in Srinagar.) Finally, the author's style incongruously and strangely combines archaistic diction with very modern informal syntax ("Comes now Yehoshua and comes those who surround him..." p. 407). The result is often quite inelegant.

The reader has to remember this book is a novel, albeit, a good novel. At first I thought this book would/should become as popular as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, but knowledge of the historical Jesus may be needed to enjoy it to its fullest. Ms. Longfellow weaves the historical Jesus, the mythological Jesus and the theological Jesus into a very compelling novel. She uses all the tools available, the apocrypha, the canon, and scholarly writings. This reader marveled and wondered at how the author got from one supposedly known Jesus adventure to the next. Without divulging the ending I have to make the following comment - the reasoning comprising the ending sequence probably wasn't conspired by the person she indicates as most scholars feel if this conspiracy came into play, it was devised after Jesus' crucifixion. Also, I was always looking for Ms. Longfellow to incorporate the Secret Gospel of Mark into the novel. It would have been a natural with Mariamne already posing as a boy. This reader enjoyed the book immensely. This book is not for the fundamentalist.

Told solely in the voice of Mary Magdalene (throughout the book called

Mariamne, eventually to be called Magdal-eder, or She of the Temple

Tower), this book begins when Mariamne is still a child in the home of

her prosperous Jewish father, a glass merchant. Her mother dead, her

only friend a ward of her father's called Salome (an Egyptian raised in

Jerusalem), and her only confidante a fierce body slave named Tata,

Mariamne is highly intelligent, always curious, and desperate for

knowledge. Along with Salome, a child of wit, insight, and cruelty,

Mariamne finds herself banned from her privileged home and dependent on

the care and concern of a mysterious man called Seth. Eventually all

three find themselves living for seven years in the Great Library of

Alexandria.

This is an immensely inventive book, a book that turns the known and not

so known gospels on their heads, revealing meaning in them virtually

unique in my experience. To have a familiar story turned inside out is

to view it so differently that the meaning we think we know, becomes

instead revelatory.

Through Salome we meet a John the Baptist who is both sly and childlike,

wise and brash, a loveable frightening man, willing to lose his life to

save his chosen people. Through Mariamne we meet Jesus. This Jesus,

known to her as Yeshu, is deeply complex, driven, a man of his times,

and yet a man for all times. Raised as zealous for the Law, yet he is a

man tortured by "visions," called on by a god who speaks so completely

at odds from the jealous angry violent god he has been taught to follow,

that his torment almost breaks him. Only by meeting Mariamne through

their mutual friend Seth, does he slowly and painfully come to terms

with the harsh demands of a simple man called on to be more than any

man. He is the hero, reluctant, in constant hope of escaping his

destiny, yet ultimately bowing to the inevitable, at which point he

fulfills his "destiny" with a triumph of will almost unbearable in the

implications of its choice...for he has a choice and by choosing it,

rather than turning away, he uplifts our souls.

And all the while we follow Mariamne as witness, as student, as teacher,

as philosopher, as companion, as a woman perhaps unique in literature.

She is not merely a disciple or a witness. She too is gifted with vision

and she too struggles with "knowing" god. But in the mouth of Mariamne

Magdal-eder we learn it is not "a god," a being, something outside the

self, it is perfect love and inherent divinity that seeks us and whom we

seek.

As for Judas...this Judas is almost more a hero than any other in this

extraordinary tale of tales. A double of his brother Jesus, a boon

companion, Judas does what is needed when it is needed, sealing his fate

for all time as betrayer, yet without him Jesus could not become the

"Christ."

Mariamne's voice is a voice to be heard. It speaks to us with a clear

ring of human honesty and doubt but also with a voice beyond our normal

voice, that of a visionary making thrilling sense of reality in

unforgettable sentences replete with the meaning we all seek.