Mary Magdalene: From the New Testament to the New Age
Mary Magdalene is a key figure in the history of Christianity. After Mary, the mother of Jesus, she remains the most important female saint in her guise as the first witness of the resurrection of Jesus and ‘the apostle to the apostles’.
This lecture focuses on the many ‘lives’ of Mary as these have been imagined and reimagined within the Christian tradition. It explores the ‘idea’ of the Magdalene in the New Testament, her cult and her relics in the Medieval East and West, and her legacy in the modern West.
In so doing, it illuminates the many different Marys across the centuries: penitent prostitute, demoniac, miracle worker, symbol of the ascetic and the erotic, feminist icon, the wife and lover of Jesus in The Da Vinci Code, and most recently in the ‘Gospel of Jesus’s wife’ hoax. The story of Mary Magdalene leads to some reflections on the relationship between myth and history within the history of religion.
Bio
Philip C. Almond is Emeritus Professor in the History of Western Religious Thought at The University of Queensland. Among his most recent works are The Buddha: Life and Afterlife Between East and West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), The Antichrist: A New Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), God: A New Biography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2018), and Afterlife: A History of Life After Death (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2016).
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Image from Wiki Commons (public domain)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d2/Mary_Magdalene_01.jpg
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