We Still Don't Know How To Love Her…

What's the shelf life of Mary Magdelene in a post-repression age? Via Arts & Letters Daily comes this long New Yorker piece about Christendom's favorite harlot and the singer of Jesus Christ Superstar's big hit single. It runs through the competing definitions of the original M&M and finally spits out this conclusion like so many demons from a possessed body:

The young Bible scholars should have all our support, and we should agree with them that the energetic, far-seeing Magdalene of the Gnostic texts is good evidence that the Church should ordain women. But that is not the evidence of the Magdalene's authority on matters of the soul. John's story is the evidence.

I'm not sure that paragraph makes any more sense after reading the whole piece, but the story is a fascinating tour of how a seminal (?) female religious identity has shifted over milennia–and how that transformation is barely getting started.

Whole thing here.