"Of all the disciples of Jesus, none seems to have been as independent, strong and close to Jesus as Mary Magdalene," writes Marvin Meyer, the foremost expert on the Nag Hammadi library and the texts about Jesus outside the New Testament. He is the author of The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus and is Griset Professor of Bible and Christian Studies and co-chair of the Department of Religious Studies, and director of the Albert Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University, Orange, California. His co-author is a minister of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands and author of Mary Magdalene: Beyond the Myth and The Gospel of Mary: Beyond a Gnostic and a Biblical Mary Magdalene.
Although the book begins with a compilation of Biblical passages about Mary in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; the authors go way beyond these texts to extracanonical literature including selections from the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Dialogue of the Savior, Pistis Sophia, and the Manichaean Psalms of Heracleides.
Taking stock of these fascinating texts, we see that Jesus had a high regard for women and treated Mary Magdalene as a beloved disciple. This is quite different from the New Testament Gospels where "the inner group of disciples often takes on the character of a male-only club, with restricted membership." De Boer writes: "Mary Magdalene should be seen as a serious candidate for the identification of the anonymous disciple Jesus loved in the Gospel of John. If we indeed look upon her as an important candidate, this has consequences for our general perspective on Mary Magdalene. She would have had disciples, her testimony would have formed a community, her accounts not only of the death and resurrection of Jesus, but also of his life and teachings, would have been preserved. But not only that, her words would have been canonized and taught through the ages, and spread over the world."
All of these materials shed new light on the role and the spiritual importance of Mary Magdalene in the early Christian tradition.
