Philip C. Almond's "Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History"

Philip C. Almond is Professor Emeritus in The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at The University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His recent books include The Antichrist: A New Biography (2020), God: A New Biography (2018), and Afterlife: A History of Life after Death (2016).

Almond applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Mary Magdalene: A Cultural History, and reported the following:

Page 99 details the story of Mary Magdalene as a woman possessed by demons as told by the Franciscan Honorius in the fourteenth century in his work The Life of Mary Magdalene. It relates how Mary, despite the determination of her inner demons, went to Jesus, bathed his feet with her tears, and dried them with her hair.

This page picks up on the central thematic of the book: the relation between Mary Magdalene as the exorcized follower of Jesus, the ‘fallen woman’ who bathed the feet of Jesus, and Mary of Bethany the sister of Martha and Lazarus. It uses the interplay, often tension, and sometimes conflict between the idea of the single versus the composite Mary as the key to untangling the history of Mary in Christian thought.

It was in the year 591 that Pope Gregory the Great identified Mary Magdalene with these two other women in the New Testament. And it was this identification within the Western Church (but not in that of the East) that allowed Mary Magdalene to be imagined not only as present at the crucifixion of Jesus and the first witness of the resurrection of Jesus, but also as a reformed prostitute, the exemplar of the Christian contemplative tradition, and the solitary desert dweller whose nakedness was covered by her hair.

This book explores the many ‘lives’ of Mary Magdalene from the time of her appearance in the New Testament to her emergence in the past seventy years as the most important Christian saint in the secular West. It details the way in which, separated from harlotry, she became a model of sanctity and, separated from sanctity, she became sensual, profane and erotic.

Thus, this book is a history of the ‘idea’ of Mary Magdalene. It is an account of how and why Christianity, with the minimal historical data about her life at its disposal, created its ideal Christian saint. It details her decisive role in the shaping of Western and Eastern religious belief and piety.

The Page 99 Test: Afterlife: A History of Life after Death.

The Page 99 Test: The Antichrist: A New Biography.

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--Marshal Zeringue