Mary Magdalene - Gareth Higgins

I grew up thinking that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute (to use the word I knew then) who anointed Jesus’s feet, though the Bible makes no such assertion. My image of Mary derives more from her portrayal in The Last Temptation of Christ and Jesus of Montreal — two of the best cinematic evocations of the meaning of Jesus, if by “best” we mean the meeting place between the highest artistic craft and the most honest seeking. There’s a more recent meaningful movie reference to Mary in last year’s Roma, where a party of the privileged carries on regardless of the suffering around them, while the Magdalene of Jesus Christ Superstar sings “I don’t know how to love him” in the background. That song was about the conflict between, or confusion of, erotic desire with apprenticeship on the path toward loving God, neighbor, and self — a conflict or confusion certainly worth considering. The other most well-known treatment of the idea, in The Da Vinci Code, doesn’t take it seriously enough to make it more than a pretend-mystical hook for a silly conspiracy thriller, although it does try to suggest, with the mystics, that there is no conflict or confusion there in the first place.

And in the newest cinematic MARY MAGDALENE, directed by Garth Davis from a script by Helen Edmundson and Philippa Goslett, Mary isn’t confused at all.

Read more here.