Mary, Called Magdalene [Unabridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Margaret George (Author), Melissa Hughes (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

Famously described as the 'Apostle to the Apostles', after her discovery of Jesus' resurrection, Mary has sparked curiosity, controversy and veneration since her name first appeared in the Gospel of Mark. But who was Mary Magdalene? Was she a prostitute, a goddess, a feminist icon, a church leader or all of these things? Using testaments, letters and narrative Margaret George brings to life one of the most mysterious and controversial characters in the bible, creating an epic that is both immediate and moving. 'Margaret George proves herself to be the very best when it comes to historical fiction. Her new novel is a gripping and moving story' Barbara Taylor Bradford

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Of all the women in the Bible, perhaps no one's presence has been as constantly reinterpreted as that of Mary Magdalene. Was she a prostitute? A prophet? In Margaret George's epic historical novel, Mary, Called Magdalene (Geroge's previous subjects include Henry VIII, Mary, Queen of Scots, and Cleopatra), Mary comes alive as one of Jesus' first believers, a woman of infallible visions and a faith that earns her the title "Apostle to the Apostles." With numerous biblical and scholarly texts serving as the core of this intriguing woman's story, George recreates the world of Galilean fishermen and the oppressions of the Jewish people under Roman rule. Cast out from her family after Jesus expels the demons that have ravaged her mind, Mary follows the man from Nazareth until they receive attention from the skeptical hordes and the Roman magistrates controlling Jerusalem.

Mary, from beginning to end of this giant undertaking, is a woman who struggles to reconcile her absence from her young daughter's life with the chance to be part of something important. Through the lens of her ever-inquisitive mind, the story covers the formation of Jesus' ragtag band of disciples and the crucifixion, and ends with Mary's mission as the head of the Christian church in Ephesus, where she died at the age of 90. What makes this a compelling read is that Mary's story connects humanity with faith in a way that's possible to understand, whatever our contemporary beliefs. --Emily Russin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

George, whose niche is historical and biographical novels, begins this one ploddingly with suspenseless reportage on Mary Magdalene's pleasant, middle-class childhood in a prosperous fishing village. Scattered references to the idol/demon that will eventually possess Mary are intended as fateful omens, but her slow road to madness gets much less play than her conventional and uninteresting life. The novel improves considerably when Mary finds herself possessed by one demon, and then, helplessly, by six more. Her valiant efforts to first hide her possession and then find a cure are masterfully described. When a prophet named Jesus finally casts out her demons, she celebrates, only to realize that she must make a heartrending choice between following the prophet or going back to her husband, baby and extended family. At this point, George's novel becomes a safe, though readable, retelling of the gospels. Her main deviation from orthodoxy is her insistence that there were 16 disciples 12 men and four women who were equal in Jesus' eyes. Additionally, George emphasizes Mary's prophetic visions and Jesus' celebration of them, and in doing so gives credence to gnostic accounts of mysticism among the disciples. While some may compare this novel with Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, it bears a much stronger resemblance to Walter Wangerin's biographical novel about the apostle Paul. Like Wangerin's work, this imagines nothing seriously objectionable to even the most devout Christians. As such, it lacks the transgressive power of The Red Tent, but is still a well-researched and thought-provoking book.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Sound Library; Unabridged edition (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0792726006
• ISBN-13: 978-0792726005
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 3.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (109 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,823,255 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret George specializes in epic fictional biographies of historical figures, taking pains to make them as factually accurate as possible without compromising the drama. Her THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HENRY VIII will have its 25th anniversary this September, and continues to be popular. ABC-TV based its 1999 Emmy-nominated "Cleopatra" miniseries on her THE MEMOIRS OF CLEOPATRA. All of her books have been bestsellers, with twenty-one foreign translations.

Margaret's father was in the Foreign Service and so she lived overseas for her early life, in such different places as tropical Taiwan, desert Israel, and cold war Berlin, all of which were great training for a novelist to be. She started writing 'books' about the same time as she could write at all, mainly for her own entertainment. It was a diversion she never outgrew. Her published works are: THE AUTOBIOGAPHY OF HENRY VIII, MARY QUEEN OF SCOTLAND AND THE ISLES, THE MEMOIRS OF CLEOPATRA, MARY CALLED MAGDALENE, HELEN OF TROY, ELIZABETH I, and an illustrated children's book, LUCILLE LOST.

Margaret lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and Washington DC, and has a sextagenarian tortoise as a pet.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An imaginative telling of Mary Magdalene's life, October 29, 2003

By 

Julie Lovisa (Indiana USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Mary, Called Magdalene (Mass Market Paperback)

After reading The DaVinci Code, I became very interested in Mary Magdalene and her place in history. While she is not cast in the same role as in TDC (which I won't divulge here for those who haven't read the book), I almost like her place in this telling better. She is written as a strong woman who after many years of struggling between possession by pagan gods and her faith in God, is healed by Jesus and becomes one of his disciples.

Since no one knows the true story of MM, Margaret George had to create an entire life for her, giving her the roles of daughter in a pious Jewish family, wife of a man she questions her love for, mother to a daughter whom she conceived after making a deal with one of her pagan possessors, and loyal friend to a girl who follows a different branch of Judaism of which her family doesn't approve.

The book starts out slowly laying a foundation for Mary's life, but read on. After she initially meets Jesus when she is a young girl and finds the idol that becomes the source of her possession problems, things begin to pick up speed. The second half of the book is about her life as a disciple of Jesus and the Passion from her viewpoint. It's also about her undying love for her daughter who was taken from her at the age of two after she began following Jesus and her family disowned her.

As usual, George has done an incredible amount of research into her subject and has written yet another fictional biography that will take you to another world.

44 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars sadly disappointed, July 15, 2002

By A Customer

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This review is from: Mary, Called Magdalene (Hardcover)

I absolutely loved the other Margaret George novels; this however is sadly disappointing. I agree with the reviewer who said is is uninspired. It reads like a young adult Sunday School lesson. Mary's dialogue is so unbelievable; the setting is so "clean" and brings to mind 1950's Hollywood Bible stories. I forced myself to read over half way through thinking it would get better, but it doesn't. Margaret - you can do much better!

60 of 70 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Dull, Plodding and Disappointing, August 9, 2004

By 

wysewomon "wysewomon" (Paonia, CO United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Mary, Called Magdalene (Mass Market Paperback)

I love historical novels. I've read everything else Margaret George has written and loved every page, so when I saw _Mary, Called Magdalene_ on the shelf of the local bookstore I bought it without even opening the cover. Boy was that a mistake! This book is so awful, it's hard to believe it was written by the same author. The characters are flat and lifeless, the research is second-rate and the plot is un-moving--and as the book deals with one of the core stories of Western thought (the ministry and passion of Jesus), that's saying a lot. It's as if because the book deals with the topic of faith and religion, the writer's capacity for critical thought went on vacation. There is no real challenge to the story of the gospels as we know it, no new interpretation and no life. Almost every situation Mary meets from the time she becomes a disciple on comes directly--sometimes verbatim--from the New Testament of the Christian Bible. The ones that don't are so boring that it's hard to care about them.

Other things bothered me about this book: the lack of cultural or historical context for the story, the huge emphasis on literal demon possession, which required way more suspension of disbelief than I was able to sustain and the superficial and inaccurate depiction of ancient Judaic religious thought, to name a few. Knowing what I know about these things, George's Jesus affected me not as an enlightened Master, but as a man driven off the deep end by an internal revelation he is unable to communicate, and his followers seemed mindless subscribers to a cult that promises them release from personal pain, much as modern cults do. This is an interesting interpretation, but I don't think it's the one George intended; therefore, I have to say her book didn't work.

Growing up in the home of a minister and Bible scholar, I spent my entire youth surrounded by books, both fiction and non-fiction, that treated Early Christianity and other Biblical subjects with passion and intellect, setting them in an historical context and making them important and real in human terms. _Mary, Called Magdalene_ is not one of them. From the reviews here it seems that a lot of people liked it, but I can't imagine why.