It’s hard to think of a greater interpretive disaster than what happened to Joseph and Aseneth. This ancient text has been known for over a hundred years, but it was misnamed—as if it were about two figures from the Hebrew Bible. All this despite the fact that nothing in the manuscript fits with the Biblical story. Joseph and Aseneth was simply slotted into the wrong historical context. It was then subjected to modern literary criticism, ignoring the way in which such texts were written and the context in which they were produced, transmitted, read, and valued. No wonder people who have previously examined this text came away bewildered. It’s a text that begs for accurate deciphering.
Western readers may be surprised that some texts require decoding and are not up-front with their meanings. In today’s democratic societies, we are open with our opinions. But this is not how ancient writers—or even modern writers living under tyrannies—understood their texts.
The Dead Sea Scrolls community, for instance—that strict Jewish sect at the turn of the Common Era—understood the Hebrew Bible as coded language. Also, like Joseph and Aseneth, they did not call people by name. Thus we know of a “Teacher of Righteousness,” a “Wicked Priest,” and a “Liar,” but we don’t know who these people were. Like Jesus, the Teacher of Righteousness deciphered mysteries and expected God to intervene in human history to bring about the messianic era. The Teacher was sure it was coming soon since, in his judgment, he and his followers were living in the worst period in human history. Surely, they thought, God had to act swiftly. They expected, therefore, the eradication of all the unrighteous and the long-awaited moment when the righteous would be crowned with eternal life and the messianic Davidic king would rule upon his throne forever.
Likewise, as we have seen, Christians in antiquity did not regard the Bible as a historical account of the movement of the Jewish people through time. For them, the intended audience of these writings had come into being only after messianic times when these former events could be properly understood. Paul, for instance, talked about how Jewish leaders misunderstood their own writings—“Indeed, to this very day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their [the Jewish leaders’] minds; but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed” (2 Corinthians 3:16). The task, as far as all these writers were concerned, was to penetrate the veil: to see in these ancient Jewish writings events that prefigured—albeit dimly—the real meaning which could only be understood in light of what Jesus had accomplished. The upshot of this view is that, for the early Christians, the Old Testament isn’t really a collection of Jewish writings but a coded Christian text, one that recounts in coded form the whole drama of divine salvation through the “Christ.”
In decoding Joseph and Aseneth, therefore, we haven’t followed new-age techniques. On the contrary, we have used interpretive techniques that were current at the beginning of what would later be called Christianity. Doing so has opened up a wealth of detail only hinted at in ancient Christian sources.
Many Different Forms of Early Christianity
Christianity as we know it now only emerged in the 4th century thanks to the efforts of such Roman emperors as Constantine and, later, Theodosius who established it as the official religion of the Roman Empire. By “Christianity,” however, these pagan emperors meant that faction that subscribed to the so-called Nicene Creed. Until then, there were many different groups vying for the mantle of “Christianity.” It’s difficult to speak of these various movements as Christian in any modern sense. Some scholars have created hybrid categories—e.g., “Jewish Christianity” or “Christian Judaism”—to talk about these early Jesus followers. But these are clearly anachronistic, applying modern words to ancient movements. Some early groups were clearly within the Jewish family, and some weren’t. After the pagans got involved, the original Jewish movements were marginalized, condemned, and driven underground. So there are really two Christian worlds: the world of the winners (Paul’s followers, which includes all the official Christian groups today) and the world of the losers (those who were banned, burned, ostracized, and driven underground). It’s from the world of the losers that Joseph and Aseneth emerges. It’s their views that it records. To the degree that we care about the birth of Christianity, we should try to reach beyond Pauline theology and make contact with these early Christian views. Paul may have won the theological battle, but it’s the banned texts that may be preserving a more accurate history. So, who were the earliest Jesus followers?
Scholars have identified a wide swath of early Christian movements: there was James’ Torah-observant Jewish Jesus Movement in Jerusalem and the Gnostics in Alexandria. In time, the “Jamesians” likely morphed into groups known to historians as Ebionites or Nazarenes. These disappeared from Western history around the 6th or 7th century. In Arabia, Islam likely absorbed them.1 As well, there were probably groups associated with the apostles Thomas and John. Syriac Christianity began early on in Antioch, Syria and places farther east. Then there seems to have been a group we know very little about. It is called “Q” by scholars, for lack of more accurate information. For its part, Paul’s Christ Movement thrived especially in Rome. It became highly successful in its ability to recruit Gentiles, at first mostly from the God-fearer segment of Judaized pagans and later, more generally, from monotheistic pagans (i.e., pagans who stressed one god above the others). It is largely from Paul’s teachings and those of his successors that the Nicene Christianity we know today emerged.
Based on the textual evidence, Morton Smith has his own approach to the post-crucifixion Jesus movements and early churches. First, there were the legalists: those Torah-observant Jews who saw Jesus as a human messiah and yet remained loyal to the Judaic law. Then there were Jesus’ brothers, who accepted Jesus as some kind of divine figure only after his crucifixion. In Smith’s words: “none of the gospels represents them [Jesus’ brothers] as part of his following. We may suppose that they came into the movement after his death; as members of the family of an alleged pretender to the throne, they were involved in his disaster whether they liked it or not. The probability therefore is that James (like the other converts made since Jesus’ death) had never received Jesus’ initiation. His succession to leadership of the Jerusalem church will have marked the triumph of the converts over Jesus’ early circle.”2 Like Paul, James’ authority was supported by a story that he had seen the risen Christ (1 Corinthians 15:7). Unlike scholars such as Robert Eisenman, who see James as a totally “kosher” Jew obedient to the Mosaic law, Smith believes that the James movement gave “the appearance of obeying the law”3 while being “liberated” from it. In other words, for the Jamesians there was one law for the inner circle and another for the outer one. Third, there was Paul’s movement—according to Paul there was “no need to appear to obey the [Mosaic] law unless apparent disobedience of it would lead you into danger or your fellow Christians into sin.”4 Fourth, Smith contends that there was, perhaps, “a mediating position” represented by Peter and Barnabas, “who felt no obligation to preserve appearances . . . but wanted to keep on good terms with James.”5 According to Smith, the idea of being “liberated” from the law while appearing to obey it “practically presupposes that the doctrine about the liberty of those in the kingdom will be kept secret.”6 This applies equally to James, Paul, and more extreme libertine groups. Therefore, “the libertinism, usually scandalous and occasionally criminal, was concealed.”7 What all these groups have in common is an element of secrecy with regard to their beliefs and practices. There were likely dozens of other Jesus-related communities about which we know nothing today. Joseph and Aseneth has now given us great insight into one of these communities—an important community, as it turns out—likely the very movement that was hijacked by Paul.
It’s now also clear that all around the Roman Empire and places outside of it such as Parthia, there existed yet another early Christian community. This one was not part of the Jewish community. It was a pre-Paul Church of the Gentiles, a group founded by Mary the Magdalene. This community had a separate and earlier origin than Paul’s more famous Gentile movement, being rooted in the teachings of Jesus and the woman they called the Mara (the lady), who was none other than Jesus’ wife, the mother of his children, the feminine principle of his theology—Sophia/Artemis made flesh.
As we have seen, the idea that Jesus’ teachings attracted Gentiles is not unexpected. According to our now-deciphered text, Mary the Magdalene was a Gentile. The canonical Gospels tell us that Jesus spent time in non-Jewish territory: as a youth in Egypt, most probably Alexandria, and later in Tyre and Sidon in particular. The Galilee, moreover, was a hotbed of Gentile activity—major highways crossed through the territory. In the north, they led to Europe on one side and Parthia on the other. In the south, they led to Egypt and Africa beyond. Beginning in 721 B.C.E., the Galilee was heavily colonized by non-Jewish peoples. Finally, the Romans established major colonies and cultural centers in such Galilean cities as Sepphoris and Tiberias. No wonder it was called “Galilee of the Nations” (Isaiah 9:2) or “Galilee of the Gentiles” (Matthew 4:15). Apparently, out of these Gentiles emerged the Church of the Gentiles as a parallel movement to James’ orthodox—or orthodox-seeming—Jewish version of Christianity.
This hitherto-unknown community, moreover, helps to explain the origins of Gnosticism well before it flowered in the 2nd century. Gnosticism’s theology of redemption through sacred sex is consistent with a syncretic Judeo/Gentile Galilean Jesus movement. Its acceptance of sexuality, the important role of women, and the meaning of the sacrament of the bridal chamber is consistent with a Gentile movement surrounding a married Jesus.
The existence of this Galilean Gentile community may also explain some anomalous structures found in northern Israel: the so-called synagogues at Beit Alpha, Hammat Tiberias, and Sepphoris with their zodiac depictions and images of Helios. Like the church of “Lady Mary” at Tel Istaba, these may represent synagogue churches, or houses of Christian worship for the 4th-century descendants of the early Church of the Gentiles.
The existence of a Mary-the-Magdalene–led Church of the Gentiles can also explain why Joseph and Aseneth was dutifully copied by monks for nearly two thousand years in places like Serbia, Greece, Armenia, Romania, and even Ethiopia. Moreover, it explains how, driven underground, this Gnostic version of Christianity—based on a historical marriage and an original libertine theology—survived as a sort of historical rumor. But, from time to time, it did surface in paintings, songs, novels, and poetry.
One of the most dramatic examples of the above phenomenon is the so-called “Bride of Christ” movement that sprang out of nowhere across Europe of the Middle Ages. This phenomenon has only recently become the subject of scholarly studies.8 It began in the 13th century, coincidentally about the same time as Joseph and Aseneth was translated from Greek into a more accessible Latin.9 The text seems to have had an almost immediate impact. Around 1260 C.E., it became even more popular when Vincent of Beauvais produced an abbreviated version of it.
Suddenly, women in places like the UK, Sweden, Italy, Hungary, Germany, France, and Holland started to have mystical relations with Jesus, often consummated with a marriage ceremony. These women, and sometimes men, were considered to be married to Christ.10 The phenomenon lasted for hundreds of years, up to the 16th century. The people involved engaged in secret mystical acts, often violent and more often sexual. For example, The Book of Margery Kempe11 describes physical love and marriage between Jesus and Margery Kempe, a married laywoman. Kempe was born in 1373 in Norfolk, England. Hers is said to be the first autobiography in the English language. Essentially, she became a medieval version of Mary the Magdalene as depicted in Joseph and Aseneth, complete with fasting, weeping, and mystical experiences of love and marriage with Jesus. She called herself a “Bride of Christ.” Where did she get this, if not from Joseph and Aseneth? In her book, in Joseph and Aseneth fashion, Jesus reassures Margery that she’s worthy to be his wife: “you know well that I treat you like a husband should his wedded wife . . . they may go to bed together without any shame . . . when you are in your bed, take me to yourself as your wedded husband, your beloved darling, as your sweet son because I want to be loved as a son should be loved by his mother and desire that you love me, daughter, as a good wife owes her love to her husband.”12 As in 2nd-century Gnosticism, notice that the lovers are variously called mother, son, daughter, wife, and husband. For her part, all of Margery’s love was focused on “the manhood of Christ.”13
It is important to note that this phenomenon is cross-European: it’s not concentrated in one place. For example, the Prussian-born Dorothea von Montau was a contemporary of Margery. She too was called a “Bride of Christ.” In that capacity, she had a vision in which “the Lord immediately wounded her with many arrows of love and ignited her with hot, burning love.”14 In the vision, Jesus revealed to her that he had “pulled” her away from her husband and “possessed her.” In some kind of altered state, she had sex with Jesus. Despite her married status, she knew that she was doing no wrong because Jesus blessed their sex as a “service of love for Christ.” Like Mary the Magdalene in our Aseneth text, Dorothea wept a lot, shedding many “sweet tears.”15 On her “wedding day” in Rome, Jesus promised Dorothea that he would lead her into the “paradise of passion and desire and into my secret chamber.” Once there, she was shown the “secrets” of Jesus’ heart.16
Katharina Tucher was also German and also lived in the late 14th century.17 In her visions, she describes the same themes that are elaborated in Aseneth’s transformation from pagan priestess to “Bride of God.” Specifically, like Aseneth, Katharina sees an angel and, as with Aseneth, he gives her something to eat. With Katharina, it’s not a honeycomb but some kind of drink which the angel calls his “precious treasure.” Once she swallows this “precious treasure”—as with the honeycomb in Joseph and Aseneth—Katharina gets the gift of eternal life. Of course, like Aseneth (the stand-in for Mary the Magdalene), Katharina is a weeper, especially when she gets to drink the blood of salvation from Jesus’ wound.18 If that’s not enough, in one vision, she holds a small cross in her hand, presumably praying over it, with Jesus’ body close to her mouth. At that point, Katharina’s connection with Mary the Magdalene is made explicit. Jesus tells her “you should not kiss me on my mouth. You are not worthy of this, only my mother is. Take yourself to the foot of the cross and join Mary [the] Magdalene.”19
In all these instances, as in Joseph and Aseneth, and in contrast with the canonical Gospels, it’s the bride, not Jesus, who is front and center. With time, the sex between them gets ever more explicit. In a 14th-century text called Christos und die Minnende Seele (CMS), “Jesus strips, beats, starves and mentally dominates the soul,”20 depicted as a woman. In Rabia Gregory’s words, “the [CMS] manuscript displays the female body in ways evocative of modern pornography.”21 In this instance, Jesus’ love is tough love. The relationship is alternately violent, exhibitionist, and erotic.22 At one point, for example, the feminine soul shouts to Jesus, “you hit me so hard I can no longer bear it.”23 At this point, the female soul finds redemption in this submissive love. All this reaches a climax when Jesus offers her “a kiss of mystery.” When their lips touch, he fully reveals himself and they accomplish mystical union.24 In fact, consistent with Mary the Magdalene being at the center of the Gnostic narrative, in this text it is the woman who is crucified, and it is Jesus who stands at the foot of the cross.25
One man who became a “Bride of Christ” was Heinrich Seuse, born around 1300 in Germany. Seuse went so far as to crucify himself in an effort to “surrender” himself to Christ, becoming “lovable” in the process.26 It is difficult to ascertain whether the participation of men in mystical union with Jesus was a medieval innovation or a reflection of early Gnostic practices. Morton Smith has argued that the gospels themselves preserve hints of secret ceremonies involving homosexual acts: for example, when they come to arrest Jesus, a young man wearing a linen cloth over his naked body runs away from the scene (Mark 14:51–52). There is no hint of homosexuality, however, in Joseph and Aseneth. But there is the idea of sacred sex consummated in the bridal chamber.
It seems that in many places Joseph-and-Aseneth–type Gnosticism was removed from the realm of the here and now and projected into the hereafter where the “brides” could reunite with the “groom.” For example, in 1423, Sister Eefce Neghels asked to strip naked on her deathbed. “A naked bridegroom wants to have a naked bride,” she said. From the good nun’s perspective, “taking her clothes off just before death signified the purity of her soul and her eagerness to please her waiting bridegroom.”27 The death of Lisbeth van Delft, a nun at Diepenveen, Holland, is also recorded in sexual, Valentinian-like terms: “in the year of our Lord 1423 she went to her bridegroom to enjoy him, face to face for all eternity.”28 Not all nuns at the Diepenveen convent waited for the moment of death to unite with the divine bridegroom. For example, when one nun was having trouble falling asleep, a sister showed her “how to lie on the chest of our dear Lord and suckle his bottomless love and mercy.”29 These examples are not unique. When introducing the experiences of 13th-century Flemish mystic Hadewijch of Brabant, Carolyn Walker Bynum warns readers that “this meeting with God reads like a description of a sexual orgasm.”30
In Italy, another 14th-century “Bride of Christ,” Catherine of Siena, sums it all up by stating that one does not marry Christ with a ring made of gold or silver “but with a ring of Christ’s foreskin, given in the circumcision and accompanied by pain and the shedding of blood.”31
Scholars have suggested that all these texts and experiences are related and that they espouse “a mystical agenda of some sort.”32 We agree. Joseph and Aseneth provides us with the key to understanding the agenda. Some might say that we have not shown a cause–effect relationship between the publication of Joseph and Aseneth in the 13th century and the beginnings of the “Bride of Christ” phenomenon. Perhaps not. After all, we’re talking about secret traditions. But it’s quite a coincidence that just as a text that we claim depicts the marriage and sacred sex between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene is translated into Latin, we suddenly have women all over Europe having mystical sex with their Savior. How else does one explain this phenomenon? The fact is that this kind of Christian Gnosticism does not appear full-blown out of nowhere. It has to be learned somehow. Since the church suppressed Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi finds were centuries into the future, the only candidate for the source of medieval Gnosticism is Joseph and Aseneth. But how do we know that Joseph and Aseneth was read then the way we propose it should be read today? The fact is that on this point we have a textual smoking gun.
In the 1400s, an English poem titled The Storie of Asneth suddenly appeared. An anonymous writer penned it at the request of some wellborn English lady. There is only one manuscript copy of this poem in existence. It was found in the collection of Lord Ellesmere at Bridgewater House, Westminster, London. Today, the manuscript is housed in the Huntington Library. Russell Peck brought it to light only recently.33 Peck observes that the first page contains several names, all of them women. “One is struck,” he says, “by the prominence of women in the history of the manuscript’s ownership.”34 He also points out that “the middle English poem is rich in Christian typology . . . much of the typology may be traced back to the original Alexandrian Greek version of the 2nd century.”35 Peck continues by stating that in the poem “Joseph is Christ-like.”36 In fact, as in the Syriac, in the Joseph and Aseneth poem Joseph is explicitly called “the Savior.”37
While Peck doesn’t make the association of Aseneth with Mary the Magdalene, he explicitly states that Aseneth is depicted according to the conventions of Christian iconography and symbolism. In his mind, Aseneth is “adorned with Marian imagery.” He concludes, therefore, that the poem’s version of Aseneth is typologically identified with the Virgin Mary. But she can’t possibly be identified with Jesus’ mother because, as he admits, she is identified with “the bride in the Song of Songs.” Jesus didn’t marry his mother. The mother, therefore, can’t be the bride of the story. Put simply, if Aseneth is not Mary the mother, she must be Mary the wife: Mary the Magdalene.
In any event, what is important for our investigation is that at the very beginning of the 15th century, we suddenly have a Christological English poem based on the Latin version of Joseph and Aseneth. And this version circulates mainly among women. Not only that, it seems to have involved a secret tradition and seems to have been part of a medieval phenomenon involving mostly women and some men38 becoming Brides of Christ.39
Put differently, we now know that we are not the first to read Joseph and Aseneth as a Christian narrative. We now have a 15th-century English poem that reads it the same way. If people were interpreting the story and its bridal-chamber implications in Jesus-related ways, this goes a long way toward demonstrating that our lost gospel—more accurately: secret gospel—was somehow involved in rekindling in Europe the kind of Gnosticism that flourished in the Middle East between the 2nd and 4th centuries. What this teaches us is that for two millennia, the tradition of Jesus’ sacred marriage to Mary the Magdalene survived in various underground forms and even managed to surface from time to time.
A Fully Human Jesus
Joseph and Aseneth represents an important early church writing, hidden away for centuries, that tells the story—in coded form—of the betrothal, spiritual Communion, and actual marriage of Jesus to Mary the Magdalene. It confirms what lies just beneath the surface of the canonical Gospels and makes explicit what the Gnostic writings celebrate.
Part of what it tells us about Jesus is familiar to us. This text celebrates the divinity of Jesus (e.g., he is “Son of God”). Yet it introduces concepts that are less familiar to most people today. Mary the Magdalene, for instance, is depicted as the “Bride of God.” The union of Jesus with Mary the Magdalene, moreover, takes place on a heavenly plane as well as an earthly one.
What is also unfamiliar is the portrait of a married Jesus and what this entails. Simply put, it clearly affirms the full humanity of Jesus, his masculinity and his sexuality. More than that, this ancient text promotes the union between Jesus and Mary the Magdalene as the way in which God acts in history so as to redeem the world. From the point of view of the text, Jesus and Mary the Magdalene’s bedroom is God’s way of redeeming humanity. Our lost gospel does all this by celebrating Jesus and Mary the Magdalene’s life—especially as it was consummated in their “bridal chamber”—as opposed to Jesus’ suffering upon the cross, death, and third-day resurrection.
For many people, thinking of Jesus as married, having sexual relations, and bringing up children is problematic. It’s the stuff of fiction. But if that isn’t enough, the Joseph and Aseneth text now asks them to go beyond this by postulating that for Jesus’ early followers, salvation involved the understanding and imitation of the sexual life of Jesus and Mary the Magdalene.
In a sense, believing that Jesus was married and had children is the easy part. The idea of a celibate Jesus is totally foreign to the Jewish world into which he was born. The fact is that it is incumbent on Jewish males to observe the first Biblical commandment—be fruitful and multiply. It is also a given in Judaism that the long-awaited messiah—Hebrew for the “anointed one” of God, Christ in Greek—will marry and sire a family. It’s to be expected. For example, a hundred years after Jesus, there was a Messiah claimant named Simon, whose followers called him Bar Kochba or “The Son of the Star.” He was no flash in the pan. On the contrary, he had the backing of the greatest rabbi of all time, Akiva, and it took the Emperor Hadrian and the might of the Roman Empire three years to put down his revolt. We know for a fact that Bar Kochba had a wife. In the context of history, thinking of Jesus as having a wife and children is no different than thinking of Bar Kochba as having a family. In the context of 1st-century Judaea, it would be scandalous to think otherwise.
A married Jesus is not an idea that should disturb anyone thinking in non-Pauline terms. What may be disturbing is the theology that grew up around it. But that’s another matter. In our world, however, people’s initial reactions are conditioned by Pauline theology. As a result, God the Father impregnating a Jewish teen named Mary so as to give birth to himself seems all right, but God the Son impregnating another Mary, known as the Magdalene, seems heretical.
More than this, we are used to a non-political Jesus, one whose kingdom is not of this earth. Our lost gospel, however, reveals a very different kind of Jesus: one involved in the messiah machinations of his time, allied with a Roman anti-Semite named Sejanus and making a power grab for the temple with the backing of his Gentile Syro-Phoenician wife. In Joseph and Aseneth we seem to have a Gnostic gospel grounded in history that fills in many of the missing pieces of the early Jesus movement. It also explains several historical phenomena, such as Paul’s movement and Gnosticism, that otherwise seem inexplicable.
We believe that Joseph and Aseneth evolved from a 1st-century gospel recording the real-life events involving Jesus and Mary the Magdalene, through Gnostic Christianity, into the Greek writing that the anonymous monk came across in the library of the bishops of Aleppo. There were various cultural reasons along the way that would account for the need to encode its message: Roman persecution and, later on, Orthodox Christian persecution bent on squelching anything to do with Jesus’ family and humanity.
But our gospel survived and, though it tells a very different story from the canonical Gospels, it is not incompatible with them. In fact, echoes of Joseph and Aseneth (e.g., Mary the Magdalene as a Syro-Phoenician and a wife) can be heard in the canonical Gospels themselves. Put differently, Joseph and Aseneth forces us to reassess enigmatic passages in the Gospels and understand them in a new way—but not only the Gospels.
In light of Joseph and Aseneth, many unintelligible texts can now come into sharp focus. For example, among the various Gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi, there was a previously lost gospel. Its composition is very early, perhaps dating to just a few years after the crucifixion—scholars estimate somewhere between 40 C.E. and 140 C.E. Unlike the canonical Gospels and Joseph and Aseneth, this gospel is not a narrative. It is simply a series of statements attributed to Jesus. Stylistically, it gives the impression of notes taken during a series of sermons. Saying 61 records an exchange between a female disciple named Salome and Jesus. Here Jesus seems to allude to his sacred marriage with Mary the Magdalene and the fact that he is destined to abandon the bridal chamber by dying. He also seems to have been less than monogamous. He explicitly states that the way to celebrate the wholeness, or oneness, of God is to unite sexually with his son. This is what the gospel states: “Jesus said: Two will rest upon a bed; one will die, the other will live. Salome said: Who are you, O man? Who gave you birth? You have mounted my bed and eaten from my table. Jesus said to her: I am he who is equal to the One that sent me; I am empowered by my Father. [Salome said:] I am your disciple. [Jesus said to her:] Therefore I say: If He is made whole, He will be full of light, but if He is divided, He will be full of darkness.”40
An incredible poem was also found in the Nag Hammadi collection. It gives us a glimpse of the power and charisma of Mary the Magdalene. We believe that it preserves an actual sermon delivered by her. It’s called The Thunder, Perfect Mind. It quotes a female savior-figure sermonizing in a series of paradoxical statements. In the sermon, the speaker identifies herself much as Jesus identifies himself. For example, Jesus calls himself “the alpha and the omega”—i.e., the first and the last (Revelation 22:13)—and she identifies herself using the very same words—“I am first and the last.” She then goes on to say, “I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin.”41 Without a decoded Joseph and Aseneth, we would not be able to recognize the Magdalene’s voice in this sermon. With a decoded Joseph and Aseneth, the words jump out at us as a perfect match with what we have gleaned as the voice of Jesus’ wife and partner.
It’s now time to review the revelations, study them, debate them and arrive at a new understanding. This will not be an easy process. We are used to Jesus being the “superstar” of the story. All the Gospels revolve around him as he talks in riddles, heals, performs miracles, is tried, crucified, and resurrected. But in our lost gospel, he is a more marginal figure. His greatest accomplishment is to win the favors of an aristocratic priestess of Artemis, Mary the Magdalene. It is she that became the “city of refuge” for many of their followers. In this text, it is she who is the superstar. It is she who became the link between the Church of the Hebrews and the Church of the Gentiles. More than this, it is she that, after the crucifixion, may have represented the resurrected Jesus himself, and it is her bedroom that became the holy of holies of a religion that claims over a billion followers today.