According to Mary Magdalene Read Free Page A

The distance was too great for her to be able to hear what they were shouting, but that did not matter, for she knew she would not understand those foreign tongues.
    Mary let her gaze roam to the west, following the long stony fortress out toward the sea and the harbor town of Seleucia. She saw the poor quarters clinging to the wall and thought about the exhausted drunken men, the whores trying to survive by selling their bodies, the children begging and rummaging in the garbage from the ships.
    It was an unbearable world and she firmly turned her eyes in the other direction. There she could just make out the caravan route across the mountains. Slowly, day after day, it would wind its way eastward toward the Euphrates and on toward the heart of the kingdom of Parthia.
    When Leonidas came to fetch her, he was pleased, for all had gone as expected, but he was muttering as usual about the high cost of the tolls.
    Livia lived by the shore of the Orontes, not far from the river island where the Seleucians had built their palace. As they sat down at table, they could hear the murmur of the sluggishly flowing river and watch the evening birds settling along the shores for the night. Livia's daughter and her husband were also there. Mary greeted Mera with great warmth, a young woman with a confident relationship to God. She worshipped Isis and was daily absorbed in prayer before the great goddess' stone in the temple.
    As always at Livia's, the food was exquisite, but that had no effect on Leonidas, who was short-tempered and gritty-eyed.
    But his sister was filled with the previous evening, impressed by Simon Peter, and she spoke eloquently of the tremendous force radiating from the man.
    “He must have been amazing, that young prophet in Palestine,” she said. “I thought there was something moving about the stories about his virtues, something gentle and innocent.”
    Mary was surprised. So that was what Livia had heard. For a moment she was tempted to confide in her, but a look from Leonidas stopped her. Then, Livia went on.
    “As far as I can make out, his teaching is much like that of Orpheus. And these new Christians do resemble many other fraternities of slaves and the poor all over the Roman Empire, where everyone is indifferent to their sufferings.”
    “You forget that those slaves and the poor are in a dangerous majority,” said Nicomachus, her son-in-law.
    “But he was no revolutionary, this young prophet.”
    “He was crucified as a troublemaker, anyhow.”
    Livia was not listening.
    “It seemed to me,” she went on, “that he…whatever his name was…yes, Jesus, refused to see that people are fundamentally evil. He was naive.”
    Mary wanted to cry out that Jesus was much greater than Livia would ever understand, but she made herself keep quiet, remembering that she herself had had similar thoughts. “His light was so strong, he found it difficult to see clearly.”
    Simon Peter stayed for a few more days, speaking in the handsome public square in Antioch. He was successful, and the first large Christian congregation outside Jerusalem was founded.
    But Mary did not go to his meetings.

M ary found remembering difficult. Day after day, she found herself sitting in front of her empty papyrus roll.
    “Don't bother about the sequence of events,” Leonidas said. “Just start with an event whenever it happened.”
    Again she tried to capture the scene in the house in Jerusalem at the time when Simon Peter had repudiated her. Then she remembered what Andrew, Simon's brother, had said the moment she had stopped speaking.
    “What strange things you are preaching. And I don't believe you.”
    The next moment, Simon spoke the contemptuous words that Jesus did not speak privately with a woman. But then she remembered there had been another voice.
    “You're hot tempered, Simon. Now you're fighting with the woman as if with an enemy. If the Savior found her worthy, who are you to judge her? He sensed her spirit, so