Channel Five - 1 x 60 mins - CTVC
Producer / Director / Writer
A fresh look at one of the great mystery figures of history - Mary Magdalene. Some say her vision of a risen Jesus was the spark that ignited the flame of Christianity. Turning the Jesus Movement from a minor Jewish sect into a new world faith. Without her Christianity, as we know it today, may never have existed.
Yet strangely, rather than celebrate her as a founder of the faith, the gospels say almost nothing about her, the early Christian church even going so far as to brand her a whore. Since then she’s been constantly reinvented in Western art and literature, most recently in the Da Vinci Code as the wife of Jesus and mother of his child.
So who was she? In this dramatized documentary we drew together what little we know about her from the gospels and contrasted that with new evidence from the “lost gospels” discovered during the last century. Adding to that expert appraisal of what the role of women might have been in one of the Jewish rebel sects of the time led us to a new understanding of Mary Magdalene’s place in Christianity. Could Mary Magdalene have been a leader in the early church? Or do all the conspiracy theories hide an even greater truth? That her story of a risen Christ, the very foundation of the faith, was based on a simple misunderstanding?