Mysteries of Mary Magdalene

Mysteries of Mary Magdalene

2011, Religion  -   68 Comments
6.93
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Ratings: 6.93/10 from 43 users.

Mysteries of Mary MagdaleneMary Magdalene is a key witness to the most important event in Christianity - the Resurrection of Jesus. But we know almost nothing about her. The early church brands her as a whore. Movie says she's the wife of Jesus and a mother of his child.

But beyond the gospels lays another secret text. So controversial, it's been banned for centuries. A lost gospel that may reveal the real Mary Magdalene. 2,000 years after her death, Mary Magdalene's name is everywhere. But she remains one of history's most mysterious woman. To some she's a prostitute, to others she's the true holy grail.

In the Bible's New Testament she plays a starring role in the foundation of Christianity. The Gospels give very few details about her, only that she comes from Galilee, and follows Jesus, and once was possessed by demons.

Discover how and why the early Christian church was able to reinvent one of the most mysterious women in history.

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Roy Hewes
Roy Hewes
3 years ago

Relationship with Christ and the true meaning of the scriptures is important. Forget religion, think Christ, Holy Spirit and God. Be mindful we know Christ was.

Sandy
Sandy
5 years ago

You know it really amazes me how some people are so ignorant because they are simply uneducated.ALSO,that most who have such an opinion,without fact ,wisdom,or knowledge of our fathers words,can't grasp the concept,that its not just words written but an awakening deep in the soul. You don't even have to understand everything because you can feel his arms wrapped around you with a warmth and love that makes you weep. Except JESUS AS YOUR SAVIOR AND YOU WILL COME TO THIS UNDERSTANDING AND ENLIGHTENMENT LIKE NEVER BEFORE!

robert k
robert k
10 years ago

well.....The story of a hooker that sat on a wet rock after an orgy and the b*stard child god wont even claim.....
Religion is a scam for money from hard working people that got suckered into a old fabricated story book for kids on how to be good and obey the laws of the land....that is the bible/10 commandments...... penal codes and laws

Jeff B
Jeff B
10 years ago

Jesus' bride is the church...not Mary Magdalene...we take Jesus life, death, burial, resurrection and accent to Heaven by FAITH...not by any special knowledge...that may be why many early manuscripts of Mark STOP at 16:8...Mary was there and saw the empty tomb...there is no additional information added...that is where our journey of FAITH begins....

MartinC
MartinC
10 years ago

Mary Magdalene has always been a very mysterious figure in history. From reading the bible, I've found very little about her besides the fact that she was one of the women to witness Jesus's resurrection and that Jesus performed an exorcism on her. I watched this documentary admittedly because a lot of my classmates watched it, but I did find the topic of Mary Magdalene very intriguing.

After talking about her early life and how she came to meet Jesus, it slowly goes a bit off topic and starts to talk about things that I think are a bit trivial. It talks about the Romans and their involvement in Judaea, and talks about many things about Mary Magdalene which are not very interesting, as well as many tangents which have very little to do with Mary herself.

In short, this documentary is a bit too long for the information that it gives. It raises many interesting and highly controversial topics (such as how she was the wife of Jesus, and bore his child), which was pretty nice to watch, but other than that there were many other things that I would deem a bit unnecessary for the documentary. It was worth watching, but the producers should have made the length appropriate for the (good) information that it had.

Guest
Guest
10 years ago

Before watching this Documentary, I knew nothing about Mary
Magdalene. I didn't know who she was and I didn't know what her role in History
was. This documentary looks at the mysteries surrounding of Mary of Magdalene,
who was believed to be a faithful follower of Jesus Christ. She was present at
Jesus’ crucifixion, stood by him and stayed until Jesus took his last breath.
She went to the tomb to anoint Jesus and witnessed the resurrection of Jesus
Christ. Some believed that Mary Magdalene was close to Jesus, even had an
intimate relationship with Jesus while some believed that she was a sinner and
a prostitute who begged for forgiveness from Jesus. At one point, Mary was
reinvented in literature and art as Jesus’ wife and mother of Jesus’ child.

Very little is known about Mary Magdalene only that she was
from Galilee. At one point, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene showed her as a
prominent figure, a disciple and a teacher who knew much about Christ and the
Jesus movement. However, the New Testament had eliminated her because her story
did not fit well into any part of the Gospels. Gospels of Mark, Luke, John and
Matthew in the New Testament focused on male disciples and downplayed Mary’s
role in Jesus’ life. The Gospel of Luke even portrayed Mary was possessed by
seven demons possibly to cast doubt on her character. Nonetheless, Gospel of
Mark and John did suggest that Mary Magdalene was the sole witness to the
resurrection of Jesus Christ – she was the first person to deliver the
resurrection to the disciples.

MarisaH
MarisaH
10 years ago

I thought the documentary sounded pretty cool, and from reading a bit of Dan Brown’s book I wanted to know more about Mary Magdalene which is why I chose this documentary. I have always wanted to learn more about Mary, which is why I had pretty high hopes for this documentary and expected to learn much more than I actually did. I though the research behind the movie was extensive, and it gave out a lot of facts about the life of Mary Magdalene, but wasn’t really relevant in some parts of the movie.

The first 10 minutes or 1st section of the movie was quite interesting and gave me basic information of Mary Magdalene’s life, and how it was a controversy that she was recognized as Jesus’s wife. But as the documentary progresses, it started mentioning topics about fishing and visiting caves. Although this was related to Mary Magdalene, i though that it was a little but unnecessary.

Overall, I think the movie is pretty mixed, the beginning was pretty interesting and I learnt more about Mary Magdalene, but for almost three quarters of the movie it was mentioning things that weren't really necessary when it comes to narrating the life of Mary Magdalene. I probably wouldn’t want to watch this again and if I were to rate it out of ten I would give this movie a three.

Guest
Guest
10 years ago

Mary Magdalene to me had always been a woman referred to occasionally a church. I did know that she was the first person to have seen Jesus after the resurrection, but hardly anything else. Then, I read The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. He described this other Mary, a highly controversial Mary, a Mary that I had never heard of. The DaVinci Code described Mary as Jesus’s wife, an idea that I had never heard of. Although I initially dismissed it as a figment of Brown’s imagination, I realized later on that it was actually a really interesting thought, I wanted to learn more about the story, and what the experts thought about it, so I found this documentary. I had high expectations for it, and hoped to learn more about this mysterious woman. Yet, it seems as if my expectations were too high.

The first 15 minutes of the movie were quite interesting, and provided some insight into Mary’s life, and her connection to Jesus and his twelve disciples. However, after that, the documentary goes on a tangent, describing the influence of the Roman Empire during the time period, and the Jewish revolts. Then, the documentary goes back on track, and veers off on another tangent a few minutes later. This pattern continues throughout the documentary, and I repeatedly found myself thinking, “What does this have to do with Mary Magdalene again?”

Overall, I did learn some things from this documentary. The segment on the agnostic gospels was really interesting, and it provided some background to the Mary I had read in The DaVinci Code. The documentary itself actually talked about the book itself, describing why Dan Brown's account had no proof. However, the extra fluff thrown in outweighed the information. I felt the producers had a 45-minute limit, but not enough information about Mary to actually fill the 45 minutes; As a result, they resorted to adding information that was somewhat related to her. If this had been shorter, I think that it would have been more enjoyable.

LaurenC
LaurenC
10 years ago

Mary Magdalene to me had always been a woman referred to occasionally a church. I did know that she was the first person to have seen Jesus after the
resurrection, but hardly anything else. Then, I read The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown. He described this other Mary, a highly controversial Mary, a Mary that I had never heard of. The DaVinci Code described Mary as Jesus’s wife, an idea that I had never heard of. Although I initially dismissed it as a figment of Brown’s imagination, I realized later on that it was actually a really interesting thought, I wanted to learn more about the story, and what the experts thought about it, so I found this documentary. I had high expectations for it, and hoped to learn more about this mysterious woman. Yet, it seems as if my expectations were too high.

The first 15 minutes of the movie were quite interesting, and provided some insight into Mary’s life, and her
connection to Jesus and his twelve disciples. However, after that, the documentary goes on a tangent, describing the influence of the Roman Empire during the time period, and the Jewish revolts. Then, the documentary goes back on track, and veers off on another tangent a few minutes later. This pattern continues throughout the documentary, and I repeatedly found myself thinking, “What does this have to do with Mary Magdalene again?”

Overall, I did learn some things from this
documentary. The segment on the agnostic gospels was really interesting, and it provided some background to the Mary I had read in The DaVinci Code. The documentary itself actually talked about the book itself, describing why Dan Brown's account had no proof. However, the extra fluff thrown in outweighed the information. I felt the producers had a 45-minute limit, but not enough information about Mary to actually fill the 45 minutes; As a result, they resorted to adding information that was somewhat related to her. If this had been shorter, I think that it would have been more enjoyable.

ElisabethS
ElisabethS
10 years ago

Before watching this documentary, I was hoping to learn about Mary Magdalene, her significance in the Bible and her relationship with Jesus. I knew her basic background but was intrigued by the mystery that surrounded her. I hoped that this documentary would lift my questions.

However, it seemed that the documentary knew no more about Mary Magdalene than I did. It spouted a few known facts about her life, and filled up the rest of the forty minutes with information about that time period, jumping from her life, to mud caves, to fishing boats and then concluding weakly that Mary Magdalene might have fished in one of these boats or lived one of the caves. Aside from basic facts, the documentary was mostly a compilation of feeble assumptions. It seemed that there was so little to say about the actual subject, the filmmakers were attempting to make wild parallels to other subjects that didn’t relate.

To be fair, I learned that there is very little known about Mary Magdalene, far too little to make a proper documentary. I admire the filmmakers in gathering up all the known information about her, but they wasted time trying to fill up space with far fetched connections.

Overall, I didn’t learn very much about Mary Magdalene from this documentary, although it provided a lot of information about the time period.

Charlotte C
Charlotte C
10 years ago

In choosing this documentary, I was hoping to learn more about Mary Magdalene's role in the Bible and the biblical story. When I was young, I remember hearing about her in Sunday School and wondering why she was only mentioned once or twice when she most evidently had a huge role in the resurrection of Jesus, but is only mentioned once or twice (and not always in the most positive view either).

However, this documentary was far from my expectations. I expected deep analysis into Mary Magdalene's life and the reasons why she doesn't play a significant role in the Christian world (positively, I mean). To be fair, there were a few important details here and there about the basic timeline of her life. But most of these facts were ones that I knew myself by just listening in class or at Sunday School. The movie is extremely hard to follow because it jumps from one random fact to another, and explains more about the time period than about her
life. It talks about mud caves and riverboats when these connections are not useful to the context of the story.

Although I did not enjoy the documentary, I must say that credit where credit is due. I could tell that the directors and the producers of the movie did attempt to gather as many facts as possible about Mary Magdalene, but failed to because of the lack of information there is about her. In the documentary, it even stated that a lot of the conclusions drawn about the woman in regards to the
scriptures we have now have a high possibility of being incorrect.

In the end, I didn't learn much at all about Mary Magdalene, but rather about the time period in which she lived.

Mark Casper
Mark Casper
11 years ago

For those who want proof are those who do not have intuition. Theses are people who want someone to do their thinking for them. Man MUST make up his own mind, anything else is lazy.

Darren
Darren
11 years ago

what a load of rubbish. There is no god.

Ian McMonagle
Ian McMonagle
11 years ago

I think "Magdalene" could be symbolic as an indicator that Mary was another fisher (or recruiter) of people for the group in the same way that the sign of the fish was used by early Christians. It´s as feasible an explanation as anything else offered in the last 2000 years.

humansoul
humansoul
11 years ago

helo everybody, JESUS the son of god maybe,maybe not, but his teachings like so many other profits are the essence for a common people to behave in social and kind manner and to respect he had no religion,or prejudice we are all born with instincts that are the common emotions of man kind i suppose i do not have to type them out.the answers cant exist with out the questions and the questions cant exist with out answers .but all profits that were good still stand, and all stand on a common ground and the teachings are all very very much the same dont impose and dont fight any more battles and kill and impose and violate remember we all do know what is right and wrong----------------

Gertrude van Voorden
Gertrude van Voorden
11 years ago

Women could not inherit, does not necessarily mean they could not make money.

RikG01
RikG01
11 years ago

This is very true. You make a good argument on the rise of cult characters. I understand that a common thought among modern skeptics is that Jesus is more likely to be a Robin Hood style phenomena. There's no evidence of the Jesus but numerous peices of evidence which describe people who fit some details while greatly missing the mark on others.

Regarding ancient writers who claimed to know someone who knew Jesus, that could never be considered as evidence, at best it's hearsay. Like most of the bible.
I understand what you mean, of course, I'm just enjoying the debate.

fordneri
fordneri
11 years ago

Some say Mary Magdalene and Jesus were brother and sister. The children of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra. That is why Agustus Caesar commanded Herod to hunt him down and kill him. Agustus Caesar the adopted son of Julius Caesar could not be god as long as Jesus who's real father was Julius Caesar the god and his mother was Cleopatra the goddess lived.

jazzdawg
jazzdawg
11 years ago

I guess the old saying "Behind every successful man is a successful woman" escaped the 4 gospels. Given the history of these nomads and the misogynist view at the time, is it any wonder that woman today have little rank in the catholic church. Of course one could also argue that Jesus was a failed prophet and that Mary was a crazy loon.

barbara sherman
barbara sherman
11 years ago

The "logical" mind will never comprehend that if there is a "SUPREME CREATOR GOD', then it follows that He is a supernatural spirit being. How can humans be so arrogant to think that such an obviously superior being would be obligated to "prove" his existence to them? It's absurd.
I believe it is left for humans to begin seeking to KNOW, outside their limited finite experience if such a GOD exists, and if so, what is their purpose in knowing and believing? But no, that's not what humans tend to do. The majority simply refuse to believe anything beyond what they "think" inside their own bony structure, and from what they read that sounds reasonable to them that some other human constructed from their own thinking, learning and so on. If an individual were to begin seeking pure, unadulterated knowledge concerning a Supernatural uncreated Being, a GOD, shouldn't that knowledge come from the SOURCE, the "God Being", not something some human thought and then wrote a book about what he thought? Humans are simply too faulty.

If such a BEING EXISTS might He not respond?

Fabien L'Amour
Fabien L'Amour
11 years ago

Is that documentary worth watching if you are agnostic? Do they have some proof of her existence outside the bible? I don't want to waste 45 minutes to end up being told that verse says this but that other verse says differently...

Glen Hale
Glen Hale
11 years ago

While you have religion, any religion, you will never have peace.
Religion is a form of mental illness just like gambling or any problem humans can have.

Kané Guarani-Kaiowá
Kané Guarani-Kaiowá
11 years ago

It is easy to speak against the teachings of Christianity. Do a documentary against Islam nobody does, ok?

heavyrocker
heavyrocker
11 years ago

Once a whore,always a whore.

Vargeaise
Vargeaise
11 years ago

Why believe Jesus is anything but a fictional character in first place?

Tom
Tom
11 years ago

The only difference, intellectually, between those who argue about the nuances of the Bible and those that argue about the nuances of the "Lord of the Rings" or "Star Wars" is . . . oh wait, they're is no difference ;)

barbara sherman
barbara sherman
11 years ago

Ok Jeremy, where is the verse that says women should be seen, not heard? That is a "saying" not a scripture. And anyway, I thought it referred to children, not women. Not saying that some women shouldn't tone it down a bit at times.

pwndecaf
pwndecaf
11 years ago

@barbara - The Farmer's Almanac?

barbara sherman
barbara sherman
11 years ago

First thing we need to straighten out, is that there is no place in the bible that indicates that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute. Legends and myths sure die hard don't they? Kind of like the one a Christian lady swore up and down it says in the bible that "It's better to plant your seed in the belly of a whore, than on the ground", referring to masturbation. When I asked her for the chapter and verse, she said I dunno, but it's in there somewhere, which sent me on a hunt. I finally found it. Anyone else know? Just asking for fun. :)