Bismarck, North Dakota - News

Who was this woman, Mary Magdalene, anyway?

Was she the penitent prostitute of the Middle Ages? The woman who had an intimate relationship with Jesus, as the book "The Da Vinci Code" postulates? Or was she a powerful leader of the early Christian church, "the apostle to the apostles?"

Or was she parts of all these? Or none of the above?

Randy Argall, associate professor of religion and chaplain at Jamestown College, will explore these three different portrayals of Mary Magdalene at a gathering in Bismarck on Sept. 24-25 called "Mary Magdalene and the Media: The Emerging Feminine Spirit in Contemporary Culture."

The gathering is open to both men and women and to people of all faiths, said Lorraine Dopson and Brian Palecek, organizers of the conference along with Wanda Walker Doppler.

Argall said his keynote talk will "play detective, look at the evidence and see the different portrayals of Mary Magdalene."

From his research into canonical and noncanonical literature surrounding Mary Magdalene, he said he will try to offer some judgments about which portrayal may be more accurate than the others.

Modern fiction writers often focus on the image of Mary Magdalene as the penitent prostitute, he said. He is disappointed with recent novels that portray her as a prostitute or a woman caught in adultery.

"That medieval image has an afterlife -- even the Catholic church no longer makes that linkage," he said.

Much is made of her in "The Da Vinci Code," as a woman who had an intimate relationship with Jesus, a figure that may have been married to him and had children with him, Argall said. There are early and ambiguous texts that deal with this fascinating line of thought, he said.

He actually had a positive reaction to "The Da Vinci Code," he said. "It's a wonderful murder mystery," he said, in the tradition of P.D. James and Susan Howatch. "The way it deals with early Jesus tradition raises some important questions worth thinking about," he said.

And, thirdly, "if Mary Magdalene's possible role as an important early leader in the development of Christianity is a viable sketch, what happened to it?" is another question Argall will explore.

Argall's interest in Mary Magdalene was spurred by Margaret George's novel, "Mary Called Magdalene," which he asks students in his "Jesus" course to read, he said.

People probably best know Mary Magdalene's media image from either "The Da Vinci Code," or the Mel Gibson production of "The Passion of the Christ," said Lorraine Dopson.

At the conference, Dopson will offer artistic images in a slide presentation called "Magdalene in Painting and Sculpture."

"The last 2,000 years have been about the path to the father," she said. She senses a tremendous yearning today for wholeness, a completion, evident in such phenomena as the appearances of the Virgin Mary at Medjugorje.

That raises the thought that "Jesus is leading us on the path to the mother," she said. "Of course, God is genderless and the embodiment of both masculine and feminine."

The concept that Jesus would have had a partner, companion, lover or spouse brings up the erotic dimension of spirituality, Palecek said.

"You can't avoid discussion of sacred sexuality," he said.

Palecek will lead participants at the gathering in doing clay work, a presentation he calls "Unearthing the Feminine."

More information on the gathering is available at http://www.marymagdaleneND.com.