HOW COULD THE COLLECTOR have missed the translation’s most striking line? Why had his first email pointed to “an argument about Mary,” rather than the showstopping “Jesus said this to them: My wife”? It didn’t matter. The fragment distilled all the themes King found most compelling in the Gospel of Mary, then went them one better. Its twist—about Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s wife and disciple—redeemed the wrongly maligned Magdalene twice over; challenged Church teachings on priestly celibacy and women’s leadership; and filled one of the biggest holes in gospel accounts of Jesus’s life. It was the
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