Three years ago, during one of the longest nights of my life as a researcher and as a believer, while reviewing the oldest texts of Christianity to prepare for “The Resurrection of Christ,” the film I am currently shooting at Cinecittà Studios in Rome, a document arrived that I hadn’t expected. It was sent to me by an Ethiopian monk who had contacted my production team through an intermediary in Addis Ababa. It was an English translation of a passage from the Kebra Nagast, the Book of the Glory of Kings, the most important sacred text of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
But it was not a known passage; it was a fragment of a manuscript that this monk had found in a monastery in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, during cataloging work carried out after the war that devastated the region between 2020 and 2022. A fragment that had remained hidden for centuries, perhaps millennia, rolled up inside another, larger manuscript, as if someone had deliberately hidden it to protect it from hands that intended to destroy it.
When I first read that passage, I was in my Malibu studio at 2:00 a.m., with an untouched glass of Irish whiskey and the television off. The house was quiet, my family asleep; it was just me and those words on a computer screen. I had to sit down—I was already sitting, but I had to sit down again, more deeply, more completely—as if my body needed to physically settle in order to process what my eyes were reading. I had to take deep breaths and read it three more times to make sure I was understanding correctly, because what that manuscript describes about Mary Magdalene contradicts everything the Church has taught about her for two thousand years. Everything.
And it doesn’t contradict it with opinions or alternative interpretations; it contradicts it with facts, names, places, with a narrative so detailed and specific that it was either invented by someone with an extraordinary imagination or written by someone who knew things the rest of the Christian world has forgotten. I’m not going to reveal everything that fragment contains because some of that material will appear in the film, but what I can tell you tonight is what the Ethiopian Bible as a whole says about Mary Magdalene.
The Ethiopian Church, one of the oldest Christian churches in the world with a tradition dating back to the first century, has preserved a radically different image of Mary Magdalene than the one you know—an image that the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant churches erased, distorted, and buried under layers of deliberate lies for centuries. What that image reveals is so disturbing to the ecclesiastical institution that you immediately understand why they destroyed it. If what Ethiopian tradition says about Mary Magdalene is true, then the history of Christianity, as you have been told it, is a forgery. Not a simplification, not an abridged version: a deliberate, methodical, and systematic forgery, executed over fourteen centuries with the precision of a military operation designed to remove the most important woman in the Jesus movement from her rightful place. Designed to turn a leader into a penitent, a teacher into a sinner, an apostle into a repentant prostitute, an example of female power into an example of female submission.
I’m going to tell you what I discovered. I’m going to show you the evidence I’ve accumulated over three years of obsessive research. I’m going to connect the dots that no one has connected before because no one has had simultaneous access to the Gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi, the Ethiopian manuscripts of Tigray, the liturgical traditions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the archaeology of Magdala in Galilee, and the historical data on the Gregory the Great forgery. When I finish, you’ll understand why I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for three years and why this discovery has fundamentally changed the way I’m filming “The Resurrection of Christ.”
To understand what Ethiopian tradition says about Mary Magdalene, you first need to understand what the Ethiopian Church is. If you’re unfamiliar with it, you might think I’m talking about some fringe sect that invented its traditions last week, and nothing could be further from the truth. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is one of the oldest, most venerable, and most misunderstood religious institutions on the planet. Its testimony carries a weight that no serious researcher can ignore, even though most Western researchers systematically disregard it for the simple reason that they don’t speak Ge’ez and can’t read the texts in their original language.
Its origins date back to the first century AD. The Book of Acts, chapter eight, records the story of an Ethiopian eunuch, a high-ranking official in the court of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, who encountered the apostle Philip on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. The eunuch was reading the book of the prophet Isaiah in his chariot; Philip explained that the passage referred to Jesus. The eunuch believed, was baptized in a pool of water by the roadside, and continued his journey back to Ethiopia, carrying the Christian faith with him. That story is in the Bible, in your Bible; Ethiopia’s connection to Christianity is not a footnote, it is in the canonical text.
The Kingdom of Aksum, in what is now northern Ethiopia and Eritrea, officially adopted Christianity as its state religion in the fourth century, around the same time the Roman Empire did under Constantine. But unlike Rome, which adopted Christianity after centuries of persecution and transformed it into an imperial religion, Ethiopia adopted it organically, integrating it with local traditions that stretched back to the Old Testament period. Ethiopians claim descent from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, whose meeting is described in the First Book of Kings. Ethiopian tradition holds that Menelik I was born of this union, traveled to Jerusalem, met his father Solomon, and brought the Ark of the Covenant back to Ethiopia, where, according to tradition, it is still kept in the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Aksum.
I was in Aksum in 2019 during a three-week research visit. Aksum is a small, dusty city with an air that smells of eucalyptus and roasted coffee. It has one of the world’s most impressive collections of monolithic stelae, carved granite obelisks that rise up to 33 meters high. It’s a city that was the capital of an empire that rivaled Rome, Persia, and China, and that most Westerners don’t even know existed. I stood in front of the chapel where they say the Ark is kept; they wouldn’t let me in. No one goes in except the guardian monk appointed to watch over it for life, a man who never leaves the chapel from the day he is appointed until the day he dies.
I asked the priest who was with me if he believed the Ark was really inside. He looked at me with an expression that combined patience with compassion, as if I had asked him if he believed the sun was real, and said something I haven’t forgotten:
— We don’t believe the Ark is there; we know it’s there. We’ve known it for three thousand years.
That certainty, that continuity of tradition stretching back thousands of years, is what makes the testimony of the Ethiopian Church difficult to ignore. They are not a recent sect; they are an institution that has preserved texts, rituals, beliefs, and practices uninterruptedly for over seventeen hundred years. And throughout all that time, they have maintained an image of Mary Magdalene that is completely different from the one constructed by Western Christianity.
The Ethiopian Bible has 81 books; the Protestant Bible has 66, and the Catholic Bible has 73. Ethiopia has more than any other Christian tradition, and these additional books are not obscure theological treatises, but texts that Ethiopians consider as sacred as Genesis or the Gospel of John. The Book of Enoch, removed from the Western canon but preserved intact by the Ethiopians, describes the fall of the angels, the Watchers who descended to earth, took human wives, and taught forbidden knowledge. It is a text that profoundly influenced the New Testament. The Book of Jubilees, also called the “Little Genesis,” recounts the stories with a level of detail that the canonical text lacks. The “Ascension of Isaiah” describes seven heavens and a Christ who descends in disguise through each one so that the powers of evil will not recognize him.
I have studied these texts for decades, consulted with Ge’ez experts, and visited the libraries where the original manuscripts are kept. I can tell you that the picture of Christianity that emerges from the Ethiopian Bible is significantly richer, more complex, and more fascinating than that of the Western canons. Among those additional books and parallel traditions, there is material about Mary Magdalene that has no equivalent in any other Christian tradition. But before I discuss what the Ethiopian tradition says about her, I need you to understand what the Western tradition did to her, because if you don’t understand the extent of the forgery, you can’t appreciate the magnitude of what Ethiopia preserved.
There’s a little-known fact I discovered while researching the Church Fathers of the early centuries. Hippolytus of Rome, one of the most important theologians of the third century, called Mary Magdalene “Apostola Apostolorum”: Apostle to the Apostles. Not disciple, not follower; Apostle, with the same title as Peter, Paul, John, or James. And not just an apostle, but the one who “apostolated” the apostles, the one who brought them the news of the resurrection, the one who transformed them from men hiding, trembling with fear, into men who went out to preach throughout the world. Without Magdalene’s testimony, the apostles would never have known that Jesus had risen. Without her, there is no Christianity. It’s that simple, that radical, that unsettling for an institution that has excluded women from leadership for two thousand years.
This title was also used by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. Both explicitly recognized that Mary Magdalene was the first to receive and transmit the news of the resurrection, making her the founding apostle. But that recognition was gradually eroded, and the erosion began long before Gregory the Great. It began in the first-century texts themselves, because a tension can already be detected in the canonical Gospels. In Luke 24, when the women return from the empty tomb and announce that Jesus has risen, the text says that “their words seemed to them like nonsense, and they did not believe them.” Nonsense. The men who had walked with Jesus for three years react by calling them crazy. It is a pattern that would be repeated for two thousand years: women who speak the truth and men who do not believe them.
In his letter to the Corinthians, when Paul lists the appearances of the risen Christ, he mentions Peter, the twelve, five hundred brothers, James, and himself, but he does not mention Mary Magdalene. This is a striking omission. Some scholars, such as Professor Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza of Harvard, interpret this as Paul being aware of the tradition but deliberately omitting it because, in a context where female testimony carried no legal weight, mentioning a woman would have weakened his argument. In other words, Paul silenced Mary Magdalene for strategic reasons.
The name of Mary Magdalene appears in all four canonical Gospels; she is better documented than most of the male apostles. Bartholomew, Thaddeus, and Simon the Zealot are practically textual ghosts, but Mary Magdalene is present at the most important moments: at the crucifixion when the men have fled, at the burial, and as the first to go to the tomb on Sunday.
I visited Magdala during my research in Galilee. It’s a fascinating archaeological site. Located on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, Magdala was a prosperous town known for its fish-salting industry. In 2009, a first-century synagogue was discovered there—a synagogue where Mary Magdalene may have prayed and where she may have first encountered Jesus. At its center was the “Magdala Stone,” with reliefs from the Temple in Jerusalem. I held a replica of that stone and reflected on the tangible connection to a real woman whose story was distorted beyond recognition.
The excavations revealed paved streets, sewage systems, and ritual baths, confirming a level of material wealth that aligns with what Luke says in chapter eight: that Mary Magdalene and other women financed Jesus’s movement “out of their own means.” Not with their cooking, but with their money and financial resources. Magdalene was the patron, the investor. Without them, Jesus’s itinerant ministry would not have been logistically viable. Peter, Andrew, John… they had all left their jobs and had no income. Someone had to pay for food and lodging, and that someone was the women led by Magdalene. She was an independent woman, identified by her city and not by her relationship with a man, which indicates an established social standing.
Here’s the forgery: In 591, Pope Gregory the Great delivered a sermon in which he merged three different women into one. He took Mary Magdalene (from whom seven demons had been cast out), the unnamed sinful woman from Luke 7 (who washes Jesus’ feet with her tears), and Mary of Bethany (Lazarus’ sister). Gregory fused them into a single figure without any textual basis. The Gospels do not say that Mary Magdalene was the sinner. Gregory was not ignorant; he understood the power of narratives. In the sixth century, female monastic communities were growing, and abbesses held considerable power. If Mary Magdalene was the apostle to the apostles, women had a legitimate claim to leadership. Gregory’s conflation nipped that claim in the bud: if Mary Magdalene was a repentant sinner, her example legitimized submission, not leadership.
It was a social control operation disguised as a sermon. And it worked for fourteen centuries. The image of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute was etched into the collective unconscious through the art of Titian, Caravaggio, and El Greco. “Magdalene Laundries” were built in Ireland, where women considered “fallen” were enslaved. All based on a lie. The seven demons in the first century were not metaphors for sexual sin, but spiritual entities that caused illness.
In 1969, the Vatican quietly corrected the error by liturgically separating Mary Magdalene from the sinful woman in Luke’s Gospel, but it did not apologize for fourteen centuries of defamation. In 2016, Pope Francis elevated her feast day to the rank of an apostolic feast, but the magnitude of Gregory’s forgery remains publicly unacknowledged. This infuriated me as a believer and as a researcher.
The Ethiopian Church never participated in this falsification because it separated from the rest of Christianity in the fifth century, after the Council of Chalcedon (451), more than a hundred years before Gregory’s sermon. Ethiopia, geographically isolated by mountains reaching four thousand meters, preserved its oldest traditions like living fossils. It never adopted the identification of Mary Magdalene with the prostitute. In Ethiopian tradition, she is an evangelist and teacher. I have seen frescoes in cave churches where she appears proclaiming with authority, not kneeling and weeping.
I traveled to monasteries in Tigray accessible only by climbing leather ropes up sheer cliffs, like Debre Damo. There, the isolation protected the texts from destruction. I held manuscripts over a thousand years old in Ge’ez where hymns call her “Bearer of the Light of Resurrection” and “Witness who preceded the apostles.” What I found confirms what the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts suggested, but in greater detail.
The Gospel of Mary, discovered in the nineteenth century, is incomplete; it lacks the pages where Mary Magdalene reveals the visions and secret teachings that Jesus entrusted to her alone. Peter appears furious in the text, questioning why Jesus would speak to a woman without their knowledge. Ethiopian tradition preserves material that fills this gap. According to these traditions, Jesus taught her about the nature of the soul and its liberation from the “seven powers” (ignorance, desire, anger, fear, bodily control, false wisdom, and death). These were the “seven demons” from which she was freed. Mary Magdalene was the student who completed the course, the one who attained complete spiritual freedom. This is why she was the only one capable of perceiving the resurrected Christ first; the others were spiritually blind.
In the text “Pistis Sophia,” of the 115 questions the disciples ask Jesus, Mary Magdalene asks 67. Jesus tells her that she is “the perfection of all perfections.” Peter complains that she “talks too much” and leaves no room for men. In the Gospel of Philip, it is said that the Lord loved her more than all others and kissed her frequently. It was not a romantic act, but a sacramental kiss, a transmission of spiritual knowledge.
John 20 describes the garden scene: Mary Magdalene weeps, sees angels, and then sees a man she mistakes for the gardener. He says a single word: “Mary.” She recognizes him by his intonation, by the intimacy of three years. In that instant, the world changed. The first person to believe in the resurrection was a woman.
In the film I’m shooting, Mary Magdalene will be a central character, commensurate with her importance in ancient texts. In “The Passion of the Christ,” I made the mistake of following Western tradition, portraying her only as a grieving bystander. Now I want to correct that. I will show the leader, the apostle, the woman who stayed behind when the men fled. I know this will cause controversy, but the truth about Magdalene has been waiting to be told for two thousand years.
The war in Tigray (2020-2022) jeopardized this legacy. Monasteries were looted and thousands of manuscripts stolen. But the truth has a resilience stronger than granite. You can burn a scroll, but not what it says. The story of how Mary Magdalene was erased is the story of how a male institution decided that a woman could not be what she clearly was.
I am Catholic, and my faith survives this discovery, but it has been transformed. The lie about Mary Magdalene doesn’t protect the faith; it corrupts it. Faith is truer when it recognizes that the first witness was a woman and that the Jesus movement was sustained by women. This story will be revealed on the world’s biggest screen, and when billions of people see it, the question won’t be whether the Church lied—they already know that—but why it did so. The answer will change everything they thought they knew about Christianity.
