King’s article is essentially a small summary of the Gospel and then a large account of how it came to be. In the summary, as someone who is unfamiliar with most Christian backgrounds, it was interesting to see a parallel in the Gospel to some modern Christian ideals. Mainly, the Gospel seemed to focus on Mary’s role as a woman and how it affected (separated) her from the other disciples. Despite her handicap (as the feminine gender was considered to be during these times), she was the one who ultimately understood the word of Jesus and was able to recount it to the other disciples with great consideration. Their rejection of her role as the receiver of His visions and distiller of His knowledge ultimately reveals their ignorance and lack of true Christian faith. The disciples fail to understand Jesus’ thoughts of performative faith versus personal faith, and seem to take a much more flawed appeal; the concept of tangible sin, heaven and hell. The article claims that in the Gospel Jesus concludes his meeting with the disciples by stating a “warning against those who would delude the disciples into following some heroic leader or a set of rules and laws. Instead they are to seek the child of true Humanity within themselves and gain inward peace.” This concept is particularly familiar to me, I have studied Islamic practices, and a common faith is that of the higher self and lower self. this also relates to Jesus’ claim that there is no such thing as sin. I was surprised to see such a similarity in these teachings to my own, because I often viewed Christianity as ‘black and white’. In a way, Jesus was claiming against the material forms of worship, sacrificial practices, preachings, the blend of church and state, and more so suggesting that personal faith, true faith, takes place on an internal spiritual level. Your relationship with God has nothing to do with how you show it, I was told once it was okay to sit silent in the church so long as your mind was louder than the choir in your prayer. On another note, I think it was influential to include the timeline and evolution of the text. It seems to eliminate the thought that this is a false Christian text, because of how controversial it is to the way that the practices were during this time period. Personal faith and women of faith were looked at far differently, as expressed in the text, than how they are discussed in the text. The Gospel of Mary Magdala speaks to the acknowledgement of all Humans in the practice of personal faith, elaborates the question of gender in religion, and presents a much more realistic and applicable form of ‘perfected’ religious thought or practices.