ABSTRACT: ANNALS OF RELIGION about Mary Magdalene. The Catholic Church cannot have failed to notice that Dan Brown's “The Da Vinci Code,” a novel claiming that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, has been a Times best-seller list nearly 3 years now. Mentions Michael Baigent's “Holy Blood, Holy Grail,” which proposes that after the Crucifixion the Magdalene escaped to France, where their descendents married into the Merovingian dynasty and are still around today. Nobody knows this, though, because, according to “Holy Blood,” the truth has been kept under wraps by a secret society called the Priory of Scion. The Magdalene gets only 14 mentions in the New Testament. Luke and Mark describe her as the subject of one of Jesus' exorcisms and as one of several women who followed him. In all 4 Gospels, she is present at the Crucifixion. After the Resurrection, however, her role becomes hugely magnified. Why her? Jesus, for his time, was notably unsexist. By the second century, however, as the “orthodox Church” consolidated itself, the women were shunted aside, along with sex. How, then, could the Resurrection announcement have been made to a woman? The Magdalene was probably a woman who lived on her own, a rare and suspect thing at the time, and had money. In what seems an ingenious solution, Luke's “sinner,” who washed Jesus' feet with her tears, was said to be the Magdalene. The conflation was already being made by the 3rd or 4th century. Thus, one of the few independent women in the New Testament became a whore. As such, she was a tremendous success. After the Crucifixion, she's said to have arrived at Marseilles, whereupon she undertook a career of strenuous evangelism before retreating to a cave in the mountains, where she wore nothing and ate nothing except “heavenly sustenance” for 30 years until she died. Mentions Jacobus de Voragine's “The Golden Legend.” The Magdalene became France's most popular saint after the Virgin Mary. In recent years, there have been a number of histories of how the Magdalene's image changed over time. Two good examples are Susan Haskins's “Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor” (1993) and Katherine Jansen's “The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages” (2001). According to these writers, it was partly because urbanization in the 12th century caused a rise in prostitution that the Magdalene became so prominent. This shifting image of the Magdalene stabilized in the Renaissance; she became “Venus in sackcloth.” With the Enlightenment, she suffered some neglect, but in 19th-century England she was again invoked by reformers, for prostitution was epidemic in Victorian London. In the 20th century, the Magdalene received more exalted tributes and even the Church tried to clean up her image. The crucial development in Magdalene scholarship was the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library and the Gnostic Gospels in the mid-1940s. Mentions Elaine Pagels's “The Gnostic Gospels” (1979) and Marvin Meyer's “The Gnostic Discoveries: The Impact of the Nag Hammadi Library” (HarperSanFrancisco; $21.95). The Magdalene is a central figure in the Gnostic Gospels and an utterly new character. Here she's an evangelical hero and Christ's favorite disciple. The key text is the Gospel of Mary. Mentions Peter's conflict with Mary in the Gospels. Writings on the Magdalene exploded after 1975. The most passionate of the Magdalene books is “The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apochrypha, and the New Testament” (2002), by Jane Schaberg. Schaberg exposes the textual maneuvers by which the Magdalene was “replaced…and left behind” by the orthodox Church. Mentions Schaberg's theory of an egalitarian Magdalene Christianity, whose goal was to end the oppression of the world's powerless. Mentions Bruce Chilton's “Mary Magdalene: A Biography” (Doubleday; $23.95). Chilton sees the Magdalene as one of the “shaping forces of Christianity.” Mentions Margaret Starbird. A problem for the Magdalene revival, however, is that it has to draw its reconfigured heroine from the austere and sober philosophy of the Gnostics. Mentions John's account of the Resurrection announcement in the New Testament.