It's not easy to write a love scene for Jesus.
So we can't blame Margaret George too much if her big moment in the woods, when Mary Magdalene throws herself at the son of God, reads like a pallid version of the fiery encounter in the barn when Scarlett throws herself at Ashley.
" 'You love me as well. I know it!' she added defiantly. . . .
" 'Yes, I do love you,' he said. 'I love your courage and your integrity, your insights and your quietness, and if I were going to have a life that went in another direction, I would choose you to be beside me on that path. . . .'
" 'I don't understand! Why can't you take that path?' "
The man has a good excuse. He's a little busy struggling with Satan and getting Christianity off the ground. But like every young woman involved with a powerful man, Mary of Magdala yearned for the Messiah to put aside his "lofty mission" and tend to her.
"She didn't want to be needed, she wanted someone to fulfill her needs," the author writes.
Jesus urges her to snap out of it and "stay the course."

As Ms. George explains in her afterward: "I assume that Jesus was an attractive person, and it would be unusual if none of his female followers developed heightened feelings for him." But in this innocent and stilted retelling, the famous biblical temptress never even tries to lure Jesus to the dark side. She sees him as marriage material, an eligible young Jewish carpenter-turned-miracle-worker.
Meet Mary Magdalene, good girl.
She was renowned as the sensual half of the madonna-whore equation, "the Jessica Rabbit of the Gospels, the gold-hearted town tramp," as one admiring writer called her. There was the Virgin Mary and the wanton Mary; the Mary in blue and the Mary in red.
The comely harlot who rubbed Jesus' feet with perfumed oil and tears and dried them with her hair inspired great art with her jar of ointment, haunting eyes and naked breasts. She inspired the spread of refuges for prostitutes around the world called Magdalene houses. And she inspired Barbara Hershey to become a notorious pioneer in lip-plumping to play the sultry sinner Jesus saves from being stoned in Martin Scorsese's "Last Temptation of Christ."
But for some time a cadre of female historians have been making the case that Mary Magdalene was framed and defamed. They point out that there is no scriptural evidence that she was a prostitute. They say the Gnostic "Gospel of Mary," supposedly written by Mary Magdalene and discovered in Egypt half a century ago, portrays her as a rival to Peter, as a female apostle who stayed faithful at the end, unlike some of the skittish males. The revisionists argue that, wittingly or unwittingly, the men who run Christianity obliterated Mary Magdalene's role as an influential apostle and reduced her to a metaphor for sexual guilt. The main confusion was sown in the sixth century, when Pope Gregory the Great conflated Mary of Magdala -- a friend of Jesus who was present at the Crucifixion, who anointed his body for burial and who was the first to see the risen Christ -- with Mary of Bethany (Martha and Lazarus's sister) and an unnamed sinful woman in the Gospel of Luke who bathed Jesus' feet.
The question is not merely academic, given the roiling state of the Roman Catholic Church. The church refuses to allow women to be ordained as priests because there were no female apostles. If Mary Magdalene was a woman of hard virtue rather than easy virtue, then the church loses its flimsy justification. So the premise of Ms. George's novel is intriguing. Loaves-and-fishes style, she takes a few mentions in the Gospels and spins them into a 625-page "diary of a soul." She begins with the reference to Mary being delivered of seven demons by Jesus. In her quest to be exorcised of the malevolent spirits who have tormented her since childhood, Mary runs into Jesus and ends up leaving her family to troop around after him. With rigorous research, Ms. George paints the landscape and rituals of Judea and makes "educated guesses" about her mysterious subject: that Mary was an observant Jew, that she married a sardine fisherman and had a baby, that she could read, that she had visions, that she befriended other women mentioned in the Gospels as part of Jesus' circle and stifled her jealousy. ("I met Jesus first, I knew him longer.")
The author goes a bit overboard with her feminist fable, turning Mary into the Gloria Steinem of Galilee. Speaking of the naming ceremony for Mary's infant daughter, she writes: "However, it was marred by the fact that Mary would have to stand up the entire time, and not allow anyone to touch her, since ritual law proclaimed that any bed or chair she sat on until the 66th day after the birth was unclean, and so was anyone who touched her. That meant that she could not hold her own child for the ceremony.
" 'The curse of Eve,' Joel had said lightly. To him it was only amusing, whereas to Mary it was a painful reminder that in every way women were considered so much lower than men." At another point, when Jesus tells her she is a prophet, "perhaps the only one in the group," Peter blurts out, "But she's a woman." The author retells the familiar stories in the Gospels but inserts Good Mary as a major player alongside Really Good Mary. Mary Magdalene is not in the lineup at the Last Supper table because she's bustling about in the kitchen, making horseradish dip, serving platters of roast lamb with coriander relish and unleavened bread. She is the one who suggests Christ might want to get away from the madding crowd in the olive garden at Gethsemane. She is the one who discovers Judas's betrayal by disguising herself as a veiled waitress at the palace of Antipas. Despite the demonic possession and all her dazzling adventures, this Mary never seems vivid or beguiling.
The book creates a role model for those who want to believe that Jesus, who treated men and women equally in the Gospels, was more enlightened than the church's leadership two millenniums later. Yet the new Mary's arc from pious good girl to Mrs. Sardine Salesman to Pillar of the Church may leave you a little nostalgic for the transgressive Mary's more gripping drama of sin and redemption, of flirting with the Messiah and finding faith through him.