Tony Benn was asked recently if he believed that Jesus was Lord. He answered, ‘Well, I don’t believe in lords.’ Then he was asked, ‘Do you believe in the Kingdom of Heaven?’ ‘I am a Republican…’ he responded before adding, ‘…and when I go to Hell I hope there is an energy crisis.’

Ten years ago Marianne Fredriksson the Swedish writer of Hanna’s Daughter, Simon & the Oaks, Inge & Mira and Elisabeth’s Daughter read Simone Weil’s Letter to a Dominican. Here is Marianne five years later in the introduction to According to Mary: the life of Mary Magdalene - a novel. ‘Simone Weil was a Catholic but in her letters she is fiercely critical of Christianity. She primarily turns against the appalling claims of the church to possess the only real truth…in whose name it judged and condemned human beings.’

Simone Weil asked how Jesus…whose foremost message is forgiveness and mercy…became the judgemental god and how his determined distancing himself from priests and scripture pedants could lay the foundations to a religion with such harsh regulations, domination and hierarchy? In The Person and The Sacred Simone Weil writes that a correct understanding of Christianity was impossible because of the ‘profound secrecy surrounding its early history’.

Fredriksson began reading theology, religious histories, mythology and Greek philosophy. Eventually she was ‘delighted and astonished’ to stumble across Sophia…daughter of the God Wisdom…and her preaching which were much like Jesus. She soon realised that many of the contradictions in Christianity go back to the conflicts between the Judeo-Christian Congregation in Jerusalem and the Apostles who wanted to take the new message to the heathen.

Jerusalem’s Christians maintained that all those wishing to convert must first become Jews, obey all the hundreds of decrees in the laws and be circumcised. The foreign missionaries…with Paul’s evangelical faction in the lead… opposed the Jewish Congregation, won the battle and wrote the history. After a while Fredriksson started ‘playing with a daydream’. Supposing there had been a free, clear-thinking person among Jesus’ disciples…someone open, unprejudiced and acquainted with both Jewish and Greek thinking…someone with ears to hear.

Then one day while researching in the Nag Hammadi Library Marianne Fredriksson chanced upon the fragment that remains of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. In it she relates what Jesus said in personal conversations with her. This was the moment Fredriksson’s novel was born. Here perhaps was someone with ears to hear, eyes to see and a mind to understand. The disciple who Jesus loved the most was a woman with the power to influence others.

In Fredriksson’s novel the fair-haired blue-eyed Mary describes how as a child she felt an outsider in her Jewish Community. Then she witnesses the slaughter of her family by the Romans. She runs for her life and is saved by Leonidas…a Roman soldier…who takes Mary to friends at a House of Pleasure. Here she is cared for and loved until when she is twenty she falls in love with a young man from Nazareth…an encounter which changes both their lives.

The main plot of the novel finds Mary Magdalene living quietly as she tries to come to terms with Jesus’ decision to choose a cruel death instead of a life of joy and happiness with her. But an unexpected visit from Peter and Paul shatters her tranquillity. They insist that she record everything about Jesus…the man, his works and his words. Mary remembers the instructions Jesus gave her ‘to make no rules of life on this which I have revealed to you’ and ‘to write no laws as the lawmakers do’ and is deeply concerned about this latest development.

Her response is to seek out three old friends…and former disciples…Lydia, Salome and Susanna. Marianne Fredriksson’s action stops shortly afterwards. But what if gospels according to Maria, Lydia, Salome and Susanna were to appear some day to challenge the teachings in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? Forgive us Our Debts for instance as we forgive those who are indebted to us.

A lecturer at the University of Glasgow has found herself unexpectedly at Number One in the download charts after she posted podcasts of her lectures about the philosopher Emmanuel Kant on iTunes’ education section. Susan Stuart’s lectures have attracted fan mail from across the world. Perhaps Ofsted should send in the inspectors?