Mary of Magdala
The Greatest Story
I guess most of us know Edward Michael Grylls, aka “Bear” Grylls, as an intrepid adventurer, TV presenter, and the youngest ever Chief Scout.
But did you also know that last year he released a book called The Greatest Story Ever Told: An Eyewitness Account? 
Nor did I until our local church gave copies out at their Christmas Midnight Service – beautifully bound copies what’s more. And because this didn’t seem to fit with the profile of this man of extreme action, Bear Grylls, I was the more intrigued. (That probably says more about my preconceptions than about him.) But he says himself, this is the hardest thing he’s ever done, and the best. He has spent a lifetime unravelling the truth about Christianity and is still on that journey, but his faith is the backbone and source of strength in all his escapades and in his everyday reality.
It’s a tale of an impoverished Middle Eastern child of the first century becoming a renegade teacher in the Roman Empire. The familiar stories of Jesus of Nazareth’s birth, life and death are told imaginatively through the eyes of five prominent eye-witnesses: his mother Mary, disciples Thomas, Simon and John, and Mary of Magdala.
I say familiar stories, but there are also intriguing alternative viewpoints offered. For example, I’d never thought of Mary being wracked with guilt because she’d taken her own baby boy out of the reach of Herod’s merciless slaughter of boys under two years of age, leaving all her friends and contemporaries’ precious children to be murdered instead. Or her maternal anxiety when her beloved grown-up son vanishes into the wilderness for forty days after his baptism. She knows it’s a bleak inhospitable place; has he succumbed to starvation and the elements?
And the details bring certain events and emotions into sharp relief – the real grief Jesus felt at the execution of his closest cousin and friend John the Baptist; the sheer brutality of Roman punishment prior to crucifixion (very hard to read); the terrible burden of guilt the disciples probably carried for not showing the love Jesus had taught them when he needed them most, for denying him, for betraying him. Sobering stuff that challenges the present-day reader to think again – the cynic and the angry, the impulsive and the lost, alike. Their stories, all our stories, are wrapped up in Jesus’ story, as Gryll’s puts it.