Books like Mary Magdalene

This book promised to be really interesting, but I ended up very disappointed. Some of what Picknett suggests is quite possibly true - certainly there is a lot more to Mary Magdalene than what 'tradition' has held. I could see it as quite possible that she was a black woman from Africa, and I have no doubt that she was a deeply spiritual woman on a par with Jesus, however, I see no need to align her with sexual initiatory rites or things of that ilk. Quite frankly, I don't believe that the highly spiritually developed have need of any quasi-spiritual experiences that can be had through sexual activity.I also found this book exceedingly wordy. I suppose there's a standard page range that a book needs to fall within if it expects to be taken seriously, but the author could have said what she wanted to say in half the time. It would have made much better reading (with or without one's agreement to her theories). I also got very irritated with her insistence on writing as if every word ascribed to Jesus was actually spoken by him. Surely an author with as 'radical' a theory as Picknett has (regarding Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist, etc.) would also have read the modern, radical scholars on Jesus. Picknett's research has her going way beyond the literal in the gospels, yet she chooses to be literal about Jesus. This reeks of the time-old strategy of putting down the opposition in order to raise your own up. I find this most unworthy.