MARY MAGDALENE was not a prostitute but a black Ethiopian priestess who was Jesus’s lover and may have borne his children, according to a book published today.

In Mary Magdalene, Christianity’s Hidden Goddess, the author Lynn Picknett says the Church of Rome may have deliberately excised references to Mary from the Gospels because she was a threat to its patriarchal powers.

She claims that passages in other ex-canonical texts, such as the so-called Gnostic Gospels, prove that Mary Magdalene may not only have been Jesus’s sexual companion but was also intended to be his successor.

Mary is a marginal figure in the Bible and was for centuries portrayed by the Churches as a reformed prostitute. In one passage, in Luke viii, she is referred to as a woman follower of Jesus from whom seven demons had been expelled.

She also makes an appearance at the Crucifixion, intending to anoint the dead body of Jesus in preparation for his entombment. According to Mark’s Gospel, she was the first person to whom Jesus appeared after rising from the dead, although she thought at first that he was a gardener.

Ms Picknett says that Mary Magdalene was treated badly by the male followers of Jesus and marginalised in the Bible because she may have been a pagan priestess and because she and Jesus were often physically affectionate in public, kissing each other.

She suggests that Mary’s birthplace or home could have been Magdala in Ethiopia, the site of a battle involving the British Army in 1868, now called Amra Mariam.

She speculates that the many statues of “Black Madonnas” around the world are not in fact of the Virgin Mary, as is commonly believed, but depict Mary Magdalene. She argues that the child these Black Madonnas are often shown holding could have been the child of Mary Magdalene and Jesus.

Ms Picknett, a writer and lecturer on heresy and the occult, also co-authored the War of the Windsors, which suggested that the spy Anthony Blunt was the illegitimate son of George V and therefore the uncle of the Queen.

Leading Roman Catholics have dismissed her new book as speculation.

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