Just in time for the holidays the library has received several new books on Christianity and the Bible.

The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a first novel by Mary Burns which imagines a rich and captivating life for the woman scholar J who lived in the Solomonic Courts. In this novel J becomes the fictional character Hokhma Janaia, the eldest daughter of King David, a woman who defies stereotypes and experiences intense visions of both present and future events.

Triumph of Deborah is a novel which tells tells the story of Deborah, Asherah, and Nogah, three women who must find their true path despite the difficulties that fate has dealt them.

The Gospel of the Beloved Companion: The Gospel of Mary Magdalene by Jehann de Quillan is the first English translation of a previously unpublished first-century gospel of the same name. Originally written in Alexandrian Greek, and brought from Egypt during the early to middle part of the first century, this exceptional manuscript has been preserved within the author’s spiritual community since that time. This extraordinary book brings us a luminously poetic yet starkly objective insight into the man called Yeshua and the philosophy that he taught, that is starkly different from the religion we today call Christianity.

Christianity: The First 3000 Years is an admirably well narrated story about the development of Christianity in which the author traces its roots in Greece and Rome 1000 years before the Common Era.  Where does Christianity begin? In Athens, Jerusalem, or Rome? How did the early creeds of the church develop and differentiate? What was the impact of the Reformation and the Catholic Counterreformation? How have vital Christian communities emerged in Asia, Africa, and India since the 18th century? Award-winning historian Diarmaid MacCulloch  attempts to answer these questions and many more in this well written history.