(Re)Presenting Mary Magdalene: A Feminist Reading of <i>The Last Temptation of Christ</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While the vast amount of scholarly literature has provided a powerful argument for Mary Magdalene’s leadership and importance in scripture, art and culture, mainstream audiences remain mostly unaware of this fact, embracing the “repentant whore” image circulated by patriarchal leaders for centuries. As 2005 ushers Mary Magdalene back into pop culture consciousness through the success of the bestseller The Da Vinci Code and an ensuing film adaptation, it is important to examine how fictional films represent Magdalene. This article focuses on an analysis of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988; 2000) because Magdalene serves as a main character, and Scorsese claims he made a “visionary” rendering of Jesus’ life and death, including his relationship with Magdalene. Critiquing Scorsese’s version of Magdalene in light of the wealth of scholarship that refutes the portrait of Magdalene as a prostitute dramatizes how the misrepresentation is maintained in the popular imagination, as well as ways she may be (re)presented in the future.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".