Author: Marianne Widmalm

Publisher:

Published: 2015-03-27

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9781905297559

God is Not Alone will challenge your views of what you thought you knew about the Bible and Christianity. It is a wide-ranging scholarly exposition of the divine feminine, drawing on numerous ancient Christian and pre-Christian texts to deliver its central message: that throughout Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, God is not alone, but is accompanied by a Mother-Goddess, the Holy Spirit, personified as Wisdom. While examining the roots of the divine feminine, this book tackles many aspects of femininity throughout the Bible, beginning with a new interpretation of the creation story where men are made in the image of God and women of His Wife. It is who She is that this book is ultimately about. The author, Marianne Widmalm, clearly illustrates the original feminine nature of the Holy Spirit, lost in translation from the Hebrew texts. By demonstrating the influence of the early Canaanites, Mary Magdalene, the Shekinah, the Holy Spirit and the role of women in the development of the Church in the first centuries, the author weaves together disparate texts that point us back to the goddess Asherah, and how She is one and the same as the Holy Spirit and Wisdom personified. The survival of the divine feminine is also shown through the Kabbalah and Apocryphal texts that drew from the Wisdom texts in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most significantly, according to numerous early church fathers, Jesus himself called the Holy Spirit as his "Mother" in, what the author argues, could be the first written Gospel. Additionally, the author explores key doctrinal issues faced by the early Church Fathers such as baptism with oil representing the Holy Spirit; the original role of women as deaconesses; as well as the development of the concept of the Trinity. This idea that God is three-in-one provides a key framework for understanding the marginalisation of the divine feminine. Step-by-step, assertions of sexism in the Bible are stripped away and the reader is returned to the original divine balance of the feminine and masculine that was lost through centuries of church doctrine and translations from Hebrew and Aramaic, to Greek and English. This provocative work is essential reading for anyone interested in first century Christianity as well as Judaism, the early Hebrews, Biblical research, Goddess Spirituality, the origins of Gnosticism, and the theological role and true nature of the Holy Spirit.