About

I’m Sophie Murphy. For years I’ve been reading everything I could find about the woman the tradition calls Mary Magdalene: the gospels in Greek and the Hebrew behind them, the commentaries, the gospels that didn’t make the canon, and the sermons that made her a penitent. Miriam Midrash is where that work lives in public.

Midrash is the old Jewish practice of gathering around a text and turning it over together: asking questions, wondering aloud, listening for what has been there all along. Jane Doe is a midrash in that sense. The questions are asked of a hundred women before they’re asked of the text.

How this place works

Everything here is mine: the domain, the code, the list. No ads, no tracking, nothing to accept.

Parts of the archive are sealed until the series reaches them. That isn’t a paywall. It protects the conversations: what a woman already carries about Mary Magdalene is the thing I most want to hear, and it can’t be recovered once she’s looked. Sealed pages open on their own schedule, for everyone at once.

To reach me, write to [email protected].