5In an era that has reclaimed many aspects of the feminine, Margaret Starbird's The Woman with the Alabaster Jar stands out as a courageous exploration of the scorned feminine in the Western religious tradition. But espousing the marriage between Jesus and Mary Magdalene created a personal crisis for this Catholic scholar. In The Goddess in the Gospels the author tells how she was guided in her ever-deepening study of the New Testament and the gematria--number coding of the Greek alphabet--by an incredible series of synchronicities that mirror the inner and outer worlds and which reveal the Sacred Marriage of male and female--the hieros gamous--leading to her own personal redemption.