The Church Fathers · c. 630; attribution debated
The Life of Mary of Egypt
Attributed to Sophronius of Jerusalem · c. 560 – 638
What it is
A monk crossing the Jordan finds a naked, sun-blackened woman who levitates at prayer and knows scripture she has never read. She tells him she spent seventeen years in Alexandria taking men for pleasure rather than money, was turned back by an invisible force at the church door in Jerusalem, and has been in the desert forty-seven years.
Why it lasted
Read aloud whole during Lent in the Byzantine churches every year since, and the most widely told conversion story in the Christian East. Its refusal to make her repentance respectable is why it lasted.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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