Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat: Stories, Symbols & the History of Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene was the Beloved Disciple-and her identity has been hidden inside the Bible for two thousand years.

Saint, sinner, bride, apostle to the apostles: she has been called everything, yet still never fully revealed. Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat is the book that finally reads the clues.

A number. A star. A flower. A name. Across scripture and symbol, pilgrimage and history, the fragments begin to gather until a portrait comes whole. Not the penitent of legend, but a noblewoman of intellect and spiritual authority, formed by the philosophical world of Alexandria. Not just the first witness to the resurrection, but the eyewitness memory behind the Fourth Gospel. The Beloved Disciple. And Mary Magdalene is not alone. Around her gather goddesses and queens, apostles and mystics-the silenced lineage of the sacred feminine that no edict could bury.

Among the symbols waits a number: 153 fish, in the closing chapter of the Gospel of John. A detail Church Fathers and modern scholars have tried to explain for centuries. But 153 was never merely a biblical riddle. It was a signature of measure, meaning, and identity encoded.

Written by Alicia Assad and Kelly Ingraham, mothers, best friends, and writers educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, Fishing on the Right Side of the Boat braids pilgrimage stories with deep historical scholarship to unveil not only who Mary Magdalene was, but a way of seeing-and of remembering ourselves.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: La Suvera Press
Published: 07/22/2026
ISBN: 9798998951855
Pages: 420
Weight: 1.23lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.93d