St. Mary of Egypt: Repentance, Holiness, and the Historical Evidence

Every year in the fifth week of Great Lent, Orthodox Christians stand through one of the longest services of the year, the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete. In the same service a reader tells the story of a woman from Alexandria who lived for seventeen years in compulsive sexual sin, was held back by an unseen force from entering a church in Jerusalem, prayed before an icon of the Mother of God, and then lived for decades alone in the desert beyond the Jordan. The following Sunday is kept in her honor. The Church calls her our venerable mother Mary of Egypt.

The story is loved because it is about hope: if this woman could be made holy, nobody is beyond God's mercy. It also raises honest questions. Who wrote it, and when? Are its miracles meant as reportage? And if historians cannot verify the details, what does it mean to venerate her? This article tells the life as the Church remembers it and then examines the evidence. St Mary is a good test case for honesty about hagiography, because the honest answer is more modest than many retellings suggest, and no less edifying.

In brief

The full story of St Mary of Egypt comes from one Greek text, the Life of Mary of Egypt, which the manuscripts attribute to St Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 to 638. Scholars debate that attribution, but the text certainly existed by 787, when an extract was read at the Second Council of Nicaea. An earlier and much shorter story appears in Cyril of Scythopolis's Life of Kyriakos, written around 555 to 557, about an anchoress named Mary who had been a singer at the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem and withdrew to a desert cave so that men would not be tempted because of her. That version has no Alexandria, no prostitution, no Zosimas and no lion. The later Life says it records an oral tradition kept by monks. There is no contemporary evidence for Mary herself, and her dates cannot be fixed. The Life is best read as a story the monks passed on "to benefit those who wish to listen," set in a real monastic world and plausibly rooted in the memory of a real solitary woman. The Church venerates her as an icon of repentance, and that veneration does not depend on the accuracy of every detail.

Thesis: The documents suggest a story that grew between the sixth and seventh centuries from a brief account of a desert solitary into a carefully shaped narrative of repentance, so an honest Orthodox reader can venerate St Mary and receive her Life as the Church does, without claiming that its details are independently documented history.

The life as the Church tells it

The Life opens with a monk. Zosimas had lived in a Palestinian monastery since childhood, and at fifty-three he began to wonder whether anyone could teach him anything new. A messenger told him that "there is no man on earth who has achieved perfection" and sent him to a monastery near the Jordan.¹ Each Lent its monks crossed the river into the desert alone, returning on Palm Sunday.

On the twentieth day of his walk Zosimas saw a naked figure, burned black by the sun, with sparse white hair. It fled, and he ran after it. From across a dry streambed it called him by name and asked for his cloak, "for as you see I am a woman and I am naked." When she prayed, Zosimas later swore, he saw her raised about a cubit above the ground. Afraid she was a spirit, he heard her say she was "altogether earth and ashes and flesh," a sinful woman "protected by holy baptism."²

At his pleading she told her story. Born in Egypt, she left her parents at twelve for Alexandria and for more than seventeen years lived in promiscuity, refusing payment and supporting herself by begging and spinning flax, because desire itself drove her. One summer she joined crowds sailing to Jerusalem for the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross on 14 September, paying her passage with her body.³

On the morning of the feast she followed the crowd to the church where the Cross was shown. Others went in; three or four times an invisible force held her back on the threshold. Standing exhausted in a corner of the courtyard, "a salvific word touched the eyes of my heart, showing me that it was the filth of my actions that was barring the entrance to me." Above her was an icon of the Mother of God. Since the Virgin's Son had become man "in order to summon sinners to repentance," she prayed, "help me, a lone woman who has no one to help her," and vowed to leave the world. This time she entered freely and venerated the Cross. A voice told her that across the Jordan she would "find a fine place of repose."⁴ With three loaves, she reached the church of St John the Baptist by the river, received Communion, and crossed over.

She had been in the desert, she said, forty-seven years. For the first seventeen, as long as she had lived in sin, she was tormented by longing for wine, food, the old songs and sexual pleasure. Each time she threw herself on the ground and wept before the memory of the icon of the Theotokos, her "guarantor," until light shone around her and peace returned. She had never learned to read, yet she quoted Scripture, because "the word of God which is living and powerful teaches man knowledge."⁵

She asked Zosimas to bring her the Holy Gifts the next year on Holy Thursday. He waited at the river; she came at night, made the sign of the Cross over the water, and walked across. After the Creed and the Lord's Prayer she received Communion and prayed Simeon's words, "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace." Zosimas thanked God for showing him "how far I am from reaching the measure of perfection."⁶ A year later he found her dead in the streambed, facing east. Words written in the ground beside her asked him to bury "the humble Mary," and only then did he learn her name. Having nothing to dig with, he was helped by a lion that dug the grave with its paws.⁷

The primary historical evidence

Layer one: Cyril of Scythopolis (about 555 to 557)

Cyril, a Palestinian monk, wrote lives of the Judean desert founders. His Life of Kyriakos, about an ascetic who died in 556 aged 107, was written around 555 to 557.⁸ It contains the earliest known version of Mary's story. A monk named John, a disciple of Kyriakos, told Cyril how he had found a woman named Mary living alone in a cave in the Judean desert. She had been a singer at the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem and had withdrawn so as not to lead men into temptation, living eighteen years on a jar of water and a basket of legumes. When John came back, he found her dead and buried her in her cave.⁹

{{strong: Cyril wrote within the lifetime of his informants, recording a monk's report that he had met and buried a desert solitary named Mary.}} That is close to the events. But Cyril's Mary was not a prostitute, was not from Alexandria, and meets no Zosimas, no barred door, no icon and no lion.

Layer two: John Moschos (late sixth or early seventh century)

John Moschos, who traveled the monasteries of Palestine and Egypt with his friend Sophronius, gathered hundreds of desert anecdotes in The Spiritual Meadow. One, in the summary of the Byzantinist Maria Kouli, is "a very similar tale": an unnamed nun from Jerusalem who fled to the desert "to avoid causing temptation to young men" and lived there seventeen years.¹⁰ Again there is no harlot.

Layer three: the Life attributed to Sophronius (seventh century)

The full Life is a different kind of text: long, carefully built, with about a third given to Mary's own account. The manuscripts attribute it to Sophronius, Moschos's friend, who was Patriarch of Jerusalem from 634 until his death in 638. According to Kouli, the twelfth-century writer Zonaras and the Bollandist H. Delehaye accepted the attribution, F. Delmas accepted it cautiously, and F. Halkin and H.-G. Beck doubted it.¹¹ {{debated: Whether Sophronius himself wrote the Life remains an open question.}}

The date is firmer than the author. In the eighth century the Life was cited by John of Damascus and translated into Latin, which leads Kouli to judge that it was probably composed in the seventh century.¹² At the fourth session of the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, during the debate on icons, "Peter the Reader read an extract from 'The Life of Blessed Mary of Egypt,'" including the scene before the icon.¹³ {{very-strong: The Life existed and was treated as authoritative by 787.}} The earliest surviving Greek manuscript is from the ninth century, and there is still no proper critical edition.¹⁴

The author calls the story "an event that took place in our own times," told by "a holy man." At the end he says the monks passed it on "by word of mouth from one generation to the other," that he knew of no one who had written it down, and that he wrote "desiring to prefer nothing but the truth."¹⁵ The Life therefore presents itself as oral monastic tradition, written down at least a generation after Zosimas, not as eyewitness testimony.

What can we actually verify?

(a) Contemporary or near-contemporary documentary evidence

For Mary herself there is none: no inscription, letter or chronicle mentions her. The nearest thing is Cyril's report from the 550s, which differs at almost every point from the later Life.

What can be checked is the world the Life describes. Female solitaries did live in the deserts of Palestine and Egypt; Cyril and Moschos both report them.¹⁶ According to the notes of the Dumbarton Oaks translation, the Lenten desert retreat of the Jordan monks reflects a real Palestinian custom, begun by St Euthymios in the early fifth century after Epiphany and only later moved to the start of Lent; the Exaltation feast did draw pilgrims from across the empire; the church of the Forerunner by the Jordan was built under Emperor Anastasios I (491 to 518); and pilgrims saw an icon of the Virgin in the courtyard of the church of the Cross. The Piacenza pilgrim of about 570 mentions it, and a later guide by Epiphanios the Monk says he saw there the icon "who forbade Saint Mary to enter the church."¹⁷ That shows the story had become attached to a real place, not that the event was recorded at the time. An accurate setting shows the writer's knowledge of Palestine, not the truth of each episode.

(b) Later hagiographical tradition

Almost everything memorable about Mary, from Alexandria to the lion, rests on one seventh-century text written down from oral tradition. Three scholarly observations bear on how to read it. First, Kouli judges that the Life "has transformed Mary into a prostitute," heightening the drama of her repentance.¹⁸ That assumes Cyril's Mary and the Life's Mary are the same figure, which is likely but not proven. Second, the Life is patterned: Mary's seventeen years of struggle match her seventeen years of sin, which Kouli calls "probably no coincidence."¹⁹ Third, the burial closely resembles St Jerome's fourth-century Life of Paul the First Hermit, where St Antony, with no tool to dig a grave, is helped by two lions who "vie with one another in excavating the sand."²⁰ Kouli thinks the Life was "strongly influenced" by Jerome.

Her dates are uncertain too. An Orthodox reading for 1 April credited to Holy Transfiguration Monastery in Brookline says her death "is reckoned by some to have taken place in 378, by some, in 437, and by others, in 522."²¹ The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia reports that the Bollandists placed it in 421.²² The Life gives no fixed reference points, only Mary's age at each stage. If the church of the Forerunner in the story is the one built under Anastasios, none of these dates fits well, since each would put Mary's crossing of the Jordan, forty-eight years before her death, before his reign began in 491. A seventh-century author's "in our own times" fits the earlier dates even less well. Kouli's verdict is blunt: "it is impossible to provide a chronology for the life of Mary, or even to establish her historicity." She adds that real female hermits lived in these deserts, and "one of them may well have inspired the edifying tale."²³

Even the day of the feast shows tradition at work. In the Greek text Kouli translated (the Patrologia Graeca edition), the writing beside Mary's body gives only the month: "in the month of Pharmouthi, according to the Egyptians (April, according to the Romans)." The English life published by the Orthodox Church in America, which does not follow that Greek text, reads "on the first day of April."²⁴ Keeping 1 April is a reasonable liturgical choice, but the exact day comes from tradition, not from the Greek text Kouli translated.

(c) Reported miracles

The Life reports that Mary was held back by an unseen force, rose above the ground in prayer, walked on the Jordan, left a written message though she could not read, lay uncorrupted for a year, and was buried by a lion. Each rests on a single text written long afterward, with no independent witness. The Church does not require anyone to treat every miracle in a saint's Life as established fact. God can do such things, and the evidence neither rules them out nor confirms them. Some motifs, the lion above all, belong to a shared literary language of desert holiness, expressing the belief that a purified human being is restored to harmony with creation.

Why the Church reads her Life in Lent

The Orthodox Church commemorates St Mary on 1 April and on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent;²⁵ in 2026 the Orthodox Church in America kept that Sunday on 29 March.²⁶ In the same week, at Thursday Matins (in parishes usually served on Wednesday evening), the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete is read in its entirety, its only complete reading of the year, and her Life is read in the same service. S. V. Bulgakov's Russian liturgical handbook (1900), citing the Synaxarion, says the Life "manifests infinite compunction and gives much encouragement to the fallen and sinners."²⁷

The Great Canon gathers the Church's calls to repentance; Mary's Life gives them a human face, late in Lent, when many feel their efforts have come to little. Her Kontakion says it directly: "Having been a sinful woman, you became a Bride of Christ through repentance."²⁸ Behind this stands the Gospel. Christ said of the sinful woman who anointed His feet, "her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much" (Luke 7:47, NKJV), and the father of the prodigal son "saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him" (Luke 15:20, NKJV).

The Orthodox position

Dogma. The Church teaches that the saints are alive in Christ and pray for us, and the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) affirmed the veneration of icons while distinguishing it from worship: it is "not the full adoration {latria} in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature," for "the honour paid to an image traverses it, reaching the model."²⁹ See our guides on the intercession of the saints in the ancient Church and icons and relics.

Common tradition. That a holy woman named Mary repented, lived as a hermit beyond the Jordan, and is among the saints is the settled liturgical tradition of the Church.

Theological opinion and historical judgment. Who wrote the Life, when Mary lived, whether Cyril's Mary is the same woman, and how literally to take each episode are open questions. No council has defined the authorship of a saint's Life or the historicity of its miracles.

What does the Church mean by repentance and holiness? When Christ says "Repent, and believe in the gospel" (Mark 1:15, NKJV), the Greek verb is metanoeite, a call to a change of mind and life. Orthodox teaching treats repentance as the lifelong turning of the whole person back to God. St John Climacus, abbot of Sinai and a near contemporary of Moschos and Sophronius, wrote: "Repentance is the renewal of baptism. Repentance is a contract with God for a second life," and "the daughter of hope and the renunciation of despair."³⁰ Mary's Life is that teaching in narrative form. Her conversion takes a moment; her healing takes seventeen years, and it is grace, pictured in the light that comes to her and the Theotokos who guards her, that carries her through.

Holiness, in this vision, is participation in God by grace, what Orthodox theology calls theosis: becoming "partakers of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4, NKJV) without ever becoming God by nature. Seeing Mary walk on the water, Zosimas says God "spoke the truth when He promised that those who purify themselves liken themselves to God as much as is possible."³¹ (See What Is Theosis?) Her desert life is framed by two Communions; her holiness is neither self-made nor lived apart from the sacraments.

The strongest objections

"It's a legend, so why venerate her?"

A skeptic, or a careful Christian, might say: if historians cannot show that Mary existed, the Church is honoring a character in a story. First, the evidence does not show that Mary is fictional; it shows the details cannot be verified. A sixth-century monk told Cyril he had met and buried a woman named Mary in the desert, and there is no evidence that he invented her. A natural reading is that a real solitary stands at the start of a tradition that grew in the telling, a possibility Kouli herself allows.

Second, the Church's veneration rests on its living memory and prayer, not on the outcome of a historical inquiry. Orthodox Christians believe the saints are alive in God and pray for us; historical research can test documents but cannot settle that question either way.

Third, honesty means distinguishing what we venerate from what we claim to know. An Orthodox Christian can say, consistently, "I ask St Mary for her prayers, and I do not know whether a lion dug her grave." The Life asks to be read for benefit, and the liturgy reads it that way.

"This is extreme asceticism, not the gospel"

Some Protestant readers find the story troubling for another reason. Forty-seven years naked in the desert, beating her breast until temptation passed: is this not the "self-imposed religion, false humility, and neglect of the body" that Paul says has only "an appearance of wisdom" (Colossians 2:23, NKJV)? John Calvin, who did not reject fasting, warned against treating it "as a meritorious work and species of divine worship," and complained that in the ancient Church "the superstitious observance of Lent had everywhere prevailed."³² An editorial aside in the 1850 English translation of Nicaea II by the Anglican clergyman John Mendham went further, remarking that in Mary's story it seemed "Christ was not so much as thought of in her scheme of salvation."³³

These concerns are not foolish, and Orthodoxy shares some of them: it does not present fasting as earning salvation. Several replies can be made. First, the Life is not a rule for ordinary Christians; the Church holds Mary up as an extraordinary case of grace, and no one hearing the Lenten services is told to move to the desert. Second, Paul himself said, "I discipline my body and bring it into subjection" (1 Corinthians 9:27, NKJV), and Christ taught His disciples how to fast, "when you fast," not whether (Matthew 6:16-18, NKJV). The question is purpose, and in the Life the purpose is healing: a woman enslaved to her appetites is set free, and the text credits God's grace and the help of the Theotokos, not her own strength.

Third, the charge that Christ is absent does not fit the text. Mary prays because the Virgin's Son became man to call sinners to repentance; she longs to see "the cross on which God ... was crucified in the flesh and offered His own blood as a ransom for my sake"; she dies after receiving Christ's Body and Blood.³⁴ Protestants and Orthodox will still differ over the Theotokos's place in her story, but the story centers on Christ and His Cross.

Fourth, there is a point to concede. Her troparion says she taught us "to disregard the flesh, for it passes away; but to care for the soul, since it is immortal."³⁵ Read alone, that could sound like contempt for the body. The Church, which confesses the resurrection of the body, does not mean it so, but the line shows why ascetic texts must be read within the whole faith. For background, see our articles on where Christian monasticism came from and monasticism in the Reformation.

"The council relied on legends to prove icons"

Mendham also complained that the stories read at Nicaea II were offered "as so many irrefragable proofs of the sanctity of images."³⁶ A story read at a council is not thereby historically guaranteed. But the council's teaching rests on the Incarnation and the distinction between honor and worship, not on any single Life; Mary's story illustrated how Christians already prayed before icons.

What we can say confidently

• Around 555 to 557 Cyril of Scythopolis recorded a monk's report of a woman named Mary, a former singer at the Church of the Resurrection, who lived as a desert solitary and was buried by him.
• The full Life was in circulation by the eighth century, when John of Damascus cited it, and was read at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.
• The Life accurately reflects the Palestinian world of its time: the Jordan monasteries and their Lenten retreat, the Exaltation pilgrimage, the church of the Forerunner.
• The Orthodox Church commemorates St Mary on 1 April and on the Fifth Sunday of Great Lent, and reads her Life with the Great Canon in the fifth week.
• The Life presents itself as oral monastic tradition, written down for the benefit of readers.

What remains disputed

• Whether Sophronius wrote the Life, and exactly when it was written. Kouli places it probably in the seventh century; the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia reports that the Bollandists of its day argued for a date before 500.
• When Mary lived: Orthodox sources give 378, 437 or 522, the Bollandists 421, and the Life no fixed dates.
• Whether Cyril's singer and the Life's former harlot are the same woman, and how the story changed between them.
• {{debated: Whether a real woman named Mary stands behind the Life.}} The earliest evidence makes it plausible; it cannot be proved.
• Whether the reported miracles, including the lion, record events or use the established language of desert hagiography.

Conclusion

St Mary of Egypt reaches us through a short sixth-century report and a longer seventh-century narrative of what monks had handed on. Pretending otherwise would ill honor a saint whose life was a turning away from pretense.

What the Church gives us is less a dossier than a mirror. Each Lent the faithful hear again how a woman who could not get through a church door found mercy before an icon of the Mother of God, and how a proud old monk found he still had everything to learn. The Church believes that she lives in Christ and prays for us. Whether or not every episode happened as written, the story tells the truth about God, who, as the Life says echoing Ezekiel, "desires not the death of the sinner." That truth needs no inflated evidence, and it is the faith of the Church that sings each Pascha of Christ "trampling down death by death." For more on the Fathers of this period, see our Church Fathers guide.

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Notes

1. Life of St. Mary of Egypt, chs. 2-4, trans. Maria Kouli, in Alice-Mary Talbot, ed., Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1996), 71-73. Translated from the Greek text in PG 87:3697-726 (BHG 1042). ↩
2. Life, chs. 9-15, Kouli trans., 75-79. ↩
3. Life, chs. 18-21, Kouli trans., 80-82. The date of the Exaltation is given in Kouli's note 45, p. 80. ↩
4. Life, chs. 22-26, Kouli trans., 82-85. ↩
5. Life, chs. 27-31, Kouli trans., 85-87. Kouli notes (p. 85, n. 54) that the figures in the Life make Mary about seventy-six at this point. ↩
6. Life, chs. 32-35, Kouli trans., 87-90. The prayer quotes Luke 2:29-30. ↩
7. Life, chs. 36-40, Kouli trans., 90-92. ↩
8. Efthymios Rizos, "Cyril of Scythopolis composes the Life of Kyriakos of Souka," The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, University of Oxford, record E06733, csla.history.ox.ac.uk. ↩
9. Kouli, introduction to the Life, in Talbot, Holy Women of Byzantium, 65, summarizing Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Kyriakos, ed. E. Schwartz, Kyrillos von Skythopolis (Leipzig, 1939), 233-34; English translation in Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R. M. Price (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991), 256-58. ↩
10. Kouli, introduction, 65-66, citing John Moschos, Spiritual Meadow, PG 87:3049; English translation in John Wortley, trans., The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1992), 148-49. ↩
11. Kouli, introduction, 66. ↩
12. Kouli, introduction, 66 (citing PG 94:1416-17 for John of Damascus). ↩
13. The Seventh General Council, the Second of Nicaea, Held A.D. 787, trans. John Mendham (London: W. E. Painter, 1850), session 4, p. 212; the extract follows on pp. 212-14. ↩
14. Kouli, introduction, 67-68 and n. 12. ↩
15. Life, chs. 1 and 41, Kouli trans., 70 and 92-93. ↩
16. Kouli, introduction, 65-67. ↩
17. Kouli's notes to the Life: n. 35, p. 75 (Lenten retreat, citing Y. Hirschfeld, The Judean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period, 1992); n. 45, p. 80 (Exaltation); n. 49, p. 83 (icon in the courtyard, citing J. Wilkinson, Jerusalem Pilgrims); n. 51, p. 84 (church built by Anastasios I). ↩
18. Kouli, introduction, 66. ↩
19. Kouli, n. 55 to ch. 29, p. 86. ↩
20. Jerome, Life of Paulus the First Hermit, ch. 16, trans. W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 6 (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893); Kouli, introduction, 67. ↩
21. Holy Transfiguration Monastery (Brookline, MA), reading for St Mary of Egypt, 1 April, as reproduced at frpeterpreble.com, "1 April ~ St. Mary of Egypt." ↩
22. J. MacRory, "St. Mary of Egypt," The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910), newadvent.org. ↩
23. Kouli, introduction, 66-67. ↩
24. Life, ch. 38, Kouli trans., 91; Orthodox Church in America, "Venerable Mary of Egypt," Lives of the Saints, 1 April, oca.org. ↩
25. Kouli, introduction, 68; Orthodox Church in America, "Venerable Mary of Egypt," commemorated 1 April. ↩
26. Orthodox Church in America, "5th Sunday of Great Lent: St Mary of Egypt," Lives of the Saints, commemorated 29 March 2026, oca.org. ↩
27. S. V. Bulgakov, Handbook for Church Servers (Kharkov, 1900), trans. Archpriest Eugene D. Tarris, "Fifth Week of Great Lent," pravmir.com. For the services in English, see Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans., The Lenten Triodion (London: Faber and Faber, 1978). ↩
28. Orthodox Church in America, "Venerable Mary of Egypt: Troparion and Kontakion," oca.org. ↩
29. Second Council of Nicaea, Definition, in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), as reproduced at documentacatholicaomnia.eu. ↩
30. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, Step 5, trans. Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (Eastern Orthodox Books, 1973 printing), as reproduced at churchmotherofgod.org, "On Repentance." ↩
31. Life, ch. 35, Kouli trans., 89. Kouli notes the echo of Plato, Theaetetus 176b. ↩
32. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 4.12.19-20, trans. Henry Beveridge (1845), ccel.org. ↩
33. Mendham, The Seventh General Council, 212, note. ↩
34. Life, chs. 23 and 35, Kouli trans., 83 and 89-90. ↩
35. Orthodox Church in America, "Venerable Mary of Egypt: Troparion and Kontakion" (Troparion, Tone 8). ↩
36. Mendham, The Seventh General Council, 192, note. ↩

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Life of St. Mary of Egypt (BHG 1042; PG 87:3697-726). Translated by Maria Kouli. In Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints' Lives in English Translation, edited by Alice-Mary Talbot, 65-93. Byzantine Saints' Lives in Translation 1. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996. ISBN 0-88402-241-2.
• Cyril of Scythopolis. The Lives of the Monks of Palestine. Translated by R. M. Price, with introduction and notes by John Binns. Cistercian Studies 114. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1991.
• John Moschos. The Spiritual Meadow (Pratum Spirituale). Translated by John Wortley. Cistercian Studies 139. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1992.
• Jerome. Life of Paulus the First Hermit. Translated by W. H. Fremantle, G. Lewis and W. G. Martley. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 6. Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893. Revised edition at newadvent.org.
• Second Council of Nicaea (787). Definition. In Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner. London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
• Second Council of Nicaea (787). Acts, session 4. In The Seventh General Council, the Second of Nicaea, Held A.D. 787, translated by John Mendham. London: W. E. Painter, 1850.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982. Greek of Mark 1:15 from the SBL Greek New Testament.

Orthodox and patristic sources

• John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Translated by Archimandrite Lazarus Moore. Eastern Orthodox Books, 1973 printing (first published London: Faber and Faber, 1959).
• Mother Mary and Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, trans. The Lenten Triodion. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Venerable Mary of Egypt" (1 April), with Troparion and Kontakion; and "5th Sunday of Great Lent: St Mary of Egypt" (29 March 2026). Lives of the Saints, oca.org. Paschal troparion from "Selected Liturgical Hymns," oca.org.
• Bulgakov, S. V. Handbook for Church Servers. Kharkov, 1900. "Fifth Week of Great Lent," translated by Archpriest Eugene D. Tarris, pravmir.com.
• Holy Transfiguration Monastery, Brookline, MA. Reading for St Mary of Egypt, 1 April. As reproduced at frpeterpreble.com.

Other scholarship (including scholars who disagree)

• Kouli, Maria. Introduction and notes to the Life of St. Mary of Egypt. In Talbot, ed., Holy Women of Byzantium, 65-93.
• Ward, Benedicta. Harlots of the Desert: A Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources. Cistercian Studies 106. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1987. ISBN 978-0-87907-606-1. (Includes an English translation of the medieval Latin version of the Life.)
• Rizos, Efthymios. Record E06733, "Cyril of Scythopolis composes the Life of Kyriakos of Souka." The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity database, University of Oxford. csla.history.ox.ac.uk.
• MacRory, J. "St. Mary of Egypt." The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910.

Sources from the traditions discussed (Protestant and critical)

• Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Translated by Henry Beveridge. Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845. Book 4, chapter 12. ccel.org.
• Mendham, John. Editorial notes to The Seventh General Council, the Second of Nicaea. London: W. E. Painter, 1850.