Mary: the unauthorised biography Michael Jordan Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 338pp, £14.99 ISBN 0297842528

The question I was most often asked by Anglicans when I joined the Roman Catholic Church was: "How on earth do you put up with all that Mary stuff?" I, too, was somewhat put off by the concentration on Mary, although, in reality, practising Catholics can get away with a single Hail Mary a week. The standard image of Mary as a porcelain-featured girl has always irritated me, because she would have been dark with Jewish features, and so would her child. I am not, therefore, a defender of the more extreme Marian practices, but this dotty book is enough to drive even a hardened cynic to rosary beads.

The essence of Michael Jordan's thesis is that Jesus Christ was the product of a sexual rite honouring a pagan mother goddess, in whose service Mary had been initiated as a sacred or temple prostitute. Yet the evidence adduced for this amazing claim amounts to little more than that there was a lot of it about - paganism, that is. There is quite a bit of flu about this winter, but that does not mean everyone who takes a hanky from his pocket has caught it.

I grew wary before I had even finished the introduction. Inconvenient evidence is dismissed as fabrication, but anything that even half supports the debunking of Church teaching is embraced as gospel. Are Mark and John excluded because they do not refer to the nativity and are thus assumed to be "too flimsy"? In fact, John's Gospel starts with an unequivocal claim of Christ's divinity, and is an eyewitness account of Christ's life. It is not, therefore, terribly surprising that he does not start with the birth itself. No two histories will give equal weight to the same events.

There is, Jordan claims, no basis for imagining the stable as a rustic wooden structure. Quite right, but the mention of a manger suggests animals in the same way that a dining table suggests humans, so we need not split hairs. The miracles of Lourdes are dismissed as a deliberate deception perpetrated by the Church; but the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and if people claim that Marian intervention has worked, the writer of a book such as this should examine those claims closely. Jordan also lampoons the Church's attitude to sex as "Inside marriage if you must . . ." If you must? What about the duty to procreate? How is that to be achieved without sex?

However, the book does contain some good passages on Church history, archaeology and tradition, especially when the author appears to forget for a moment that he has an axe to grind. In his opening remarks, Jordan explains that the original version was a gentle quest, but that his editor persuaded him to a more assertive advocacy, for which the latter is thanked. The editor should not be thanked. This work would have been far more credible as a series of questions, rather than a collection of improbable answers - even if, in the modern world of publishing, controversy can mean larger sales than thoughtfulness.

The history of the veneration of Mary is a rich source of knowledge, which, stripped of Jordan's interpretation and left to speak for itself, would have been a work in its own right.

The most remarkable feature of this book is the author's apparent inability to understand the spiritual dimension. Everything is a conspiracy of distortion on the part of the Church, little is pure or made in heaven. When Jordan writes, in all seriousness, that a woman has to absolve herself from "the eternal shame of being born female in the Roman Catholic world of the 21st century", it is time for a large pinch of salt. Prejudice is not a good basis for a work of this kind, and one of the book's major weaknesses is the lack of any real examination of the sort of defence of Marian practice that would be mounted by modern theologians and churchmen.

I have no doubt that, in the past, this book would have caused outrage and been placed on the "Index", the list of titles that Catholics were forbidden to read, which included even the works of Alexandre Dumas because they glorified duelling. Today, I think that we can give a wry smile and leave it on the fiction shelves to gather dust.

Ann Widdecombe's new novel, An Act of Treachery, will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in January

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