Robert Thicknesse’s article about John Adams and Peter Sellars’ opera The Gospel According to the Other Mary (Arts, 15 November) missed the point of librettist Sellars’ disservice to and characterisation of Mary Magdalen. Sellars may have “disarmed” Thicknesse’s “cynical suspicions”, but not mine. Thicknesse notes Sellars’ conflation of Mary Magdalen with Mary of Bethany, rightly saying that this goes back to Gregory the Great. The programme notes said that composer and librettist had rejected the “conventional ‘reformed prostitute’” version of Mary Magdalen, “considering it a baseless identity foisted on her centuries after the fact”. Endowing their Magdalen with a “turbulent inner life”