[citation needed] The primary source of information on Saint Mary of Egypt is the Vita written of her by Sophronius, Patriarch of Jerusalem (634–638).

[4] In her Vita it states that she often refused the money offered for her sexual favors, as she was driven "by an insatiable and an irrepressible passion", and that she mainly lived by begging, supplemented by spinning flax.

She undertook the journey as a sort of "anti-pilgrimage", stating that she hoped to find in the pilgrim crowds at Jerusalem even more partners to sate her lust.

Realizing this was because of her impurity, she was struck with remorse, and upon seeing an icon of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) outside the church, she prayed for forgiveness and promised to give up the world (i.e., become an ascetic).

She immediately went to the monastery of Saint John the Baptist on the banks of the River Jordan, where she received absolution and afterwards Holy Communion.

When he fulfilled her wish, she crossed the river to get to him by walking on the water, and received Holy Communion, telling him to meet her again in the desert the following Lent.

There, he found her lying dead; an inscription written in the sand next to her head stated that she had died the very night he had given her Communion, her incorrupt body miraculously transported to that spot.

Some scholars doubt her existence, on the grounds of the similarity of her Vita to the stories of other "desert mothers": "[I]t is impossible to provide a chronology for the life of Mary, or even to establish her historicity.

[23][24] Rosa Egipcíaca, an Afro-Brazilian religious mystic and formerly enslaved prostitute, renamed herself in 1798 to honour Saint Mary of Egypt.

[25] Egipcíaca was the first black woman in Brazil to write a book, Sagrada Teologia do Amor Divino das Almas Peregrinas ("Holy Theology of Divine Love of the Pilgrim Souls"), that recorded her religious visions.

The Unknown Masterpiece (1831), a novella by Balzac, contains a long description of a portrait of Mary of Egypt "undressing in order to pay her passage to Jerusalem".