You have probably heard her story preached. Mary Magdalene was a woman with a past, a prostitute who met Jesus, wept at his feet, and changed her life. Painters gave her long red hair and a jar of ointment. Films made it the main thing about her.
Here is where that story comes from, verse by verse.
The verse that introduces her
Luke introduces Mary Magdalene in chapter 8, in a list of women who traveled with Jesus.
…some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who ministered to them out of their own resources.
Luke 8:2-3
That is the whole of her past in the New Testament. Seven demons had gone out of her. "Magdalene" most likely means she came from Magdala, a town on the Sea of Galilee. She was one of the women who paid for the group's travels out of their own money.
No Gospel calls her a prostitute. No Gospel calls her a sinner of any kind.
The woman just before her
So where did the reputation come from? Turn back one page. At the end of Luke 7, Jesus is eating at a Pharisee's house when a woman comes in.
And a woman in the city who was a sinner, having learned that he was eating in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment. She stood behind him at his feet, weeping, and began to bathe his feet with her tears and to dry them with her hair, kissing his feet and anointing them with the ointment.
Luke 7:37-38
Luke never gives her name. He never says what her sins were, either. Readers have often assumed sexual sin, but the verse does not say it. A few lines later, at the start of chapter 8, Luke names Mary Magdalene for the first time. He had every chance to say the two women were the same person. He did not.
A third woman, in John
John tells a story of an anointing too, and he names the woman. She is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill.
John 11:1-2
Bethany is a village near Jerusalem. Magdala is far to the north, in Galilee. In the text these are three women: an unnamed woman in a Pharisee's house, Mary of Bethany at her brother's home, and Mary from Magdala, freed of seven demons. What ties them together is a jar of ointment, a woman's hair, and, for two of them, the name Mary.
The sermon that made them one
The three were joined into one woman most famously in a sermon. In 591 AD, Pope Gregory the Great preached a homily in Rome on the anointing in Luke 7. In it he said that the sinful woman of Luke, the Mary that John names, and the Mary from whom seven demons went out were the same person. He went further. The seven demons, he said, stood for "all the vices."
In the early Middle Ages Gregory was widely seen as the master of Bible interpretation, and his reading spread across the Western church. From then on, preaching and art showed one woman: the repentant sinner, the Penitent Magdalene of the paintings. It lasted well over a thousand years.
Not every church followed him. The Eastern Orthodox churches never joined the three women and never honored her as a penitent. In 1969 the Catholic Church revised its calendar and dropped the identification. In 2016 it raised her day, July 22, to a feast, with a title tradition had given her long before: "apostle of the apostles."
What the Gospels give her instead
The Gospels do not give Mary Magdalene a past to repent of. They give her a place at the most important moments of the story. She is at the cross.
Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.
John 19:25
She is at the empty tomb in all four Gospels. The lists of who came with her differ, and so do the messengers they meet, but hers is the only name on every list. In John she comes first, and alone.
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb.
John 20:1
And in John she is the first person to see the risen Jesus. He sends her to tell the others.
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and she told them that he had said these things to her.
John 20:18
The accounts do not all agree on who saw him first. In Matthew she meets him with the other Mary. Paul's list of witnesses in 1 Corinthians starts with Peter and names no women at all. In all four Gospels, though, Mary from Magdala is there on Easter morning.
For further exploration
Three things to read with the text open:
- Read Luke 7:36 to 8:3 in one sitting. Notice where the unnamed woman's story ends and Mary Magdalene's name begins. Ask whether Luke links them.
- Read John 12:1-8. Find who anoints Jesus there, and in which village. Then compare it with Luke 7.
- Read John 20:1-18. Count how many times Mary Magdalene is the one who sees, speaks or goes to tell.
Sources
- Luke 7:37-38; Luke 8:2-3; John 11:1-2; John 19:25; John 20:1; John 20:18 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, notes on Luke 7:36-50 and Luke 8:1-3
- Bart D. Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction, box on Mary Magdalene
- Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, on the Galilean women in Luke 8 and the scenes at the tomb in John 20
- Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels, Homily 33 (591 AD)
- John Barton, A History of the Bible, on Gregory the Great as a reader of scripture
- Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (Harcourt Brace, 1993), on how the composite figure formed and spread