Mary Magdalene

For fourteen hundred years the Western church painted Mary Magdalene as a reformed prostitute, with loose hair and a skull to weep over. The painting at the head of this entry follows that same tradition. Almost none of it is in the Gospels. The Gospels give her a very different distinction, one the penitent image managed to bury. She was the first person to witness the Resurrection, and the one Christ sent to tell everyone else.

What the Gospels actually say

She was from Magdala, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, which is why she is Mary “the Magdalene,” to tell her apart from the other Marys around Jesus. Luke introduces her plainly: Jesus had freed her of seven demons, and she was one of a group of women who traveled with him and paid for the ministry out of their own money. That is the whole of her back-story in scripture. No brothel, and no sin of any kind named.

Her real distinction comes at the end. All four Gospels put her at the crucifixion, standing near the cross after most of the male disciples had run. She watched where the body was laid. And on the third morning she went to the tomb, found it open, and became the first person to meet the risen Christ. In John’s account he says her name, “Mary,” and she turns and answers, “Rabbouni,” teacher, and he sends her to carry the news to the others. The men do not believe her at first. The early church gave her a title for that morning: apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles, the one sent to the ones who were sent.

The making of a prostitute

The harlot was made in Rome, in a single sermon. Around the year 591 Pope Gregory the Great preached on the Gospels and folded three separate women together: Mary Magdalene, the unnamed “sinful woman” of Luke 7 who washes Jesus’s feet with her tears and dries them with her hair, and Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus. Read as one person, the result was a beautiful, fallen woman redeemed by love, and the West embraced her. The seven demons were reread as seven vices, and the loose hair of the foot-washing became her permanent attribute in art.

The identification was never doctrine, only a reading, but it held for fourteen centuries and it had teeth. Houses for “fallen women” were named Magdalene after her, down to the Magdalene laundries that were still confining women in Ireland at the end of the twentieth century. The Eastern church, tellingly, never made the merger. In Orthodoxy she stayed the Myrrh-bearer and the Equal-to-the-Apostles, never a whore. In 1969 Rome quietly untangled the three women in its calendar, and in 2016 Pope Francis raised her July feast to the rank of the apostles.

The gospels that did not make the cut

Mary is also the center of texts the church left out, and they show a very different figure from the weeping penitent. In the Gospel of Mary, a second-century work found in a Berlin codex, the disciples are frightened after the crucifixion and it is Mary who steadies them and repeats teaching the risen Christ had given her alone. Peter cannot accept it. Would the Savior really have spoken to a woman in private, and preferred her to us? Another disciple, Levi, rebukes him, saying the Savior loved her more than the rest. The Gospel of Philip, from Nag Hammadi, calls her the koinonos, the companion or partner, of Jesus, and a torn passage says he used to kiss her, though the word for where is lost to a hole in the page.

These texts are not history of the first century. They are the theology of the second and third, and they were arguing, through Mary, about whether women could teach and lead. But they are why she never stopped being flammable. The modern bloodline story, from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in 1982 to The Da Vinci Code in 2003, took the “companion” and the lost kiss and built a secret marriage and a royal descent on them. Historians do not accept the marriage, let alone the dynasty. What the buried gospels genuinely preserve is smaller and stranger than a bloodline: a memory of a woman close enough to Jesus, and prominent enough among his followers, that some of the men found her a problem.

The hermit of the cave

The West gave her one more life. By the Middle Ages a legend, gathered up in the Golden Legend around 1260, had Mary, her sister Martha, and their brother Lazarus set adrift in a boat without oars and washed ashore in Provence. She preached at Marseille, then withdrew to a cave in the cliffs of the Sainte-Baume for thirty years of penance, clothed only in her own long hair, and angels lifted her at the hours of prayer and fed her on heavenly food. Her supposed relics rest at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, and the abbey of Vézelay claimed them too, and the pilgrim traffic between the rival shrines was enormous. The Orthodox tell it otherwise, sending her with John to Ephesus, where she died.

In the compendium

Mary Magdalene is the clearest case in this wing of an image overwriting a person. The Gospels hand us a first witness and a woman entrusted with the central news of the faith; a single sixth-century sermon handed the West a penitent whore, and that is what the painters, and a chain of laundries, kept alive. Her nearest neighbor here is Cecilia of Rome, whose fame as the patron of music grew from a mistranslation, another saint whose popular identity was manufactured by a later error rather than her own life. The difference is the scale of what was buried under Mary’s. Strip the invented sins away and what remains is a larger saint, the one who got to the tomb first.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• The Gospels: Luke 8:1-3 (the seven demons; the women who funded the ministry) and the Passion and Resurrection accounts, esp. John 20:1-18 (first witness)
• Gregory the Great, Homily 33 on the Gospels (c. 591), the conflation of the three women
• The Gospel of Mary (Berlin Codex / Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, 2nd century)
• The Gospel of Philip (Nag Hammadi Codex II, 3rd century), the ‘companion’ passage
• Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea, c. 1260), the Provence legend
• Pope Francis, decree Apostolorum Apostola (2016), raising her memorial to a Feast
• Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen (Princeton, 2000)