Mary Magdalene and Jesus

Yes, and the gospels are unusually specific about it. Luke names her in a short list of women who traveled with Jesus and the twelve through Galilean towns while he preached, and who served the mission out of their own possessions. She is introduced there as the woman from whom seven demons had gone out.

She is also there at the end. Matthew, Mark and John name her at the crucifixion. Luke, who mentions the women from Galilee without naming them at the cross, names her once they reach the tomb. Mark and Matthew both record her watching where the body was laid, and Matthew has her sitting opposite the tomb afterward.

Set that against the twelve and the arithmetic is uncomfortable. Bartholomew and James the son of Alphaeus are named in the apostle lists and nowhere else in any gospel. Simon the Zealot is no better attested. She is named in all four gospels, at the execution, at the burial, and at the tomb. In the lists of women she is almost always placed first, the way Peter is placed first among the men, and ancient lists tended to lead with the person of most standing.

The first is her healing. Luke 8:2 says seven demons had gone out of her, and the longer ending of Mark says he cast them out. Neither text describes the scene, names the affliction, or gives her a word of dialogue. Everything the gospels tell us afterward is what she did once it was over.

Then the road. She is one of the women who kept the mission funded and moving through Galilee, which means months or years of ordinary proximity that nobody bothered to write down.

Then the execution. John places her at the foot of the cross. Matthew and Mark place her among the women watching from a distance. Whatever the exact distance, she is in the record at the moment when most of the men are absent from it.

Then the burial, twice noted, as though the gospel writers wanted it established that she knew which tomb.

Then the garden, which is the only scene where the two of them speak at length. John 20 runs like this. She comes while it is still dark, sees the stone moved, and runs to Peter and the disciple Jesus loved with the report that the body is gone. The two men run to the tomb, look inside, and go back to their own homes. She stays.

Two angels ask why she is weeping. She answers them, turns around, and takes the man standing there for the gardener. She offers to carry the body away herself if he will tell her where it is. He says one word, her name, and she recognizes him. He tells her not to hold on to him because he has not yet ascended, and sends her to the others with a message about his Father and their Father, his God and their God.

Then the aftermath, which the gospels report without flattering anybody. She delivers the message and the men do not believe her. Luke says the women's words seemed to them to be nonsense. The longer ending of Mark needs one word for it. They disbelieved. Peter got up and ran to the tomb anyway.

Her recorded speech is very short. Four lines survive, all of them in John 20, quoted here from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain.

To Peter and the other disciple, before dawn: "They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we don't know where they have laid him!" To the angels, a few minutes later: "Because they have taken away my Lord, and I don't know where they have laid him." The sentence is the same and one word has changed. The Lord became my Lord when the audience became someone who would not argue with her.

To the man she takes for the gardener: "Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away." She is a woman offering to lift a corpse by herself. Then one word back to him, "Rabboni!", which John stops to translate as Teacher.

Notice what is missing. She calls him Lord, Teacher and Sir. She never calls him God. The confession "My Lord and my God!" arrives eight days later in the same chapter, and it belongs to Thomas. Her titles are the titles of a follower who has not yet worked out what she is looking at, and she is sent anyway.

No gospel calls Mary Magdalene a prostitute. The word never appears anywhere near her name, and the man usually blamed for putting it there did not use it either. What actually happened is that three separate women were pressed into one, and the rest was supplied by centuries of preaching and paint.

Luke 7:36-50 tells of an unnamed woman in a Pharisee's house, described only as a sinner, who weeps on Jesus' feet and anoints them. She has no name and no town. Mary Magdalene is introduced in the next chapter as a different person entirely. John 11:2 identifies the woman who anointed the Lord as Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who lives outside Jerusalem.

Pope Gregory the Great treated all three as one woman in Homily 33 of his homilies on the gospels, preached to the congregation in the basilica of San Clemente in Rome on the Friday of the September Ember Days, in about 591. He read the seven demons as seven vices and said she had been full of all of them. The word he used for her was sinner, taken straight from Luke 7. Most of the sermon is aimed at the Pharisee who looked down on her. A sermon is not a decree, and this one carried no definitional force. It shaped Western art, liturgy and legend for roughly fourteen centuries anyway.

Her home town did some of the work too. By the late first century Magdala had a reputation for vice, and the reputation of the place got attached to the woman named after it.

Paul VI's 1969 revision of the General Roman Calendar unpicked the merger. The accompanying commentary said the 22 July celebration concerns only the Mary Magdalene to whom Christ appeared after the resurrection, and neither Martha's sister nor the sinful woman whose sins the Lord forgave.

On 3 June 2016 the Congregation for Divine Worship raised that memorial to the rank of feast, the rank the apostles hold, with a proper preface titled de apostolorum apostola. The Vatican's own published explanation traces the Western merger to the same place, saying the tradition in the West made that identification "especially after St. Gregory the Great." A paragraph later the same article quotes Gregory approvingly, as the man who called her the first witness of divine mercy. Both things are true about him at once.

The Eastern Orthodox churches never made the identification. They keep Mary of Bethany as a separate saint, have never filed Mary Magdalene under penitent, and title her Myrrhbearer and Equal to the Apostles. Their devotional lives are not squeamish about her past. The Orthodox Church in America's life of her says tradition holds she was young and pretty and led a sinful life. What the East never did was fuse her with the woman in Luke 7 or with Martha's sister.

Magdala was a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. Excavations that began in 2009 uncovered a synagogue there from the Second Temple period, the oldest yet found in Galilee, with a carved stone block near its center showing a seven-branched menorah and other Temple imagery. If her name means what it usually means, she prayed in that room. A minority of scholars, among them Elizabeth Schrader Polczer and Joan Taylor, argue that Magdalene, which means tower, was an honorific nickname instead of a place name.

After Easter the New Testament goes quiet on her. Acts and the letters never mention her again. Everything else is tradition, and the traditions disagree with each other.

Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, says she retired to Ephesus with Mary the mother of Jesus and was buried in that city. A later Eastern account has her reaching Ephesus to live near the apostle John, and the Orthodox version adds travel through Rome, an audience with the emperor Tiberius and a red egg. Her relics were reported moved from Ephesus to Constantinople in the ninth century.

In the West, from about 1050, the monks of Vezelay Abbey in Burgundy said they had her skeleton. In December 1279 an excavation at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence, backed by Charles II of Naples, produced a rival burial, and Provence gradually displaced Vezelay. The Golden Legend, compiled in the 1260s, fixed the French version in the popular imagination. The claims cannot all be true. Read them as devotion and keep them out of the history column.

Both are known by a small place. He is Jesus the Nazarene. She is Mary of Magdala. Neither name is a family name, and both put a Galilean address on a person Jerusalem had to reckon with.

Both are recorded weeping at a tomb. He wept outside the tomb of Lazarus in John 11. She wept outside his own in John 20, same gospel, nine chapters later, in the same posture.

Both were disbelieved by the people closest to them. In Mark 3:21 the people around him go out to seize him because they think he has lost his mind. Her resurrection report struck the eleven as nonsense until Peter went and looked.

Both were sent, and both did the sending. In John 20:21 he tells the disciples that as the Father sent him, he sends them. He had already sent her four verses earlier, before any of them knew anything.

Both stayed where it cost something. She stood near the cross, and she stayed at the tomb after Peter and the other disciple had gone back to their own homes. Staying is the one thing the gospels never stop crediting her with.

Jesus is worshipped. She is honored. Christian teaching draws that line hard, and the gospels draw it first. In Matthew 28:9 the women take hold of his feet and worship him, and he lets them. In John 20:17 she reaches for him and he tells her to let go. Nobody in the New Testament worships Mary Magdalene, and she never asks anyone to.

The healing runs one way too. Seven demons went out of her by his action. That transaction is never reversed anywhere in the text.

Catholic teaching keeps two different words for the two things. Writing about images of Christ and of the saints, the Catechism calls the honor paid to them a "respectful veneration," and says plainly that it is not the adoration due to God alone (CCC 2131 to 2132). Vatican II makes the matching point about the saints themselves. Every genuine testimony of love shown to those in heaven tends toward and terminates in Christ, and through him in God (Lumen Gentium 50). That same passage also tells Catholics they may ask the saints to pray for them.

Many Protestants draw the line further out. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 allows that the memory of the saints may be set before us so that we may follow their faith and good works, then says scripture does not teach invoking them, because it sets before us the one Christ as mediator and intercessor. Whether a Christian may ask her to pray is exactly where the traditions split, and it is a live argument inside Anglicanism as well.

The split is narrower than the calendars suggest. The Church of England lists Mary Magdalene among its Festivals, in the same column as Andrew, Peter and Paul, James, and the rest of the apostles. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America marks her on 22 July as an apostle.

One more difference, and it is physical. Every gospel reports his tomb empty. Hers has been located at Ephesus, at Vezelay and at Saint-Maximin, by people who were all certain. That is the difference between a resurrection claim and a relic claim.

PrayWithJesus.ai has no ecclesiastical approval and no teaching authority. This page reports what the traditions say and where they disagree. Take the disagreements to your own church.

Almost everything typed into a search box after her name comes in one of three shapes. Was she a prostitute. Was she married to Jesus. Why does her story keep getting rewritten by people who never met her.

Underneath those there is usually a fourth question that nobody types. Is there anybody who stays. She stayed at the cross. She stayed at the tomb after the two men went home. The text is blunt about who left and who did not.

Her most repeated sentence is barely a prayer. They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him. No creed in it, no request, no attempt to sound composed. It was answered by someone saying her name.

So if you are awake and the only sentence you have is closer to a complaint than a prayer, say the complaint. That is the form hers took, and it worked.

And if you want to settle the prostitute question in your own Bible tonight, read Luke 7:36-50, then Luke 8:1-3, then John 11:1-2, in that order. Ten minutes will do it. Then tell one living person how you are before morning, because a message you deliver to nobody is the one part of her story you should not copy.