You’ve got to feel sorry for Mary Magdalene. I think she has been given a bad rap…and a bad rep. I say, “Hold off on all criticism of her.”
Sure, she has fame many of today’s celebrities would envy. She’s played a leading role in works ranging from Renaissance paintings to just about every passion play and movie made about Jesus’ life. But all that stardom has come with a great price.
Few other followers of Jesus have been saddled with such a notorious reputation. She’s the reformed harlot who is the polar opposite of the Virgin Mary. Or, thanks to the best-selling thriller “The Da Vinci Code,” she’s seen as Jesus’ secret love interest. If she were a celebrity today, she would get salacious headlines on TMZ and an unflattering photo on the cover of US Weekly.
Lost in all the speculation about her love life is the biblical record. The Early Christian Writings never identify her as a prostitute, former or otherwise, and certainly not as Jesus’ would-be girlfriend.
The actual record shows Mary Magdalene as an important disciple of Jesus – the one witness to the Crucifixion and Resurrection identified in all four canonical Gospels. In three Gospels, she encounters the risen Jesus. In the Gospel of John, she is the first person to testify to the good news that Jesus has conquered death.
Every Easter Sunday Christians around the world hear the account of Mary’s tearful conversation with a man she first mistakes for a gardener but ultimately recognizes as being her the risen Savior.
Scholars today are saying it’s significant that the four Gospels agree that women remained with Jesus during the Crucifixion and that women — particularly Mary Magdalene — discovered the empty tomb. Given women’s often debased place in first-century society, some scholars now believe, these accounts tell Christians something important about Jesus’ ministry.
The Early Christian Writings offer few clues as to Mary Magdalene’s background before she followed Jesus.
Many scholars speculate that her last name refers to Magdala, a fishing village in Galilee where she might have grown up. But that they say is just conjecture!
The Gospels of Luke and Mark identify her as a woman Jesus healed of seven demons, though neither specifies the nature of these unclean spirits.
What the first-century world labeled “demons” could refer to sinfulness “or” to what we would consider physical and mental infirmities today.
Luke first introduces Mary Magdalene with a group of women who support Jesus’ ministry “out of their resources.” But in the previous chapter, Luke tells the story of an unnamed penitent woman with an alabaster jar who anoints Jesus’ feet with perfumed oil and wets them with her tears. That seems to be at the heart of all the confusion.
The Bible does not say what happened to Mary Magdalene after Jesus’ Ascension.
Mary Magdalene is not named in Paul’s letters or in the Acts of the Apostles, the sequel to the Gospel of Luke.
We know that more than a century after Jesus’ time, Mary Magdalene remained a popular role model of discipleship.
By the third century, some early Christians had given Mary Magdalene the honorific title of the “apostle to the apostles.”
Mary Magdalene was likely the “foremost of Jesus’ women disciples,” of that, there seems to be little doubt!
Still, as the church grew and became more established, women leaders were sidelined and that included the women named among Jesus’ earliest followers. There are those who say it was the church hierarchy that drove Mary Magdalene to prostitution.”.”
“Driving her to prostitution fits in the context of putting women in their place.”
We do know that we can credit Pope Gregory the Great with fusing Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus and Luke’s sinful woman in the popular imagination.
In a sermon delivered in A.D. 591, the pope gave the Roman Catholic Church’s “official sanction to the view” that Mary Magdalene was the promiscuous woman with the alabaster jar whom Jesus redeemed. Mary of Bethany ended up in the mix because in John’s Gospel, she anoints Jesus’ feet before the Passion.
The sermon transformed Mary Magdalene into one of the “bad girls of the Bible” and his interpretation prevailed in Western Christianity for nearly 1,400 years.
Throughout the middle Ages, miracle plays and pictures frequently showed Magdalene as weeping for all her sins.
Meanwhile, other legends developed about Mary Magdalene’s life after the Ascension. One common story is that she sailed away with Martha and Lazarus and spent the rest of her life in a cave repenting of her decadent life. As the years passed, the story went, her clothes dwindled into rags and she had nothing to cover her but her long, curly hair.
This image of Mary Magdalene gave artists an excuse to paint a sexy “pinup.” She became sort of the Marilyn Monroe of the 16th century.
No doubt a great disservice has been done to her by the unrelenting myth of her as a reformed prostitute.” Even the idea that she had a romantic relationship with Jesus undermines her and implies “that is the only reason” she was close to Jesus.”
“She is seen more at Eastertide than the Virgin Mary or the 12 disciples.” “The sheer volume of her presence in these accounts is significant. For me, an accurate portrayal of her would be as one of those closest to Jesus – one who, perhaps, understood his teachings better than anyone else around him.”