Was Mary Magdalene A Whore?

And why do we think she was?

If there’s one thing you know about Mary Magdalene it’s probably that she was a prostitute. This is essentially her defining characteristic, and if you’ve seen The Last Temptation of Christ you’re familiar with a tradition that holds that she was the same woman Jesus saved from a stoning with the whole “He who is without sin” thing*

*Little side trip here - that passage in John contains a real weird mystery. Here’s how it opens:

They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.

Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou?

This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not.

Jesus wrote on the ground? What did he write? What the hell is that all about? It’s such a specific detail, but why is it there? Some people think that he was writing in the dirt so as to not look at the woman who, having been caught in flagrante, may have been nude. Jesus with a win for her dignity! But there are other ideas, and my favorite is that Jesus was writing the names of the people assembled, and next to their names their sins. This is a very cinematic moment, although it does render the rest of the encounter an exercise in blackmail as opposed to a moment when people’s hearts were changed.

I’m talking about Mary Magdalene today because it’s Maundy Thursday, aka the day of the Last Supper. What does Magdalene have to do with this? Nothing, really, but her tainted legacy is forever tied to the idea that she one time washed Jesus’ feet.

At the end of the Last Supper Jesus does something very incredible - he gets down and washes the feet of each of his apostles. What I love about this is that even today, two thousand years later, it’s an act of incredible humility. Jesus makes this one of his commandments:

If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do as I have done to you. Most assuredly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master; nor is he who is sent greater than he who sent him. If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.

But the whole thing is even better if you take it within the context of the MIddle-East of the 1st century. Back then everybody wore sandals - it was like a whole society as Phish concert - and everything was dusty and dirty. So you’d go to someone’s house and you would be offered a basin in which to wash your feet. Some hosts would offer servants to do the washing and sometimes the host himself would do the washing as, again, a sign of humility.

When you realize this is not just a sign of humility but also a sign of welcoming you begin to see the big meaning of the gesture. It’s hospitality as spiritual act. It’s very beautiful.

The hospitality of the act is also part of the story of Mary Magdalene (supposedly) washing Jesus’ feet. This doesn’t happen at the Last Supper, but rather at a dinner at a guy named Simon’s house (not the apostle. There are so many repeated names in these stories that it gets very, very confusing. For instance there are at least three major Marys in the Gospels, and sometimes it’s not entirely clear which is which). Simon is a Pharisee, and he has invited Jesus over to trap him - another guest at this dinner party is a woman who is “a sinner.” And the minute Jesus walked into the house this woman started crying on his feet and washing them with her tears and drying them with her hair and anointing him with perfume (I have never been invited to this kind of dinner party, I have to admit). For Simon the Pharisee this is a huge gotcha moment:

“If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner.”

Jesus, though, knows. He gives Simon a mini-parable - who is more grateful, a guy who has a small debt but is forgiven of it or a guy who has a big debt but is forgiven of it - and says

“Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little.”

This is a good story because it’s one of those ones where the Pharisees think they’ve got Jesus in their clutches and then he outwits them using just his wits, which is delightful. He’s a theological action hero. But when you read this passage you may find yourself asking, when is this woman identified as Mary Magdalene?

She isn’t! She isn’t identified at all! She has, in some traditions, been connected to the “Let he who is without sin” woman, but that story doesn’t even happen in Luke (a lot of stories in John only happen in John and it’s hard to know from where they originated). And that woman isn’t identified with Mary Magdalene either. So how the hell did this happen? How did we all become so certain that Mary Magdalene was this fallen woman?

Blame it on the Popes. Pope Gregory I, in particular, who in his Easter sermon in 591 conflated her with the woman who anointed Jesus’ feet (and with Mary of Bethany, Lazarus’ sister). But it is plausible that the smears on Mary’s good name started long before Gregory was born.

Mary Magdalene is a power player in the New Testament. She’s in all four Gospels, she is present at the crucifixion (unlike many of Jesus’ other buds), she discovers the empty tomb and she is present at Jesus’ first resurrection appearance in every Gospel (sometimes on her own and sometimes as part of a group). The Gospels tell us a couple of things about Mary: one is that Jesus drove seven demons out of her. The other is that she supported Jesus’ ministry out of her “resources,” which tells us that she had money and she freely gave it to Jesus to maintain his lifestyle of wandering from town to town outwitting Pharisees.

Magdalene, by the way, has become something of an epithet - the Catholic Church started “Magdalene asylums” to basically enslave sexually wayward young girls - but it’s probably just referring to where was from - the fishing town of Magdala. In a world where there are Too Many Marys, calling her by her hometown makes a lot of sense (like calling Survivor great Rob Mariano “Boston Rob.” Yes, Survivor in your Holy Week piece - bet you didn’t see that coming).

Jesus had quite a few female followers, and Mary Magdalene was likely the most prominent. If Simon Peter was the “leader” of the boys, Mary must have been the “leader” of the girls. I think the idea that women followed this itinerant preacher around sounds weird to us today, but it really was the situation. There’s no denying that she was one of his most important followers, possibly the most important if you believe some traditions.

She is known as the “apostle to the apostles,” partially because of the fact that she was, in some Gospels, the first person to proclaim the good news of the Resurrection to the boys*.

*Except in Mark, the earliest of the Gospels, whose original ending is abrupt. Here’s how it goes:

And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe, and they were alarmed. And he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.” And they went out and fled from the tomb, for trembling and astonishment had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

What a weird finale! The Bible you have at home probably has more verses after that, but everyone agrees those verses were added later by scribes who didn’t like how anticlimactic that ending was.

John’s version, by the way, may be even weirder - Mary is alone when she sees the resurrected Jesus and she thinks he’s the gardener. I swear to God.

There’s evidence that Mary’s closeness to Jesus engendered some jealousy from the other apostles. She ends up being very prominent in a number of apocryphal Gospels (books that didn’t make the canon but may have been widely read and used in ancient Christianity). The idea that maybe the apostles had some jealousy comes from the Gospel of Phillip, which is a pretty interesting work. It’s Gnostic, which is a belief system that was eventually named heretical, but beyond its spiritual elements it has a lot of stuff about Mary.

One of the more intriguing things in Phillip is the use of a Greek word koinōnos, which means ‘companion.’ One of the things that makes ancient texts so interesting is trying to determine the context of word usage - like, imagine if I wrote that John was my partner. Well, what does ‘partner’ mean? It has a wide range of possibilities from business to romantic to just good old camaraderie. So what does it mean when this Gospel says she was his ‘companion?’

Many people have interpreted that to mean a romantic relationship; indeed Tom Hanks was certain of it in the movie The DaVinci Code. The answer might be in the text… if we could see the whole text. The Gospel of Phillip was discovered in the Nag Hammadi library, a whole bunch of ancient codexes discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945. The text is in bad, bad shape, with all kinds of holes and tears, and with one hole in the most dramatic place imaginable. Brackets contain scholarly reconstructions of missing pieces:

As for Wisdom who is called "the barren", she is the mother [of the] angels. And the companion of the [...] Mary Magdalene. [... loved] her more than [all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on her [...].

Kiss her often on her what? On her what?

Anyway, immediately after that we have the apostles getting jealous:

[The apostles] said to him, "Why do you love her more than all of us?" The Savior answered and said to them, "Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in the darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

Now, Phillip is maybe from the 3rd century, and it is likely not a reliable source of information, but it is possible that it is using traditions that had been part of the Christian communities. Many of the things we know about Jesus or his followers come to us from tradition, not from Gospel. Is it possible that the apostles were jealous of how much attention and love Mary Magdalene got and began bad mouthing her, thus creating the tradition that she was the fallen woman?

So there is nothing, not a word, in the Gospels (or the epistles, as Paul never mentions her) to indicate that Mary Magdalene was anything other than a beloved follower of Jesus who was wealthy and helped him out with cash. She was at his feet as he died, while all the male apostles fucked off (to be fair they may have been worried about being arrested themselves). She helped bury him (which is controversial in its own right - there are scholars who can’t believe Jesus was buried at all), and she was there to see him rise from the grave. And yet for thousands of years she has been seen as a whore, absolutely diminishing her role in the original community around Christ. This is not me being anti-sex work, by the way, but simply reflecting the mores of thousands of years of Western culture, and it seems as if the decision to brand her a harlot was made specifically knowing just how damaging it could be.

But there is some bright news for Mary Magdalene: in 1969 the Church quietly walked back the whole prostitute thing and disconnected her from the fallen woman. They kept her feast day and her status as a saint, but they now honor her for being the first to see the risen Christ. Since then the cultural perspective on her has begun to slowly - very slowly - change. She has been seen as Jesus’ secret wife*

*there is a pretty hilarious scrap of parchment with some Coptic text on it that was revealed in 2012, and the text says:

"Jesus said to them, 'my wife...'"

The words [Borat voice] seem to be missing from the parchment… which, by the way, is pretty certainly a forgery.

and within that role she has been given a bit more dignity. But still, the culture largely sees her as a repentant whore, and while Seinfeld might remind us “Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” that idea is a continuation of an attempt to smear her. In the last decade or so feminist scholars and writers have begun reclaiming the Mary Magdalene narrative, using the apocryphal Gospel of Mary Magdalene as a starting point. There was even a feminist Mary Magdalene movie, cleverly titled Mary Magdalene, which starred Rooney Mara as Mary and Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, but it is quite boring. Like, punishingly so. It does attempt to portray Mary as a strong woman, though, which is likely exactly what she was.

Oh, one last thing - why is it called Maundy Thursday? Well, it comes from the French mandé, which comes from the Latin mandatum, which as you might guess basically means mandate or command. And the command here is actually a commandment, tied to the washing of the feet, and it’s a lovely one. From John:

"I give you a new commandment, That ye love one another as I have loved you"