Mary Magdalen

Mary Magdalene, also spelled Mary Magdalen, was a first-century Jewish disciple of Jesus of Nazareth and one of the most clearly attested women in the New Testament. She is named in all four canonical Gospels. The epithet Magdalene is generally taken to mean that she came from Magdala (Migdal; also known in Greek sources as Taricheae), a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee noted in the early Roman period for fishing and the salting and trade of fish. The Gospels give no year of birth, parentage, or formal social rank. Luke 8:1–3 states that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her and that she, together with Joanna, Susanna, and other women, accompanied Jesus and the Twelve and provided for them from their own resources. That notice places her among a circle of female patrons of the Galilean ministry, a publicly visible role for a Jewish woman of the time. Nothing in the canonical texts documents a husband or children, nor do they supply a chronology beyond her association with the public career of Jesus.

The same sources present her as a principal witness of the Passion and Resurrection. She is placed at the crucifixion when most of the male disciples have fled, observes the burial, and on the first day of the week goes to the tomb, either with other women or, in the Johannine account, alone. Mark, Matthew, and Luke include her among those who find the tomb empty and hear that Jesus has been raised. The Gospel of John gives her a distinctive scene: she remains weeping at the tomb, encounters the risen Jesus, who addresses her by name, and is sent to announce the resurrection to the disciples. From this commission later Christian tradition, already reflected in Hippolytus of Rome in the third century, called her apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles. Paul does not name her in the appearance list of 1 Corinthians 15, a silence variously explained by the conventions of legal witness or by the particular traditions Paul received. On the Gospel evidence alone she is the preeminent female disciple and the first herald of the resurrection in Christian memory.

She must not be identified, on historical grounds, with other New Testament women named Mary or with anonymous female figures. She is distinct from Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, from Mary the mother of James, and from the unnamed sinner who anoints Jesus in Luke 7. A homily of Pope Gregory I in 591 fused several of these figures into a single composite of the penitent prostitute who became contemplative and resurrection witness. That identification dominated Latin preaching, liturgy, and art for many centuries and produced the familiar medieval image of the long-haired penitent with an ointment jar. The churches of the East never accepted the fusion. Modern biblical scholarship and the Roman liturgical reform of 1969 treat Mary Magdalene as a distinct person, honored chiefly as witness of the Resurrection rather than as a penitent whose past the canonical Gospels do not describe. Extra-canonical works such as the Gospel of Mary assign her a prominent, sometimes contested, role as recipient of special teaching; they illuminate later devotion and controversy but are not independent historical biographies of a first-century woman.

No contemporary or near-contemporary source records the date, place, or manner of her death, and she was venerated from early Christian times without a later formal process of beatification or canonization. Eastern tradition, found in writers such as Modestus of Jerusalem and in later synaxaria, holds that she went to Ephesus with the Virgin Mary and John and was buried there; a tomb was shown at Ephesus in late antiquity. A separate Western legend, fully developed in the thirteenth-century Golden Legend and in Provençal cult, claims that she, Martha, Lazarus, and companions were cast adrift, landed in southern Gaul, that she preached at Marseille, and that she lived as a hermit in the cave of Sainte-Baume before burial at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. Vézelay in Burgundy also claimed her relics from the eleventh century. These competing cults explain the spread of her dedication across medieval Europe but cannot be verified as history. Her feast on 22 July is ancient in both East and West; the Roman calendar now ranks it as a feast, and Byzantine usage also commemorates her among the Myrrh-bearing Women. Traditional patronage includes converts, contemplatives, pharmacists and apothecaries, hairdressers and perfumers, glove makers, tanners, penitent sinners, people ridiculed for their piety, and women in general.