Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene, also called Mary of Magdala, was a first-century Jewish woman from Magdala, a town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, who became one of Jesus of Nazareth's closest followers and a principal witness of his crucifixion and resurrection. She is named more often in the four canonical Gospels than most of the Twelve Apostles and more than any other woman apart from members of Jesus's family. The Gospel of Luke records that Jesus had cast seven demons out of her and that she, together with other women of means such as Joanna the wife of Chuza and Susanna, accompanied Jesus and the disciples and supported them from their own resources. The designation Magdalene almost certainly indicates origin from Magdala (Migdal), then a significant fishing and trading settlement in Galilee under the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas.

The Gospels uniformly present Mary Magdalene as present at the crucifixion of Jesus, standing near the cross with other women after many of the male disciples had fled. She is also among those who observed where Jesus was buried and who went to the tomb on the first day of the week. In the Gospel of John she is the first person to encounter the risen Jesus, initially mistaking him for the gardener, after which he sends her to announce the resurrection to the disciples. This role led early Christian writers, including Hippolytus of Rome in the third century, to call her apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles, a title later used by medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark likewise place her among the first witnesses of the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances.

Western Christian tradition from the late sixth century, especially following a homily of Pope Gregory I in 591, identified Mary Magdalene with the unnamed sinful woman who anointed Jesus's feet in Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus. The resulting composite figure was widely depicted as a repentant prostitute and became a major subject of art, preaching, and popular devotion in the Latin West. This identification was never accepted in the Christian East, which has always venerated Mary Magdalene as a distinct person, honoring her as Equal-to-the-Apostles. In 1969 the Roman Catholic Church, in its revision of the General Roman Calendar, separated the liturgical commemorations of Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and the unnamed penitent, thereby reversing the Gregorian conflation for liturgical purposes.

No historically reliable sources describe Mary Magdalene's life after the events narrated in the New Testament. Eastern tradition associated her later years with Ephesus, where she was said to have lived with the apostle John and the Virgin Mary and to have died and been buried. A medieval Western legend, especially cultivated in Provence, held that she, Martha, Lazarus, and others were cast adrift in a boat and landed in southern Gaul; she was then said to have preached in Marseille and spent thirty years as a hermit in a cave at Sainte-Baume, with relics later claimed by the basilica at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. These accounts are legendary rather than historically documented. Mary Magdalene is venerated as a saint throughout Christianity. Her principal feast day is 22 July in the Roman Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox calendars.

Outside the canonical Gospels, Mary Magdalene appears in several early Christian writings of the second and third centuries, including the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and Pistis Sophia, where she is often portrayed as a privileged interlocutor of Jesus and a leader among the disciples, sometimes in tension with Peter. These texts are not regarded as historical biographies by mainstream scholarship, but they attest to her high standing in some early Christian communities. In modern times she has been the subject of extensive theological, feminist, and popular reinterpretation. Claims that she was the wife of Jesus or the mother of his children, popularized by modern novels and speculative literature, lack support in the earliest sources and are not accepted by the large majority of historians of early Christianity.