Salome

Salome was a first-century Jewish woman from the region of Galilee who became a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. She is named in the Gospel of Mark as one of the women who watched the crucifixion from a distance, standing with Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses (Mark 15:40). The same evangelist records that after the Sabbath Salome joined the other women in buying spices and going to the tomb at dawn on the first day of the week to anoint Jesus’s body (Mark 16:1). Finding the tomb empty, they received the angelic proclamation of the resurrection. These notices situate Salome among the faithful women who had followed Jesus in Galilee and had ministered to him.

By comparing the Synoptic lists of women at the cross, Christian tradition has long identified Mark’s Salome with the mother of the sons of Zebedee mentioned in Matthew 27:56. Zebedee was a Galilean fisherman; his sons James and John were called by Jesus to be apostles. Matthew 20:20–23 further recounts that this mother once asked Jesus to grant her sons seats of honor in his kingdom. A related but more conjectural tradition, drawing on John 19:25, has regarded Salome as a sister of the Virgin Mary and therefore an aunt of Jesus, which would make James and John his cousins. The Johannine verse is grammatically ambiguous, and modern historical-critical scholarship treats the familial identification as possible yet unproven.

Salome also appears in several extra-canonical texts of the second century. In the Gospel of Thomas she is portrayed as a disciple who questions Jesus. Fragments of the Gospel of the Egyptians preserved by Clement of Alexandria contain a dialogue in which Salome inquires about the cessation of death. While these writings cannot be used as historical sources for her biography, they demonstrate that some early Christian communities remembered her as a significant female follower. No contemporary document records the date, place, or manner of her death; later legendary accounts that place her in various Mediterranean locales lack historical corroboration.

In subsequent Christian tradition Salome is numbered among the Myrrhbearers. She is venerated as a saint in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches. Her cult is of ancient origin and predates the formal canonization processes of the later Middle Ages; consequently she was never the subject of a papal decree of canonization. Precise feast days vary according to local calendars and rites. No historically reliable information survives concerning her place of burial.