Virgin Martha

Saint Martha, commemorated in the Roman Martyrology as Martha, virgin and hostess of the Saviour, is the first-century disciple of Jesus known from the canonical Gospels as a resident of the village of Bethany, near Jerusalem, and as the sister of Mary and of Lazarus. The Gospel according to Luke describes Jesus being received into her house, where Martha was occupied with the tasks of hospitality while her sister sat listening to the Lord; Jesus’ reply that Mary had chosen the better part has been a classic text on the relation of active service to contemplative attention. The Gospel according to John presents Martha in a more developed light: when Lazarus falls ill and dies, she goes to meet Jesus on the road, converses with him about the resurrection, and makes an explicit confession of faith that he is the Messiah and the Son of God. She is present when Jesus calls Lazarus from the tomb, and she again serves at table during the supper at Bethany at which Mary anoints Jesus shortly before the Passion.

Nothing further about Martha’s life or death is recorded in the New Testament, and no contemporary extra-biblical source supplies a reliable chronology or place of death. From the early Middle Ages, however, Western hagiography elaborated a cycle of legends that placed her later years in southern Gaul. According to the tradition that became especially popular in Provence from the eleventh century and was given wide circulation by the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, Martha, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, and several companions were cast adrift in a rudderless boat and came ashore in the Camargue. Martha is said to have settled at Tarascon, to have converted the local population, and to have overcome a monstrous creature called the Tarasque by the sign of the cross and by binding it with her girdle. She is then described as living a life of prayer, fasting, and continued hospitality until her death. These narratives are pious legend rather than history; they cannot be verified from early sources and are not accepted as historical by modern scholarship. Eastern Christian tradition generally omits the Gallic episode and commemorates Martha together with her sister Mary, often on 4 June, as well as in connection with the Saturday of Lazarus.

Martha’s cult as a virgin saint is ancient in both East and West. Her principal feast in the Latin Church falls on 29 July. Because of the Gospel portrait of her as the woman who received Christ into her home and served him at table, she has long been invoked as patroness of cooks, housewives and homemakers, servants and domestic workers, waiters and waitresses, innkeepers and those engaged in the hospitality trades, dietitians, and travelers. The town of Tarascon in France regards her as its patron, and a collegiate church there has claimed her relics since the Middle Ages, though the identification of those relics cannot be historically confirmed. As a biblical figure venerated from Christian antiquity, she belongs to the category of saints whose cult predates the later formal processes of beatification and canonization.

In Western medieval piety Martha and her sister Mary were frequently interpreted as types of the active and contemplative lives respectively, an exegesis already suggested by the Lucan episode and developed by writers such as Augustine and Gregory the Great. Later centuries sometimes identified the Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene, thereby linking Martha more closely to the Magdalene cycle of legends; modern biblical scholarship generally treats Mary of Bethany, Mary Magdalene, and the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 as distinct persons. Regardless of these identifications, Martha remains one of the most vividly drawn women of the Gospels and a perennial model of faith, service, and hospitality.