Suggest an Edit — Virgin Mary Magdalene

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Biography

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Mary Magdalene, known in the New Testament as Mary of Magdala, was a Jewish woman of the first century whose life is attested in the canonical Gospels as that of a close disciple of Jesus of Nazareth. Her epithet indicates origin in Magdala (Migdal), a fishing and trading town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee in the tetrarchy of Herod Antipas. Luke 8:1–3 states that Jesus had healed her of possession by seven demons and that she thereafter accompanied him and the Twelve, providing for them from her own means together with other women including Joanna, the wife of Chuza, and Susanna. This notice is the principal biographical datum supplied by the evangelists concerning her earlier circumstances: she was a woman of some independent resources, associated with a Galilean lakeside town, and among the inner circle of itinerant followers. No verified year of birth or death is preserved in any contemporary source.

All four canonical Gospels place Mary Magdalene among the women present at the crucifixion and burial of Jesus, when most of the male disciples had fled. She is likewise central to the Easter narratives. In Mark 16 and Luke 24 she is among the women who find the tomb empty; in Matthew 28 she and the other Mary encounter the risen Jesus; in John 20 she comes to the tomb, speaks with angels, and is the first to whom the risen Christ appears, receiving the charge to announce the resurrection to the disciples. On the strength of this Johannine scene, later Christian writers, including Hippolytus of Rome in the third century and medieval Latin authors, called her apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles. In 2016 Pope Francis raised her liturgical celebration in the Roman Rite from a memorial to a feast, explicitly invoking that title and her role as the first witness of the Resurrection.

Western medieval piety, following a homily of Pope Gregory I in 591, commonly identified Mary Magdalene with both Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 who anointed Jesus’ feet. That conflation produced the familiar image of Magdalene as a repentant prostitute and contemplative penitent, an image richly developed in art, liturgy, and legend but not warranted by the canonical texts themselves. Eastern Christian tradition generally kept the three women distinct. The Roman Catholic liturgical reform of 1969 separated the 22 July feast of Mary Magdalene from commemorations of Mary of Bethany, and contemporary biblical scholarship treats Mary of Magdala as a discrete historical figure: a Galilean disciple and primary resurrection witness, not a prostitute and not identical with Mary of Bethany. The Gospels do not record a spouse or children, and later claims that she was the wife of Jesus lack support in the earliest Christian sources.

Accounts of her later life are legendary rather than historically documented. Greek and Eastern tradition held that she accompanied Mary the mother of Jesus and the apostle John to Ephesus and died there. A Western cycle of legends, circulating from the eleventh century and popularized in the Golden Legend, claimed that she, Martha, Lazarus, and others were set adrift and landed in Provence, that she preached in Marseille and Aix, and that she spent her last decades as a hermit in the cave of Sainte-Baume, being buried at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. Relics have been claimed at those sites, at Vézelay, and elsewhere; none of these post-biblical itineraries can be verified from contemporary sources. Non-canonical works of the second and third centuries, such as the Gospel of Mary, assign her a privileged teaching role among the disciples; they are important for the history of early Christian diversity but are not independent historical biographies.

Mary Magdalene has been venerated as a saint from the earliest Christian centuries, without a formal process of canonization of the later medieval or modern type. Her feast is kept on 22 July in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, and many Protestant calendars. Traditional patronages, many of them shaped by the medieval composite Magdalene, include converts, penitents, contemplatives, pharmacists and perfumers, hairdressers, tanners, glove-makers, and women, as well as those ridiculed for their piety.

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