Mary Magdalene

More has been claimed about Mary Magdalene on less evidence than about almost any figure in the New Testament, and the central claim can be dated to a specific sermon.

What the Gospels say is brief and consistent. She is from Magdala on the Sea of Galilee. Luke says Jesus cast seven demons out of her and that she was among the women who supported the movement out of their own means, which indicates independent resources. All four Gospels place her at the crucifixion, all four place her at the tomb, and in each she is among the first to find it empty. In John she is alone at the tomb, mistakes the risen Jesus for the gardener, and is sent to tell the others, which is the basis of the ancient Western title apostle to the apostles, used of her by Hippolytus in the third century and by others after.

She is never called a prostitute. She is never called a sinner. Nothing connects her to sexual sin of any kind.

The unnamed woman of Luke 7 who anoints Jesus' feet and is described as a sinner is a different person in a different chapter. Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints Jesus in John 12, is a third. In 591, Gregory the Great preached a homily that fused all three into one woman, read the seven demons as the seven deadly sins, and identified the sin as unchastity. That identification held in the Western church for fourteen centuries. The Eastern churches never adopted it and always kept the three women distinct.

Rome removed the identification quietly. The 1969 revision of the Roman calendar separated Mary Magdalene from Mary of Bethany and from the sinful woman, and the reformed readings for her feast dropped the Luke 7 passage. In 2016 the Congregation for Divine Worship raised her commemoration to a feast, the same rank as the apostles, and the accompanying decree used the old title, apostle to the apostles. The correction is therefore official, and it is also almost invisible: the association is embedded in a thousand years of European painting, in Magdalen houses and asylums named for a penitent she never was, and in the ordinary meaning the word maudlin acquired from her name.

A second body of claims runs the other way and is no better supported. The Gospel of Mary, a fragmentary second-century text, and the Gospel of Philip, third-century, give her a prominent and contested place among the disciples; Philip calls her the companion of the Saviour and says he loved her more than the others, with a damaged phrase about kissing her that is missing the crucial word. These are real texts and genuinely interesting for what second-century groups argued about. They are not evidence about first-century events.

The marriage to Jesus, the bloodline, the flight to southern France with the Holy Grail: the French elements are medieval Provencal legend, associated with the Vezelay and Saint-Maximin cult sites and their competing relic claims, and the bloodline construction is twentieth-century, assembled in the 1980s and popularised as fiction in 2003. No ancient source says any of it.