Homily 33 on the Gospels

Gregory the Great's Homily 33 on the Gospels, preached in 591, is a primary patristic text. Its strength is that it is the actual sermon in which a pope first identified Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and with the sinful woman of Luke chapter 7, and read her seven demons as the seven vices, the origin point of a conflation that shaped centuries of Western devotional tradition. Its limit is the ordinary one for any single patristic sermon: it is Gregory's own theological reading rather than independent historical or textual analysis of the gospel figures themselves, and the identification it makes is not shared by Eastern Christian tradition.