Question
Who was Mary Magdalene? (was she a prostitute?)
Analysis
Where the name comes from
Magdalene is almost certainly a place-name, not a description of her character: it marks her out as being from Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee. That is how the Gospels distinguish her from the other women named Mary, Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary the mother of John Mark. Confusing these Marys is the single most common mistake made about her.
Why people think she was a prostitute, and why the text does not say so
No Gospel calls her a prostitute, a sinner, or an adulteress. The idea grew from running three separate women together:
| The woman | Where | What the text actually says |
|---|---|---|
| Mary Magdalene | Luke 8:2 | Jesus cast seven demons out of her. Nothing about sexual sin. |
| An unnamed sinful woman | Luke 7:37; Luke 7:38; Luke 7:47 | Anoints Jesus' feet in a Pharisee's house. Unnamed, and in a different chapter from the introduction of Mary Magdalene. |
| Mary of Bethany | John 11:1; John 11:2; John 12:3 | Sister of Martha and Lazarus, anoints Jesus at Bethany. A different woman in a different town. |
The merging of the three is usually traced to a homily of Pope Gregory the Great in 591, which treated them as one person. That identification took hold in Western art and preaching for centuries. The Eastern Orthodox churches never adopted it and have always kept the three women separate. The Roman Catholic Church revised its calendar in 1969 so that her feast no longer presents her as the penitent sinner, and in 2016 raised her commemoration to a feast, with the title apostle to the apostles.
Two further points of plain reading:
- Demon possession is not a moral charge. In the Gospels it is consistently presented alongside sickness and affliction, not sexual sin, in Luke 8:2 itself she is listed among women healed of evil spirits and infirmities.
- Seven is not a count of sins. It is the usual biblical way of saying complete or total, so the phrase describes how severe her affliction was and how complete her deliverance.
The claim that she was married to Jesus
No book of the New Testament says or implies this. The claim rests on a small number of later writings, chiefly the Gospel of Philip and the Gospel of Mary, which survive in copies from well after the first century, are not part of any Christian canon, and are fragmentary at exactly the points usually quoted. Those texts are real historical artefacts and worth knowing about; what they are not is first-century evidence about her marital status. The four Gospels say nothing on the subject either way.
Why she matters
In all four Gospels the resurrection is announced first to women, and in John it is announced to her by name. In a first-century setting where a woman's testimony carried little formal weight, this is a detail the writers had no obvious motive to invent, and it is often noted as a mark of the accounts' candour. Whatever weight a reader gives that argument, the narrative role is not in doubt: the first person entrusted with the central claim of the Christian faith was Mary Magdalene.
One honest textual note
Mark 16:9, which names her as the first to see the risen Jesus, sits in the longer ending of Mark (Mark 16:9 through Mark 16:20). That section is absent from the earliest surviving Greek manuscripts, and most modern Bibles mark it with a footnote. The point it makes about her is independently supported by John 20:14 through John 20:18, so nothing above depends on the disputed passage alone.