Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?

What the Gospels actually say

Mary Magdalene is named a dozen times in the Gospels, and none of them mentions prostitution. Luke introduces her as one of the women who traveled with Jesus.

and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out; and Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, Herod’s steward; Susanna; and many others who served them from their possessions.

Two facts stand out. Jesus had freed her of “seven demons,” which Luke presents as an illness, not a sin. And she and the other women “served them from their possessions”: women of means were paying for the mission. Magdalene means “from Magdala,” a fishing town on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee. In 2009 archaeologists found its first-century synagogue there.

How the label began

Every Gospel tells of a woman anointing Jesus, and they differ. In Mark and Matthew, an unnamed woman pours ointment on his head at Bethany. In John, Mary of Bethany anoints his feet. In Luke, at a Pharisee’s dinner in Galilee, a woman Luke calls only “a sinner” weeps on his feet and wipes them with her hair. Luke never says what her sins were, and never names her. A few verses later, he introduces Mary Magdalene as someone new.

In 591 Pope Gregory the Great preached a sermon that merged these women into one: Luke’s sinner, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene. From there it was a short step to imagining the sinner’s sin as sexual. For fourteen centuries painters showed Magdalene weeping, hair loose, a penitent. The Gospels’ Mary is a witness.

The first witness of the resurrection

All four Gospels put Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb, and John gives her the central scene. She stays at the tomb weeping after the men go home. She mistakes Jesus for the gardener, until he says one word: “Mary.” She answers in Aramaic, “Rabboni!”, my teacher.

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had said these things to her.

Churches corrected the record

The Eastern churches never adopted Gregory’s merger and have long called her “equal to the apostles.” In 1969 the Catholic calendar dropped “penitent” from her feast. In 2016 Pope Francis raised her day, July 22, to a full feast and revived an old title for her: apostle of the apostles, the one sent to those who were sent.