Who was Mary Magdalene?

A woman from Magdala

Mary, Miriam in Hebrew, was the most common name for Jewish women of her time, so the Gospels tag their Marys: the mother of Jesus, Mary of Bethany, Mary the wife of Clopas. This one is tagged by her town. Magdalene means “of Magdala,” from the Hebrew migdal, a tower. It was a busy lakeside town about 120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Jerusalem, where the night’s catch was salted for market; Greek writers seem to have called it Taricheae, after salted fish. In 2009, digging for a guesthouse turned up its first-century synagogue and a carved stone showing the Temple’s seven-branched lampstand.

Seven demons

Luke introduces her as the one “from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2), and the longer ending later added to Mark repeats it (Mark 16:9). Neither says what the affliction was. In the Gospels’ world, demons were blamed for seizures, madness and wasting sickness alike, and seven is the Bible’s number of fullness. Most readers take it as a severe illness, healed, and see in it the reason she followed him. No text ties it to sin.

The women who paid for the mission

As Jesus went through the towns of Galilee with the twelve, Luke says, a group of women traveled with them and paid their way. He names three: Mary Magdalene; Joanna, wife of the steward who ran Herod Antipas’s household; and Susanna (Luke 8:1–3). Unlike most women in the Gospels, Mary is never identified by a husband, father or son, only by her town, and she comes first in nearly every list of the women. Many scholars read that as a sign that she led them, or at least that everyone knew her.

At the cross and the grave

When the men had scattered, the women stayed.

There were also women watching from afar, among whom were both Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome; who, when he was in Galilee, followed him and served him; and many other women who came up with him to Jerusalem.

John moves her closer, standing by the cross with Jesus’s mother (John 19:25). Then she and the other Mary watched where Joseph of Arimathea laid the body (Mark 15:47), so on Sunday she knew which tomb to come back to. In John she comes alone while it is still dark, runs to fetch Peter, and is still there, weeping, when the others have left. The man she takes for the gardener says her name, and gives her a message to carry.

Don’t hold me, for I haven’t yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’

Apostle to the apostles

She delivered it, which is why medieval writers called her apostola apostolorum, the apostle to the apostles. The Orthodox honor her as a myrrh-bearer, one of the women who brought spices to the tomb, and as equal to the apostles. Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans and Lutherans keep her day on July 22; in 2016 Pope Francis gave it the rank of a feast, like the apostles’ own days.

Legends grew around her. A sermon of Pope Gregory the Great in 591 merged her with the sinful woman of Luke 7, and she became the weeping penitent of a thousand paintings; English still says maudlin, from her name, for tearful self-pity. That story is told in Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute? A second-century text, the Gospel of Mary, shows her teaching the disciples. A medieval legend brings her by boat to Provence. The Gospels’ Mary is simpler: a healed woman who paid her way, stayed to the end and came back first.