Holy Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles Mary Magdalene

Era

First century

Region

Magdala in Galilee, Jerusalem, and — by Eastern tradition — Ephesus

Category

Myrrh-bearer, Equal-to-the-Apostles

Principal feast for this profile

July 22

About 5 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to Out of Whom Seven Demons Had Gone The One Who Stayed Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Her What Her Life Asks of Us

Out of Whom Seven Demons Had Gone

Luke introduces her in a single sentence about a group of women who travelled with Jesus and the Twelve: women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities — Mary, called Magdalene, out of whom seven demons had gone — and who supported the ministry out of their own means.

That is the entire biographical note the Gospels give about her life before the Passion. Two facts: she had suffered something terrible and been healed of it, and she had money and spent it on Him.

There is nothing about sin. There is nothing about prostitution. Those are not in the text.

The One Who Stayed

She is at the crucifixion in all four Gospels. She watches the burial and notes where the tomb is. She comes back at first light on the first day of the week with spices, because there is a body to anoint and someone has to do it.

John tells the rest most fully. She finds the stone moved and runs to Peter and the other disciple. They come, look, and go home. She stays, outside, weeping. She turns and sees a man she takes for the gardener and asks him, in what must be the most heartbreaking sentence in the Gospels, if he has carried the body away — tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.

He says her name. Mary.

And then He sends her: go to My brothers and tell them. She goes to the disciples and says I have seen the Lord. Mark notes that they did not believe her. Luke records that the women’s report seemed to them an idle tale.

She is the first witness of the Resurrection and the first person commissioned to announce it, and the Church in the East has never been shy about what that means. She is Equal-to-the-Apostles, and in the ancient phrase, the apostle to the apostles.

Where the Record Comes From

The correction that matters most. Mary Magdalene is not the sinful woman who anointed Christ’s feet in Luke 7, and she is not Mary of Bethany. The Gospels never identify any two of these three women with each other.

The fusion is Western, and it can be dated. Pope Gregory the Great, preaching in Rome in about 591, said in his thirty-third homily on the Gospels that the woman Luke calls a sinner, and the woman John calls Mary, is the Mary from whom the Lord cast out seven demons. Gregory presents it as received opinion rather than his own discovery, so something of the sort may have been circulating before him — but that homily is the point at which it becomes authoritative teaching in the Latin West, and it then shapes thirteen centuries of Western art, liturgy and piety. The penitent Magdalene with the long hair and the jar is a product of that sermon.

The East never made the identification. Byzantine liturgy and preaching have always kept the three women apart. The Orthodox calendar commemorates Mary Magdalene on 22 July, Mary of Bethany with Martha and Lazarus separately, and the anointing woman of Holy Week without naming her.

Rome dropped it too. In the 1969 revision of the Roman calendar the identification was removed from the Church’s own liturgical texts: the 22 July feast was rewritten around the Johannine material, and Mary of Bethany was given her own commemoration. This is now uncontroversial church history, but older Western reference works — the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia, for instance — still argue at length for the composite figure, and should be read as representing the position before 1969.

“Magdalene” is a place. Magdala, on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee, called Taricheae by Josephus — a fishing and fish-salting town. In 2009 Israeli archaeologists excavating there uncovered a first-century synagogue with a carved stone bearing a menorah, one of very few Second Temple–period synagogues found anywhere. It confirms Magdala as a real and substantial Jewish town in her lifetime. It cannot, of course, confirm anything about her.

The red egg and Tiberius. The tradition that she came before the Emperor Tiberius, handed him an egg and said Christ is risen, and that the egg turned red, is much loved and explains a custom Orthodox Christians keep every Pascha. It has no attestation in the New Testament or in the early Fathers; it belongs to a later Byzantine and Slavic devotional layer. Tell it as what it is — a story the Church tells about why we dye the eggs — and it loses nothing.

Where she died. Eastern tradition has her go to Ephesus with the Apostle John, die there, and be buried there, with her relics translated to Constantinople in 886 under Leo VI. A medieval Western tradition, incompatible with it, has her sail to Marseille with Lazarus and Martha, evangelise Provence, and end her life as a penitent in a cave at La Sainte-Baume, with rival relic claims at Vézelay and at Saint-Maximin. The two cannot both be right, and neither can be verified. The Eastern tradition is the older of the two and the one the Orthodox Church keeps.

The Gospel of Mary. A second-century text, not canonical in any church, surviving incompletely in a fifth-century Coptic manuscript and two small third-century Greek fragments. It depicts a post-resurrection dialogue in which Mary reports a vision and is challenged by Peter and Andrew. It is generally classed as Gnostic or proto-Gnostic. It tells us that some second-century Christians used her figure in arguments about teaching authority. It tells us nothing about her life, and it is not a suppressed memoir.

Why the Church Remembers Her

Because of where she was standing. Everyone who could run had run. She had watched Him die, watched where they put Him, and came back with spices for a corpse — which is not faith in the Resurrection; it is love with nowhere left to go.

And because of what the risen Christ did with that. The first appearance in John’s Gospel is not to Peter, and not to the Eleven. It is to a woman, in a garden, in the dark, who mistook Him for the gardener — and the first commission to preach the Resurrection is given to her, in a world where her testimony would not have been accepted in a court.

The Orthodox Church has never needed to be persuaded of this. It sings it every year.

What Her Life Asks of Us

That staying is sometimes all there is to do, and that it is not nothing. She had no plan and no hope; she had spices and a location.

And it asks us to be careful with other people’s stories. For fourteen hundred years the Western Church told this woman’s life wrong — not maliciously, but by fusing her with two other women and letting the composite harden into a character. She became a penitent prostitute in a thousand paintings on the strength of a sermon. If that can happen to the first witness of the Resurrection, it is worth asking what we are repeating about people because we heard it somewhere.

Holy Myrrh-bearer Mary Magdalene, Equal-to-the-Apostles, pray to Christ our God that we may love Him when there is nothing left to do but stay, and that we may speak truthfully about the lives of others.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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