Mary Magdalene | Atlas | Theologos Media

The witness the apostles did not believe

Mary Magdalene is one of the most misread figures in the Christian tradition. For most of the medieval Western imagination she was conflated with the unnamed sinful woman who anoints Christ's feet in Luke 7 — the conflation goes back to a sermon by Gregory the Great in 591 — and from there she became the icon of the repentant prostitute. The Eastern churches never made this conflation and the modern Western church has formally repudiated it. The Gospels themselves give us a different woman. Mary of Magdala is named seven times across the four Gospels. She is the first person Christ appears to after the resurrection. She is the first to preach the resurrection. None of the Gospel writers ever calls her a prostitute.

What the Gospels actually tell us is that Christ cast seven demons out of her (Luke 8:2; Mark 16:9). Magdala was a fishing village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, prosperous in the first century from the salting industry — the village's Hebrew name *Migdal Nunya* meant *Tower of Fish*. The seven demons are not explained. The number seven in the canon's idiom usually signals fullness — total possession, the deepest case. Whatever Christ delivered her from, the deliverance was complete enough that the rest of her life is recorded as discipleship.

Luke names her in the small group of women who travel with Christ and the Twelve and *provided for them out of their own means* (Luke 8:1–3). She is, in the Gospel of Luke's introduction, a financial backer of the public ministry — possibly the financial backer with the most resources, given that Luke lists her first. The Christian editorial tradition has had to come back around to this verse repeatedly: Christ's ministry was funded in significant part by women, Mary Magdalene among them, and the women who funded it were also taught by it. The first generation of disciples included women whose theological formation Christ took as seriously as the men's.

All four Gospels place Mary Magdalene at the cross when most of the male disciples have fled (Matthew 27:55–56; Mark 15:40–41; Luke 23:49; John 19:25). The disparity is recorded without commentary. The men who would later preach the resurrection were not the men who stood at the crucifixion. The women were. The Gospel narrators name them so that the church cannot forget who was there.

All four Gospels also place Mary Magdalene at the tomb on the third morning. The details vary between the accounts — John's narrative is the longest and most intimate — but Mary is in every list. In John's Gospel she comes alone while it is still dark. She finds the stone rolled away. She runs to Peter and the beloved disciple. They run back with her. The men inspect the empty tomb and then go home. Mary stays. She stays weeping by the open grave. Two angels speak to her. She does not recognize them as angels. She turns and sees a man she takes for the gardener. She asks him where he has taken the body she came to anoint.

The Christ she is looking for says one word: *Mariam.* (John 20:16) She recognizes him by her name. She tries to take hold of him. He stops her with the line the Christian tradition has held in Latin as *Noli me tangere* — "do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father." He gives her a message: "go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" (John 20:17) She runs back to the disciples. "I have seen the Lord." The patristic tradition called her *apostola apostolorum* — the apostle to the apostles. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Eastern liturgical tradition all use the phrase. The first preacher of the resurrection was Mary of Magdala.

Luke records that the men did not believe her. "These words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." (Luke 24:11) The Greek word *leros* — *idle tale* — is dismissive. The cultural context matters. Under Jewish law of the period, a woman's testimony was not accepted in court without male corroboration. Christ had chosen, for the inaugural witness of the resurrection, the form of testimony first-century Jewish men would be tempted to dismiss. The choice was theological. If the apostles believed the resurrection, they would believe it on the witness of women, in the order in which Christ had appointed it. Some of them did. Some of them only believed when Christ appeared to them himself later that same day.

The later legends are extracanonical and should be flagged. The Eastern tradition has Mary going on to Ephesus with John and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and dying there. The Western medieval tradition has her sailing to Provence and spending thirty years as a hermit in a cave at La Sainte-Baume — a tradition the Atlas reports without endorsing, since the historical evidence is thin. The Gnostic *Gospel of Mary* (second century) presents her as receiving private revelations from Christ that the male disciples envied; this text is extracanonical, the Christian tradition rejected it, and the editorial position is to name its existence without granting it the authority of Scripture.

What the canonical Gospels give us is enough. Mary Magdalene was delivered from total possession, became a financial patron and a disciple, stayed at the cross when most of the men did not, came to the tomb in the dark, was the first to see the risen Christ, was the first to preach the resurrection, and was disbelieved by the apostles she had been sent to. The reading of her as the apostle to the apostles is the Christian tradition's most honest accounting of what the Gospels actually say happened.