Essay 3 of 5 in Magdalene Series
In Essay 1, we explored why the wisdom of Mary Magdalene seems to be coming online now. In Essay 2, we explored how to listen for the wisdom beneath the many stories told about her.
Now, we arrive at a more uncomfortable question: What did we do to her?
How did Mary Magdalene - remembered in the earliest Christian traditions as a devoted disciple and a woman of spiritual authority, portrayed in some early Christian texts as receiving teachings directly from Yeshua, and later known as the apostle to the apostles - become known throughout much of Western Christianity as a repentant prostitute?
And what does that transformation reveal about us?
Here's the first thing that surprised me when I began looking more closely:
The Bible never says Mary Magdalene was a prostitute.
Not once.
And yet, for centuries, this became one of the defining stories told about her in Western Christianity. Magdalene became the fallen woman. The sexual sinner. The woman whose redemption was made all the more powerful because of the depths from which she had supposedly risen.
But that isn't actually the story the canonical Gospels tell us.
What they do tell us is that Mary Magdalene was a follower of Yeshua. Luke tells us that she had been healed of "seven demons" and that she was among a group of women who traveled with Yeshua and the disciples and helped support the ministry. The Gospels place her at the crucifixion. They place her at the tomb. And most significantly, they place her among the first witnesses to the resurrection.
So where did the prostitute come from?
When we look beyond the texts that eventually became the Christian canon, we find other early Christian communities remembering Mary in ways that make the prostitute narrative even more curious.
Elaine Pagels, whose work on the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi helped reveal just how diverse early Christianity actually was, writes about a world in which there was not yet one singular understanding of Christianity. Different communities held different ideas about Yeshua, spiritual authority, the role of women, and even how human beings encountered the Divine.
Mary Magdalene appears in several of these early texts, and again and again, we find her associated not with prostitution, but with spiritual maturity and a close relationship with Yeshua.
We have already encountered the Gospel of Mary, where Mary receives teachings directly from Yeshua and shares them with the other disciples, only to have her authority questioned.
In the Gospel of Philip, she is described as the Savior's companion and as especially beloved by him. The other disciples even question why he loves her more than them.
In the Dialogue of the Savior, Mary is one of only three disciples who receive special teaching from Yeshua, alongside Matthew and Thomas. The text describes her simply and powerfully as "a woman who knew the All."
What can we make of all of this?
These texts do not give us a secret biography of the "real" Mary Magdalene. They were written by different communities at different times, and they carried their own theological agendas. As we explored in Essay 2, its important that we not replace one unquestioned story about Magdalene with another simply because it is acceptable.
But they do tell us something. They offer us a different narrative, from several different perspectives.
The repentant prostitute was not the only Magdalene available to the early Christian imagination.
There were traditions that remembered her as a disciple. A receiver of revelation. A woman of spiritual maturity and agency. A woman with an intimate connection to Yeshua. A woman whose spiritual authority appears, more than once, to create tension with the male disciples around her.
And yet, that isn't the Mary Magdalene most of us inherited.
So where did the prostitute come from?
And perhaps more importantly, why did that version of her become so powerful?
Part of the answer lies in the fact that there are several women in the canonical Gospels whose stories eventually became entangled.
There is Mary Magdalene, whom the Gospel of Luke describes as having been healed of seven demons.
There is Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints Yeshua's feet with perfume and wipes them with her hair.
There is an unnamed woman in the Gospel of Luke, described simply as "a sinner," who enters the home of a Pharisee, weeps at Yeshua's feet, wipes them with her hair, and anoints them with perfume. The text never tells us that this woman is Mary Magdalene. It doesn't tell us that she is a prostitute either.
Yet over the centuries, these women began to merge within the Western Christian imagination. And in the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great gave enormous weight to this interpretation when, in a now-famous homily, he identified Mary Magdalene with both Mary of Bethany and the unnamed sinful woman in Luke. He also interpreted the "seven demons" Yeshua had cast out of Magdalene as representing the fullness of vice.
Three women became one.
And Mary Magdalene's identity became increasingly bound to sexual sin and repentance.
Did Gregory sit down one day and decide to destroy the reputation of Mary Magdalene? Unlikely, history is rarely that simple. These associations had already been developing, and Christianity itself was evolving within a much larger world of changing ideas about sexuality, celibacy, women, the human body, authority and holiness.
The Magdalene that emerged from this merging of stories has proven to be remarkably enduring. This is where the question becomes much more interesting to me.
Because if the biblical texts never call Mary Magdalene a prostitute, and other early Christian texts remember her as a woman of spiritual understanding and authority, why did the image of the repentant sexual sinner become the one that captured the Western Christian imagination?
What did that version of Magdalene offer that the spiritually authoritative Magdalene did not?
Or maybe the better question is:
What did it take away?
Her authority, for one.
Think about the difference between these two versions of Magdalene.
In the Gospel of Mary, her authority comes from what she knows. She has received teachings directly from Yeshua. She has a direct experience of Yeshua through the spiritual eye of her heart. She trusts her own experience enough to speak about it, even when the men around her question whether she has the authority to do so.
But the Magdalene who came to dominate the Western Christian imagination derives her significance from something very different.
She repents.
She becomes an example of what happens when a fallen woman turns away from sin and toward God. Her sexuality - something the biblical texts never actually tell us about - becomes central to her identity. Her spiritual authority moves into the background.
That shift is profound.
A woman whose story might have taught generations of women to trust their direct relationship with the Divine instead became a woman whose story taught them about sin, shame, repentance and redemption.
One expands and empowers. The other confines her to a story of sin and redemption.
And I find myself wondering what might have been different if we had inherited the other Magdalene.
What if generations of women had grown up hearing about Mary Magdalene as a woman who received revelation?
What if little girls had been taught that Yeshua shared sacred teachings with women, that women could interpret spiritual truths, that women could speak from their own direct experience of the Divine?
What if we had inherited a Christianity in which a woman's spiritual authority was as central to Magdalene's story as her supposed sexuality eventually became?
We will never know.
But we do know which story endured.
And I don't think we can separate that story from the larger ways women have been divided and defined through their relationship to sexuality.
The virgin.
The mother.
The whore.
The saint.
The sinner.
These categories leave very little room for a whole woman.
And maybe this is where we need to look more closely at what has been made sinful in the first place.
Because there is another trap here. In our desire to restore Magdalene's spiritual authority, we can become so invested in proving that she wasn't a prostitute that we unintentionally reinforce the same belief that has haunted women for centuries - that a sexually awakened woman is somehow less holy.
What if she had been a prostitute?
Would that make her less capable of receiving revelation? Less worthy of Yeshua's love? Less able to know the Divine?
No.
The problem isn't that Mary Magdalene was mistakenly associated with sexuality. The problem is what was done with that sexuality. Her body became evidence against her. Sexual empowerment became something from which she needed to be redeemed before she could become holy.
This is where I think the story of Magdalene begins to reveal something much larger:
A woman disconnected from her body is easier to control than a woman who inhabits it fully.
A woman taught to distrust her desire is easier to control than a woman who owns the creative power moving through her.
A woman taught that her body is the source of sin learns to look outside herself for purity, permission and ultimately, authority.
But what happens when a woman no longer believes that her body separates her from God?
What happens when her sexuality is not something she must overcome in order to become spiritual, but an expression of the same life-force that moves through all of creation?
What happens when she knows that the Divine can be encountered not only by transcending the body, but through it?
That woman becomes much harder to contain.
And I wonder if this is part of what makes Magdalene so powerful - not because we can prove anything about her sexual life historically, because we can't - but because the stories surrounding her have become a mirror for our inability to hold female sexuality and female spiritual authority in the same body.
We have been taught how to understand the virgin. The mother. The whore. The repentant sinner. Each woman has her place.
But the woman who is spiritually awake and fully embodied?
The woman whose erotic energy belongs to her rather than defining her worth?
The woman who does not need to sever herself from her body in order to know God?
She disrupts the system.
Maybe the problem was never Magdalene's sexuality.
Maybe the problem was that we couldn't imagine a woman's sexuality and her holiness belonging to the same body.
And when I speak of sexual or erotic energy, I am speaking of something larger than sexual activity. I mean the creative life-force of the body itself - desire, sensation, pleasure, creation, longing, vitality. A woman can be celibate and deeply embodied in this energy. She can be sexually active and profoundly disconnected from it. This isn't about how much sex a woman is having. It is about whether she has been taught embrace or to fear the power that lives within her own body.
Because once we begin dividing the human being into what is holy and what is not, where does that division end?
We separate spirit from body.
Sacred from sexual.
Divine from human.
Mind from matter.
Humanity from the natural world.
And eventually, we begin to believe that becoming more spiritual means becoming less human.
Maybe this is what we did to Magdalene.
We took a woman who represented a possibility of wholeness - spiritual authority and embodiment, devotion and desire, humanity and Divinity - and divided her into categories we could understand.
Saint or sinner.
Holy woman or whore.
But Magdalene refuses the split.
And maybe that is why Her wisdom feels so necessary now.
Because the split has not disappeared. It has simply taken new forms.
We are living at a moment when human beings are becoming more technologically powerful and, in many ways, more disconnected from the very things that make us human. We have access to more information than any generation before us, while spending increasing amounts of our lives outside our bodies - mediated through screens, algorithms, artificial intelligence and digital worlds.
At the same time, we are increasingly disconnected from the natural world that sustains us.
We can speak to machines, generate images of places that do not exist, create synthetic voices, synthetic faces, synthetic relationships and entire synthetic realities.
And none of this is inherently wrong.
But it raises a question I believe we are going to have to become very intimate with:
What does it mean to remain fully human in a world increasingly mediated by machines?
Maybe Magdalene's return is not asking us to go backward.
Maybe She is asking us to go deeper.
Back into the body.
Back into relationship.
Back into the Earth.
Back into the mysterious, sensual, inconvenient, beautiful experience of being alive.
Because the next great spiritual challenge may not be learning how to transcend our humanity.
It may be remembering what it means to be human.
