On that false note hangs the dual use to which her legend has been put ever since: discrediting sexuality in general and disempowering women in particular.Ĭonfusions attached to Mary Magdalene’s character were compounded across time as her image was conscripted into one power struggle after another, and twisted accordingly. Mary Magdalene in which the most consequential note-that she was a repentant prostitute-is almost certainly untrue.

Beginning with the threads of these few statements in the earliest Christian records, dating to the first through third centuries, an elaborate tapestry was woven, leading to a portrait of St.

This prominence derived from the intimacy of her relationship with Jesus, which, according to some accounts, had a physical aspect that included kissing. From other texts of the early Christian era, it seems that her status as an “apostle,” in the years after Jesus’ death, rivaled even that of Peter. These are among the few specific assertions made about Mary Magdalene in the Gospels. She was present at the tomb, the first person to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection and the first to preach the “Good News” of that miracle. When the men in that company abandoned him at the hour of mortal danger, Mary of Magdala was one of the women who stayed with him, even to the Crucifixion. Who was she? From the New Testament, one can conclude that Mary of Magdala (her hometown, a village on the shore of the Sea of Galilee) was a leading figure among those attracted to Jesus. How the past is remembered, how sexual desire is domesticated, how men and women negotiate their separate impulses how power inevitably seeks sanctification, how tradition becomes authoritative, how revolutions are co-opted how fallibility is reckoned with, and how sweet devotion can be made to serve violent domination-all these cultural questions helped shape the story of the woman who befriended Jesus of Nazareth. In one age after another her image was reinvented, from prostitute to sibyl to mystic to celibate nun to passive helpmeet to feminist icon to the matriarch of divinity’s secret dynasty.

Yet she was only elusively identified in Scripture, and has thus served as a scrim onto which a succession of fantasies has been projected. For many centuries the most obsessively revered of saints, this woman became the embodiment of Christian devotion, which was defined as repentance. The whole history of western civilization is epitomized in the cult of Mary Magdalene. Vision of St Maria Magdalena di Pazzi from the Museo de Bellas Artes, Granada

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