Q.
120
Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute?
Becky Garrison
A.
Even though Mary had the courage to go inside and proclaim
the good news that “I have seen the Lord,” (Jn. 20:18), the church
couldn’t handle the truth that a woman delivered the news that
changed the world. So church tradition pegged her as the penitent sinner (read
“prostitute”). By some accounts, she’s the woman caught in adultery who is
about to be stoned before Jesus saved her (Jn. 7:53–8:11) or the sinful woman
who anointed Jesus’ feet with perfume and her tears (Lk. 7:36–50).
But if this was case, then why is she not identifi ed by name in these
instances, yet she’s referenced elsewhere in the Bible? Yes, Luke reports that
she had seven demons come out of her but he’s silent on the nature of her
disease (Lk. 8:1–3).
Given that history seems to have been written by the winners, the church
tends to focus on the male disciples. As we know, they ran for the hills. All too
often, church historians neglect to focus on those women who not only stayed
with Christ until the end but also assisted in the burial of the only man who
truly embraced them as equals in the kingdom of God. Even the disciples dis-
missed these fi rsthand accounts as nonsense, demonstrating the lack of respect
accorded to women in fi rst century Judea (Lk. 24:11).
And while we’re at it, let’s put an end to this gnostic nonsense that she
was married to Jesus. Since when did The Last Temptation of Christ and The Da
Vinci Code become part of the biblical canon?Marcia Ford
Who is...
?
Marcia Ford
I am an intensely private person whose
life is an open book. Go gure.A.
Probably the most accurate answer to that is that we don’t know
for sure. However, the contemporary consensus is that she was not
a prostitute and that her reputation as such resulted from a sixth-
century sermon by Pope Gregory the Great, who misinterpreted several Bible
passages. Efforts to correct that have intensifi ed in recent decades, both in the
Roman Catholic Church, where the error had long been kept alive, and among
Protestants, who often didn’t know what to make of her.