Some Thoughts on Mary Magdalene

Mary Magdalene painted by Titian

Mary Magdalene, one of the few figures identified by name in all four canonical Gospels, wasn’t identified as a prostitute. Let’s start with that. Yes, Luke’s Gospel calls her “Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils,” so she had a past. But nobody considered her a prostitute until Pope Gregory I, who syncretized several widely spaced references to simplify doctrine. This happened in the Sixth Century CE.

Yet I’ve been considering Mary recently, and I suggest, considering her a prostitute makes theological sense. The fact she has a past, and a past which her time and ours often consider irredeemable, carries important weight. We now know, as public moralists in Jesus’ time didn’t, that women enter prostitution mainly because of economic desperation. To First Century moralists, prostitutes didn’t just sell sex, they sold their identities as women.

“The Virgin-Whore Dichotomy” has become a widespread critical buzzword for the moral roles enforced upon women. It’s important to remember, though, that at one time, this wasn’t metaphorical. Women were wholly commodities; their virginity made them valuable as wives and mothers, like prize heifers. If they didn’t possess their virginity, they became something men could rent, like a Buick, but never really own. Bought or rented, never independent.

In either case, women (and by implication everyone) are defined wholly by their past. Prostitution became, not something a woman did, pressed by poverty and need, but something a woman was. Consider all the identity roles enforced on people today: race, gender, nationality, immigration status, economic class. Even your name, assigned at birth and changeable only by court order. Every identity marker binds you entirely to your past.

If Mary was a prostitute, she would’ve understood this intimately. Once the world recognized her as sexually “unclean,” she would’ve had no route back; she was beyond redemption. This attitude isn’t millennia old, either; “purity culture,” which dominated sectors of White Christianity for the last thirty years, preaches the same message. You’re either pure or fallen, and once fallen, that condition lasts forever. Impurity is beyond redemption.

By contrast, Jesus says we, like Mary, aren’t yoked to the past. A repentant heart has freedom to move, because it abjures its past, and faces the future. The world chains us to mistakes we made previously, maybe years ago, a posture that comforts the powerful by making everyone fixed and controllable. But Jesus says other people don’t own you, can’t define you by choices made in your past.

Mary Magdalene painted by Guido Reni

Worldly authorities love creating categories of control. Consider the pundits who love reminding everyone that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used to work as a bartender. Such moralists want to define her entirely according to a job they consider menial; power, they imply (like the Romans and Pharisees before us) belongs to people of means and leisure. If you’ve ever needed to accept a derided job, they’ll define you by that forever.

Throughout history, powerful people have attempted to yoke the poor, the despised, and women to their pasts. In Second Temple Judaism, the punishment for crimes of desperation, like prostitution or petty theft, was maiming or death: punishments that cannot be rescinded. You became, forever, the “worst” thing you ever did. Nor did Christians improve things; from medieval flagellants to modern Evangelicalism, sexual indiscretions have tainted women for life, and beyond.

Rather than the comforting, but damning, certainty of the past, Jesus offers a dangerous, uncertain future. That sounds terrifying to people who prefer certainty, and not without reason; remember, eleven of the twelve male Apostles died violently. But the alternative to this living, risky future, is the fixity of the past. You can race headlong, giddy, into the future, encountering it on Jesus’ terms; or you can be static and dead.

I admit, I’m frequently bad at embracing this. The past is knowable, to the extent that humans can know anything, because it doesn’t change. Sure, it gets reframed, our understanding changes, but the past itself stands. The future may sucker-punch us, and frequently does. The desire to reduce risk makes us hug the chains connecting us to the past, dragging our guilt, resentment, and fear everywhere.

Yet I consider the prospect that we aren’t beholden to our past liberating. Worldly powers continue defining us according to our past: dragging the punishment for nonviolent drug offenses out for decades, for instance, or insisting on deadnaming us. To the hierarchy, prostitution is the epitome of this. But the Gospel says: you’re defined by where you’re going, not where you’ve been.