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Mary Magdalene is described, both in the canonical
New Testament and in the New Testament apocrypha,
as a devoted disciple of Jesus. She is considered
a saint by Roman Catholic,  Eastern Orthodox
Church|Eastern Orthodox and Anglicanism|Anglican
churches with a Calendar of saints|feast day of
July 22. Her name probably means "Mary of
Magdala", a town on the western shore of the Lake
of Tiberias. The life of the historical Mary is a
subject of ongoing debate.

==Mary Magdalene in the New Testament==

In Gospel of Luke|Luke 8:3 she is mentioned as one
of the women who "ministered to him
Jesus|Christ of
their substance". Their motive, according to the
author of Luke, was that of gratitude for
deliverances he had wrought for them: Luke tells
that out of Mary were cast seven demons, in an
exorcism. These women, who earlier "had been
healed of evil spirits and infirmities," later
accompanied him also on his last journey to
Jerusalem (Gospel of Matthew|Matt. 27:55; Gospel
of Mark|Mark 15:41; Gospel of Luke|Luke 23:55). 
They were witnesses to the Crucifixion.  There
Mary remained until all was over, and the body was
taken down and laid in a tomb prepared for Joseph
of Arimathea. Again, in the earliest dawn of the
first day of the week she, with Salome
(disciple)|Salome and Mary the mother of James,
(Gospel of Matthew|Matt. 28:1; Gospel of Mark|Mark
16:2; Gospel of Peter|Peter 12), came to the
sepulchre, bringing with them sweet spices, that
they might anoint the body of Jesus. They found
the empty tomb|sepulchre empty but saw the "vision
of angels" (Gospel of Matthew|Matt 28:5).  As the
first witness to the Resurrection, Mary Magdalene
hastened to tell Peter and another – unnamed
– apostle, (John 20:John 20:1|1, John
20:2|2), (gaining her the epithet "apostle to the
apostles") and again immediately returned to the
sepulchre. There she lingered thoughtfully,
weeping at the door of the tomb. The risen Lord
appeared to her, but at first she knew him not.
His utterance of her name "Mary" recalled her to
consciousness, and she uttered the joyful,
reverent cry, Aramaic of Jesus#Rabboni|Rabboni.
She would fain have clung to him, but he forbade
her: John 20:17|17 "Jesus said to her, 'Do not
cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My
Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, "I
am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to
My God and your God."'"

This is the last entry in the canonical New
Testament regarding Mary of Magdala, who now
returned to Jerusalem.

==The Gospel of Mary==

Further attestation of Mary of Magdala and her
role among some early Christians is provided by
the gnostic, New Testament Apocrypha|apocryphal
Gospel of Mary Magdalene. which survives in two
Third century | 3rd century Greek fragments and a
longer Fifth_century | 5th century translation
into Coptic language|Coptic. In the Gospel the
testimony of a woman first needed to be defended.
All of these manuscripts were first discovered and
published between 1938 and 1983, but as early as
the Third century | 3rd century there are
Patristic references to the Gospel of Mary. These
writings reveal the degree to which the gospel was
despised and dismissed by the early church
fathers. In the fragmentary text, the disciples
ask questions of the risen Savior (a designation
that dates the original no earlier than the Second
century | 2nd century) and are answered.  

Then they grieve, saying, "How shall we go to the
gentile | Gentiles and preach the Gospel of the
Kingdom of the son of man | Son of Man? If even he
was not spared, how shall we be spared?" And Mary
Magdalene bids them take heart: "Let us rather
praise his greatness, for he prepared us and made
us into men."  She then delivers – at
Peter's request – a vision of the Savior she
has had, and reports her discourse with him, which
shows Gnosticism|Gnostic influences.

Her vision does not meet with universal approval:

:"But Andrew answered and said to the brethren,
'Say what you think concerning what she said. For
I do not believe that the Savior said this. For
certainly these teachings are of other ideas."

:"Peter also opposed her in regard to these
matters and asked them about the Savior. "Did he
then speak secretly with a woman, in preference to
us, and not openly? Are we to turn back and all
listen to her? Did he prefer her to us?"

Dr. Karen King, a professor of church history at
Harvard Divinity School, has observed, "The
confrontation of Mary with Peter, a scenario also
found in The Gospel of Thomas, Pistis Sophia, and
The Gospel of the Egyptians, reflects some of the
tensions in second-century Christianity.  Peter
and Andrew represent orthodox positions that deny
the validity of esoteric revelation and reject the
authority of women to teach." (introduction, Nag
Hammadi|The Nag Hammadi Library)
*http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/gospelmary.
html Early Christian Writings: Gospel of Mary
*http://reluctant-messenger.com/gospel-magdalene.h
tm Gospel of Mary: (English), syncretic text,
incorporating Coptic and earlier Greek versions;
further web links

==Expansion of the Mary Magdalene tradition==
Tradition as early as the 3rd century identified
as Mary Magdalene the woman who was a sinner in
Luke 7:36-50:
:" 37 And, behold, a woman in the city, which was
a sinner, when she knew that Jesus sat at meat in
the Pharisee's house, brought an alabaster box of
ointment,
:38 And stood at his feet behind him weeping, and
began to wash his feet with tears, and did wipe
them with the hairs of her head, and kissed his
feet, and anointed them with the ointment."

Though there is no connection made in the New
Testament, nor is the woman in the house of the
Pharisee given a name, the idea that Mary was "the
woman who was a sinner", or that she was unchaste,
was developed by the Church fathers|Patristic
writers of the 3rd and 4th centuries. This idea is
rejected by most Protestants. Catholics, on the
other hand, consider this one person to be, not
only the sinner of Luke 7:36-50 but also Mary
sister of Lazarus|Mary of Bethany, the sister of
Martha and the resurrected Lazarus (Luke 10:38-42
and John 1:10); although the Roman Catholic Church
withdrew from this linkage at the Second Vatican
Council (1969) it survives strongly in folk
Catholicism.

For some Christians, the idea developed by Church
fathers, that Mary is also the woman that Jesus
had rescued from being stoning|stoned to death (as
recounted in the Pericope Adulterae) still holds
true. However those critical scholars who are
drawing conclusions from the canonic texts alone
believe that the woman Jesus rescued and Mary were
two separate persons. Conservative early-19th
century theological traditions, vividly realized
in the Mel Gibson movie The Passion of the Christ,
portray the prostitute and Mary as the same
person, and Martin Scorsese's earlier film
adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis's novel The Last
Temptation of Christ followed a similar tradition.

==Veneration of Mary Magdalene==
The Eastern Orthodox Church maintains that the
saint retired to Ephesus with the Blessed Virgin
and there died, that her relics were transferred
to Constantinople in 886 and are there preserved.
Gregory of Tours (De miraculis, I, xxx) supports
the tradition that she retired to Ephesus with no
mention of any connection to Gaul.

How a cult of Mary Magdalene first arose in
Provence is not clear. As a Roman Catholic saint,
Mary Magdalene's relics were first venerated at
the abbey of Vézelay in Burgundy. Jacobus de
Voragine gives the official story of the
translation of the relics of Mary Magdalene from
her sepulchre in the oratory of Saint Maximin at
Aix-en-Provence to the newly-founded abbey of
Vézelay ("the Abbey of Vesoul" in William
Caxton's translation), that was reputed to have
been undertaken in 771 by the founder of the
abbey, identified as Gerard, duke of Burgundy
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/goldenlegend/
GoldenLegend-Volume4.htm#Mary%20Magdalene
(Medieval Sourcebook).

The Saint Maximin of this legend is a figure who
conflates the historical bishop Maximin with a
legend-generated "Maximin" accompanying Mary
Magdalen, Martha and Lazarus (the "Saint Lazare"
of hagiography) to Provence. 

A cult later than the Legenda Aurea drew pilgrims
to the body of Mary Magdalene, officially
discovered September 9 1279, at Saint Maximin la
Sainte Baume, Provence, where they attracted such
throngs of pilgrims that the earlier shrine was
rebuilt as the great Basilica from the mid
thirteenth century, one of the finest Gothic
architecture|Gothic churches in the south of
France.

The competition between the Cluniac Benedictines
of Vézelay and the Dominicans of Saint-Maxime
occasioned a rash of miraculous literature
supporting the one or the other site. Jacopo de
Voragine, compiling his Legenda Aurea before the
competition arose, characterized Mary Magdalen as
the emblem of penitance, washing the feet of Jesus
with her copious tears, protectress of pilgrims to
Jerusalem, daily lifting by angels at the meal
hour in her fasting retreat and many other
miraculous heppenings in the Romance (genre)|genre
of Romance, ending with her death in the oratory
of Saint Maximin, all disingenuously claimed to
have been drawn from the histories of Hegesippus
and of Josephus. 

The French tradition of Lazarus|Saint Lazare of
Bethany is that Mary, her brother Lazarus, and
Maximinus, one of the Seventy-Two Apostles andsome
companions, expelled by persecutions from the Holy
Land, traversed the Mediterranean in a frail boat
with neither rudder nor mast and landed at the
place called Sainte Marie-de-Mer near Arles. Mary
Magdalene came to Marseille and converted the
whole of Provence. Magdalene is said to have
retired to a cave on a hill by Marseille, La
Sainte-Baume ("holy cave", baumo in Provencal), 
where she gave herself up to a life of penance for
thirty years. When the time of her death arrived
she was carried by angels to Aix-en-Provence|Aix
and into the oratory of Saint Maximinus, where she
received the viaticum; her body was then laid in
an oratory constructed by St. Maximinus at Villa
Lata, afterwards called St. Maximin. 

There is no earlier mention of these episodes than
the notice in 745, when   the chronicler Sigebert,
the relics were removed to Vézelay through fear
of the Saracens. There is no record  of their
return and a casket of relics associated with
Magdalene remains at Vezelay..

In 1279, when Charles II of Naples|Charles II,
King of Naples, erected a Dominican convent at La
Sainte-Baume, the shrine was marvellously found
intact, with an explanatory inscription stating
why the relics had been hidden. 

In 1600 the relics were placed in a sarcophagus
commissioned by Pope Clement VIII, the head being
placed in a separate reliquary. The relics and
free-standing images were scattered and destroyed
at the French Revolution|Revolution. In 1814 the
church of La Sainte-Baume, also wrecked during the
Revolution, was restored, and in 1822 the grotto
was consecrated afresh. The head of the saint now
lies there, where it has lain so long, and where
it has been the centre of so many pilgrimages.

The Magdalene became a symbol of repentance for
the vanities of the world, and Mary Magdalene was
the patron of Magdalen College, Oxford and
Magdalene College, Cambridge (both pronounced
"maudlin", as in weepy penitents). Unfortunately
her name was also used for the infamous Magdalen
Asylums in Ireland where supposedly fallen women
were treated as Slavery|slaves.

Mary Magdalene is often omitted from Catholic
iconography of the Crucifixion, or replaced by
John

==Author of the Fourth Gospel, the Gospel of
John?==
A group of scholars have suggested that for one
early group of Christians Mary Magdalene was a
leader of the early Church and maybe even the
unidentified Beloved Disciple, to whom the Fourth
Gospel commonly called Gospel of John is ascribed.
The most familiar of the scholars is Elaine
Pagels.

Ramon K. Jusino offers a logically presented
explanation of this unorthodox view, based on the
textual researches of Raymond E. Brown, a
mainstream Catholic biblical scholar, in
http://www.beloveddisciple.org/ "Mary Magdalene,
author of the Fourth Gospel?", 1998, available
on-line. Ann Graham Brock (see ref.) summarized
this reading of the texts in 2003. She
demonstrated that an early Christian writing
portrays authority as being represented in Mary
Magdalene or in Peter, but not both. She presents 
Luke as promoting the narrowest and most formal
Petrine concept of "apostle" that diminished and
ignored the role of Mary. In the Petrine
tradition, Mary Magdalene is often replaced by
Mary, mother of Jesus, a passive figure who
affirms Peter's authority. The Peter authority
figure is consistently affirmed in writings that
also promote hierarchical, male, formal authority
within the church community structure.  

These scholars also observe that the Mary
Magdalene figure is consistently elevated in
writings from which formal leadership roles are
absent, while the Paul figure is more involved in
a tug-of-war between these two opposing systems of
church government.

Ki Longfellow, in her novel The Secret Magdalene
(Eio Books, 2005), has woven a fiction based on
the premise that Mary is not only the author of
the Gospel of John, but the Beloved Disciple
herself. Another novel that delves into the
positions of Mary and Peter is According to Mary
Magdalene by Marianne Fredriksson

==Easter Egg tradition==
For centuries, yes it has been the custom of many
Eastern Orthodox Christians to end the Easter
service by sharing dyed and painted eggs and
proclaiming to each other, "Christ is risen!" The
eggs represent new life, and Christ bursting forth
from the tomb. This began one tradition of
coloring Easter eggs.

One tradition concerning Mary Magdalene says that
following Jesus Christ's death and resurrection,
she used her position to gain an invitation to a
banquet given by Emperor Tiberius Caesar. When she
met him, she held a plain egg in her hand and
exclaimed "Christ is risen!" Caesar laughed, and
said that Christ rising from the dead was as
likely as the egg in her hand turning red while
she held it. Before he finished speaking, the egg
in her hand turned a bright red, and she continued
proclaiming the Gospel to the entire imperial
house. 

A modern lithograph by Richard Stodart (born 1945)
of Mary Magdalene displaying an egg illustrates
this tradition http://www.magdalene.org
illustration.

There is also a supposed tradition that the
remnants of Christ's heart remain inside an
egg-like vessel, and that this vessel is the basis
for "the Sacred Heart" motif in Catholicism. In
some legends the Sacred Heart exists as a guarded
sacred object or a metaphysical essence, passed
from hand to hand, with Mary Magdalene being
listed among noteworthy caretakers.

==Wife of Jesus?==
Some modern writers, notably the authors of Holy
Blood, Holy Grail (1982) and The Da Vinci Code
(2003), hold that:
* Mary was in fact the wife of Jesus, and 
* that fact was omitted by Pauline
Christianity|Pauline Christian revisionists and
the editors of the Gospels. 
* it is never mentioned that Jesus was unmarried.

These writers cite non-canonical and Gnostic
writings in selective portions  to support their
argument. While sources like the Gospel of Philip
depict Mary Magdalene as being closer to Jesus
than any other disciple, there is no ancient
document which claims she was his wife. It is
thought the meaning here is Mary Magdalene knew
what Jesus was talking about. She understood him,
while the disciples did not.

An argument for support of this theory is that
bachelorhood was very rare for Jewish males of
Jesus' time, being generally regarded as a
transgression of the first mitzvah (divine
commandment)— "Be fruitful and multiply". It
would have been unthinkable for an adult,
unmarried Jew to travel about teaching as a rabbi,
as Jesus certainly did.

A counter-argument to this is that the Judaism of
Jesus' time was very diverse and the role of the
rabbi was not yet well defined. Celibate teachers
like John the Baptist were known in the
communities of the Essenes, and Paul of Tarsus was
an example of an unmarried itinerant teacher among
the Christians, at a time when most Christians
were still practicing Jews.  It was really not
until after the Roman destruction of the Second
Temple in A.D. 70 that Rabbi|Rabbinic Judaism
became dominant and the role of the rabbi made
uniform in Jewish communities.

Mary Magdalene appears with more frequency than
other women in the canonical Gospels and is shown
as being a close follower of Jesus. Mary's
presence at the Crucifixion and Jesus's tomb,
while hardly conclusive, is at least consonant
with the role of grieving wife and widow, although
if that were the case Jesus might have been
expected to make provision for her care as well as
for his mother Mary. Given the lack of
contemporary documentation, this scenario cannot
be proven, and although some consider the idea
desirable to believe, most scholars do not take it
seriously. On the other hand, there is neither any
evidence that Jesus was unmarried.

===Metaphysical marriage===
Substituting metaphysical analogy and allegory for
historical inquiry, other writers would assert
that Christ was already married— to the
Church— an image that was developed first by
Paul in what became the New Testament and then
later expanded on by the Church fathers. Some
writers, following an early tradition that Jesus
is in a mystical sense the second Adam (again
beginning with Paul and continuing with Irenaeus
and others), embody this sense with literal
parallels: like the first Adam, his bride was
taken from his side when he had fallen asleep
(died on the cross). In medieval Christian
anagogic exegesis, the blood and water which came
from his side when he was pierced, was held to
represent the bringing forth of the Church with
its analogy in the water of baptism and the wine
of the Covenant theology|new covenant. Thus Christ
can be said to already have a wife in the Church;
and so it would not be considered possible or
tolerable to believe that he was otherwise
married.

==See also==
* Saint Sarah

==External links==
*http://www.trekker.co.il/english/israel/i-olives-
07.htm Church of Mary Madgalene in Jerusalem, on
http://www.trekker.co.il/english/mount-of-olives.h
tm Mount of Olives
*http://www.magdalene.org Magdalene.org: illus.
modern lithograph by Richard Stoddard
*http://altreligion.about.com/library/texts/bl_mar
ymagdalen.htm Mary Magdalen Research Guide:
About.com
*http://www.jerusalem-mission.org/convent_magdalen
e.html Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene
*http://www.thenazareneway.com/life_of_st_mary_mag
dalene.htm Legends of Mary Magdalene

==Reference==
* Ann Graham Brock, Mary Magdalene, The First
Apostle: The Struggle for Authority, Harvard
University Press 2003: discusses issues of
apostolic authority in the gospels and the Gospel
of Peter the competition between Peter and Mary,
especially in chapter 7, "The Replacement of Mary
Magdalene: A Strategy for Eliminating the
Competition".
* Birger A. Pearson, "Did Jesus Marry?"  Bible
Review, Spring 2005, pp 32-39 & 47 Discussion of
complete texts.
* Jane Schaberg, "How Mary Magdalene Became a
Whore", Bible Review, Mar/Apr V8, No.5 (No longer
available from BR)
* Jane Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary
Magdalene, Continuum International Publishing Co.,
2004