When is mary magdalene first mentioned in the bible

When Mary Magdalene met Jesus, she was set free from seven demons. From that day forward, her life was forever changed. Mary became a devoted believer and traveled with Jesus and the disciples as they ministered throughout Galilee and Judea. Out of her own wealth, Mary helped care for Jesus and the needs of his disciples.

She was deeply devoted to Jesus and stayed with him at the foot of the cross during his crucifixion when others fled in fear. She and other women bought spices to anoint the body of Jesus and appeared at his tomb in all four Gospels. Mary Magdalene was honored by Jesus as the first person he appeared to after his resurrection. Because Mary Magdalene was charged in all four Gospels to be the first to share the good news of Christ's resurrection, she is often called the first evangelist.

She is mentioned more often than any other woman in the New Testament. Mary Magdalene is the subject of much controversy, legend, and misconception. There is no evidence to back up claims that she was a reformed prostitute, the wife of Jesus, and the mother of his child. Being a follower of Jesus Christ will result in hard times. Mary stood by Jesus as he suffered and died on the cross, saw him buried, and came to the empty tomb on the third morning. When Mary told the apostles Jesus had risen, none of them believed her.

Yet she never wavered. Mary Magdalene knew what she knew. As Christians, we too will be the target of ridicule and distrust, but we must hold onto the truth. Jesus is worth it. Luke —3 Soon afterward Jesus began a tour of the nearby towns and villages, preaching and announcing the Good News about the Kingdom of God. He took his twelve disciples with him, along with some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases. John Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.

Mark Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joseph saw where he was laid. John Jesus said to her, "Mary. Jesus said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.

This otherwise innocuous reference to Mary Magdalene takes on a kind of radioactive narrative energy because of what immediately precedes it at the end of the seventh chapter, an anecdote of stupendous power:.

One of the Pharisees invited [Jesus] to a meal. She had heard he was dining with the Pharisee and had brought with her an alabaster jar of ointment. She waited behind him at his feet, weeping, and her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them away with her hair; then she covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the ointment. But Jesus refuses to condemn her, or even to deflect her gesture. The scene would be explicitly attached to her, and rendered again and again by the greatest Christian artists.

But even a casual reading of this text, however charged its juxtaposition with the subsequent verses, suggests that the two women have nothing to do with each other—that the weeping anointer is no more connected to Mary of Magdala than she is to Joanna or Susanna.

Other verses in other Gospels only add to the complexity. Matthew gives an account of the same incident, for example, but to make a different point and with a crucial detail added:.

Jesus was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, when a woman came to him with an alabaster jar of the most expensive ointment, and poured it on his head as he was at table. When they saw this, the disciples were indignant. I tell you solemnly, wherever in all the world this Good News is proclaimed, what she has done will be told also, in remembrance of her.

But in other passages, Mary Magdalene is associated by name with the burial of Jesus, which helps explain why it was easy to confuse this anonymous woman with her. The offense taken by witnesses in Luke concerns sex, while in Matthew and Mark it concerns money.

But the complications mount. Matthew and Mark say the anointing incident occurred at Bethany, a detail that echoes in the Gospel of John, which has yet another Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and yet another anointing story:. Six days before the Passover, Jesus went to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom he had raised from the dead. They gave a dinner for him there; Martha waited on them and Lazarus was among those at table.

Mary brought in a pound of very costly ointment, pure nard, and with it anointed the feet of Jesus, wiping them with her hair. Judas objects in the name of the poor, and once more Jesus is shown defending the woman. As before, the anointing foreshadows the Crucifixion.

There is also resentment at the waste of a luxury good, so death and money define the content of the encounter. But the loose hair implies the erotic as well. The death of Jesus on Golgotha, where Mary Magdalene is expressly identified as one of the women who refused to leave him, leads to what is by far the most important affirmation about her. All four Gospels and another early Christian text, the Gospel of Peter explicitly name her as present at the tomb, and in John she is the first witness to the resurrection of Jesus.

This—not repentance, not sexual renunciation—is her greatest claim. Unlike the men who scattered and ran, who lost faith, who betrayed Jesus, the women stayed.

And chief among them was Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of John puts the story poignantly:. It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb and came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. Meanwhile Mary stayed outside near the tomb, weeping. Then, still weeping, she stooped to look inside, and saw two angels in white sitting where the body of Jesus had been, one at the head, the other at the feet.

Who are you looking for? As the story of Jesus was told and told again in those first decades, narrative adjustments in event and character were inevitable, and confusion of one with the other was a mark of the way the Gospels were handed on. Most Christians were illiterate; they received their traditions through a complex work of memory and interpretation, not history, that led only eventually to texts.

Once the sacred texts were authoritatively set, the exegetes who interpreted them could make careful distinctions, keeping the roster of women separate, but common preachers were less careful. The telling of anecdotes was essential to them, and so alterations were certain to occur. The multiplicity of the Marys by itself was enough to mix things up—as were the various accounts of anointing, which in one place is the act of a loose-haired prostitute, in another of a modest stranger preparing Jesus for the tomb, and in yet another of a beloved friend named Mary.

Women who weep, albeit in a range of circumstances, emerged as a motif. Not only was Jesus remembered as treating women with respect, as equals in his circle; not only did he refuse to reduce them to their sexuality; Jesus was expressly portrayed as a man who loved women, and whom women loved. Out of these disparate threads—the various female figures, the ointment, the hair, the weeping, the unparalleled intimacy at the tomb—a new character was created for Mary Magdalene.

Out of the threads, that is, a tapestry was woven—a single narrative line. Across time, this Mary went from being an important disciple whose superior status depended on the confidence Jesus himself had invested in her, to a repentant whore whose status depended on the erotic charge of her history and the misery of her stricken conscience. In part, this development arose out of a natural impulse to see the fragments of Scripture whole, to make a disjointed narrative adhere, with separate choices and consequences being tied to each other in one drama.

Thus, for example, out of discrete episodes in the Gospel narratives, some readers would even create a far more unified—more satisfying—legend according to which Mary of Magdala was the unnamed woman being married at the wedding feast of Cana, where Jesus famously turned water into wine.

Her spouse, in this telling, was John, whom Jesus immediately recruited to be one of the Twelve. When John went off from Cana with the Lord, leaving his new wife behind, she collapsed in a fit of loneliness and jealousy and began to sell herself to other men.

She next appeared in the narrative as the by then notorious adulteress whom the Pharisees thrust before Jesus. When Jesus refused to condemn her, she saw the error of her ways. Consequently, she went and got her precious ointment and spread it on his feet, weeping in sorrow. Could anything else in Mary's life have made her an outcast?

The Gospel of Luke tells us that Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary. Luke Jesus was known as an exorcist. In all of the gospels, one of the principal things he is doing in his campaign for a renewal of Israel is exorcism. The exorcisms and healings probably go together with the teaching and preaching that the kingdom of God is at hand. At that time, people believed that the demons possessed people who had done something wrong, and deserved to be possessed, whereas good, virtuous people were protected from demon possession.

Whatever the cause of her possession, Mary's exorcism is the catalyst which makes her sign up with the Jesus movement. The message that Jesus is said to have preached seems to have particular appeal for people who are in the margins of society. Luke chapter 8, tells us that Mary was one of Jesus' followers and travelled with him.

But the Bible isn't the only source. In at Nag Hammadi, in southern Egypt, two men came across a sealed ceramic jar. Inside, they discovered a hoard of ancient papyrus books. Although they never received as much public attention as the Dead Sea Scrolls, these actually turn out to be much more important for writing the history of early Christianity. They are a cache of Christian texts.

The Nag Hammadi texts tell us about early Christians. They were written in Coptic, the language of early Christian Egypt. As most ancient Christian texts have been lost, this discovery was exceptional. None of these texts were included in the Bible, because the content didn't conform to Christian doctrine, and they're referred to as apocryphal.

They tend to concentrate on things that one doesn't read about in the Bible. For example, New Testament gospels report that after the resurrection Jesus spent some time talking with the disciples, but you don't learn much about what he said. In the gospels of Nag Hammadi you can read what he said. Although they're not Biblical texts, experts still believe that they give us significant insights into Christian history.

In these apocryphal texts we might have genuine traditions about Jesus that for one reason or another didn't make it into the New Testament. For the first time in hundreds of years there was a new source of information about Mary Magdalene. She appears very frequently as one of the prominent disciples of Jesus. In certain texts where Jesus is in discussion with his disciples, Mary Magdalene asks many informed questions. Whereas the other disciples at times seem confused, she is the one who understands.

It has been the cause of one of the most controversial claims ever made about her. During their long burial in the desert, some of the books were attacked by ants. In this Gospel, the ants made a hole in a very crucial place.

The text says:. And the companion of the [ The rest of the disciples [ They said to him "Why do you love her more than all of us? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness. The lacuna , or gap, which hides where Jesus kissed Mary has tantalised scholars for decades. Some scholars have interpreted the kiss in a more spiritual sense and see kissing as a symbol for an intimate reception of teaching of the word of God, of learning.

The image of Jesus and Mary as engaged in mouth-to-mouth closeness suggests not necessarily sexuality, but the transmission of divine knowledge. Mary Magdalene appears in this text also not only as the disciple he loved most but also as a symbolic figure of heavenly wisdom.

These stories of Mary - as Jesus' closest companion and a symbol of heavenly wisdom - are in sharp contrast with the Mary Magdalene of popular imagination. It often means that it's not to be read, not to be taken seriously, not to be considered, not true. The contents of these books are regarded by many people as legends.

So can we believe the Gospel of Philip? Was Mary really Jesus' closest companion? Well, there is other evidence for this, and some of it is even in the Bible itself. The Bible says that Mary Magdalene was present at the two most important moments in the story of Jesus: the crucifixion and the resurrection. Mary Magdalene was a prominent figure at both these events. We're told that Mary Magdalene was one of the women who kept vigil at Jesus' tomb.

It was customary at this time for Jewish women to prepare bodies for burial. Corpses were considered unclean, and so it was always a woman's task to handle them. When Mary goes to the tomb, Jesus' body is no longer there. The fullest account of Mary's role after discovering the empty tomb is in the Gospel of John. She is in a state of shock and runs to where the disciples are gathered to tell them the news. When she reports to the disciples she is not believed.

Peter and another disciple return with her to the tomb, to see for themselves.