Who was Mary Magdalene?

The short answer

Mary Magdalene was a woman from Magdala, a town on the Sea of Galilee, who followed Jesus and helped pay for his work. She stood near his cross, watched his burial and was the first person John says saw him risen. No Gospel calls her a prostitute.

What the record says

Luke names her among the women who traveled with Jesus and the twelve. He calls her “Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2). He adds that these women helped the work “from their possessions” (Luke 8:3).

She stayed when most of his friends had run:

But standing by Jesus’ cross were his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.

John 19:25

All four Gospels put her at the empty tomb on the third morning. In John she stays behind, weeping, and Jesus speaks her name. Then she goes to tell the others:

Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had said these things to her.

John 20:18

Hundreds of years later, some preachers blended her with the unnamed woman “who was a sinner” in Luke 7:37, and the idea of Mary as a repentant prostitute grew from there. No Gospel says it. Many churches today agree the two women were mixed up.

How the novels tell it

Third Day is a novel. In the novel he goes by Yeshua, the name his family would have called him. Mary of Magdala first joins the work in The Narrow Gate, nursing the sick in a house at Magdala where a keeper holds the women’s debts. In chapter twenty-one of Third Day, “The Morning,” she and four other women go to the tomb before light. She goes in first and finds only the linen and the folded face cloth. In the garden a man says her name, and she knows him. He sends the women to tell his apostles, and Peter. Running through the gate, they hear a water seller already telling pilgrims that a shining man opened the tomb. Mary catches his cup.

“He said my name.”

When Peter and John run to the tomb and leave without her, she stays weeping at the entrance. Yeshua comes to her a second time and tells her to carry the news again. She picks up the broken tile she has been keeping lists on and goes back down the road.