How Mary Magdalene Became the “Penitent Prostitute”

A woman weeps beside an ointment jar, her long hair falling over her shoulders. For centuries, Western artists used these details to make Mary Magdalene recognizable. Many viewers also learned to identify her as a former prostitute. Yet no New Testament passage gives her that occupation.

The distance between the Gospel descriptions and the familiar portrait is a story about interpretation. It involves the linking of passages, a powerful preaching tradition, and images that taught generations of viewers how to remember a biblical figure.

Three passages, no explicit identification

Luke 7:36–50 describes an unnamed woman known as a sinner who anoints Jesus’s feet. Luke does not identify her as Mary Magdalene, nor does he specify her occupation. Luke 8:2 then names Magdalene among women associated with Jesus’s ministry and says that seven demons had gone out of her. Deliverance from demons is not a biographical statement about sexual behavior.

John 12:1–8 names a different Mary, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, as the woman who anoints Jesus’s feet at Bethany. The similar actions invited readers to connect the accounts. But the narratives do not explicitly equate the unnamed woman, Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene. Treating them as one person requires an interpretive step beyond those identifications.

Gregory’s influential synthesis

In Homily 33, preached in 591, Gregory the Great identifies the woman in Luke’s anointing scene with John’s Mary and with the Mary delivered from seven demons. He interprets seven symbolically as the totality of vices. His rhetoric gives the ointment, hair, and tears a story of transformed devotion, including a sexualized account of the woman’s former life.

Gregory did not create every connection between these passages from nothing. Earlier Christian interpretation had already explored identifications among the anointing women. His importance lies in giving the combined figure an influential expression that subsequent Western preaching and devotion developed. A sermon can consolidate a tradition without being the first moment anyone conceived it.

Titian, Penitent Magdalene, c. 1561–1565 · Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg · Public Domain. Image record.

A tradition with more than one trajectory

The composite Magdalene became a major figure in Western penitential spirituality and art. Katherine Ludwig Jansen’s The Making of the Magdalen examines preaching and popular devotion in the later Middle Ages, when her story served many purposes beyond identifying a supposed occupation. Repentance, love, contemplation, and proclamation all belonged to her reception.

Eastern Christian tradition generally distinguished Magdalene from Mary of Bethany and the unnamed sinner. That difference cautions against describing the composite figure as a belief held uniformly by all Christians. Nor should an influential Western devotional identification be confused with a formal dogmatic definition.

The Catholic liturgical revisions associated with the Roman calendar of 1969 and the Missal of 1970 made the distinction explicit. A Vatican explanation issued in 2016, when Magdalene’s celebration was raised to a feast, recalls these changes.

Letting Magdalene’s own scenes lead

The Gospels place Magdalene at Jesus’s crucifixion and empty tomb. John 20 gives her the encounter with the risen Jesus and the task of reporting to the disciples. These are substantial roles, whether or not readers also study the later penitential tradition.

Recovering that textual portrait does not require mocking the art or devotion that grew around her. It means explaining which details come from the narratives and which belong to their reception. A sermon about Magdalene can begin with what she actually does in the Gospel, rather than an occupation assigned to her by later memory.

Sources and further reading

• Gregory the Great, Homilies on the Gospels 33, especially §§1–2.
• Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular Devotion in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2000).
• Congregation for Divine Worship, decree and explanation on Mary Magdalene’s feast, 10 June 2016.

Explore original-language and historical context for sermon preparation at Didymus Lab.

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