If anything can rightly be said about St. Mary Magdalene, it is that she remains a mysterious and oftentimes elusive figure. Over the centuries, her identity has been debated and disputed endlessly, with the result that today many Catholics are left feeling very confused. What exactly do we know about her on the basis of the Gospels? And was she a reformed prostitute? The answer to these questions depends on which view of Mary Magdalene one chooses to adoptβand there are several available. A number of the Eastern Church Fathers, for example, maintained that the only things we know about the saint come from those handful of Gospel passages which explicitly mention her by name.
For the Eastern Fathers, this is all that we can know about Mary Magdalene. In the West, a rather different understanding of the Magdalene began to emerge in the earliest days of the Church. Beginning with figures like Tertullian c. Augustine - , a near-unanimous consensus arose in Western Christianity which continued largely unchallenged right up until the twentieth century.
On this traditional Western Catholic understanding, therefore, three female New Testament characters are identified as one: Mary Magdalene, Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and the anonymous sinful woman from Luke 7. But what, if anything, does this reveal about Mary Magdalene having been a prostitute? After all, the Gospels never explicitly describe her as such.
We do know for sure that Jesus cleansed her of seven demons, but there is no way of knowing whether these demons were the result of sexual vice. So where did the prostitute idea originate? The idea seems to have originated with Pope St. Gregory the Great in a homily he delivered at the Basilica of St.
Clement in Rome in the year Upon examining the text of Luke , it seems obvious that the woman in question has earned a very bad reputation for herself. Moreover, the acute sense of shock on the part of the crowd would suggest that this was more than just a dishonest businesswoman. She has all the appearances of a wretched woman of low social standing whose very presence is considered scandalous by the men gathered there. Identifying her as a prostitute makes sense of these details.
