“And he said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven”. Until then the reading for the feast day of Mary Magdalene on 22 July was from chapter 7 of the gospel of Luke in which an unnamed woman enters a house where Jesus is a dinner guest and abases herself to him, washing his feet with her tears and wiping them dry with her hair. Hagg explains that only in 1969, during the papacy of Paul VI, did the Vatican make some discreet alterations to the Latin mass. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images) Repentant Mary Magdalene, found in the Collection of the Art History Museum, Vienne.
Digging for the Bible: 10 key discoveries from the Holy Land. Christianity’s rocky relationship with sex. Nor has it been a historical accident that Mary, the mother of Jesus, who apart from the nativity narratives in Matthew and Luke plays almost no role in the gospels and in the life of Jesus (and who was regarded by early sceptics and critics of Christianity as a wanton an adulteress, her son as a bastard) was transformed by the Church (without any gospel evidence) into a perpetual virgin and the Mother of God.” “Those struggles saw the Church attempt to control the visionary nature of Mary Magdalene’s experience by turning her into a prostitute. The question ever since has been how much of that vision was distorted or suppressed or lost in the controversies that shaped the new religion. This mystery, with its suggestion of intimacy, is bound up with the nature of Mary Magdalene’s vision – the vision of the kingdom of God that she shared with Jesus. Michael Haag explains: “The whole of the Christian mystery starts with that first moment when Mary Magdalene stood alone at the empty tomb. Medieval writers were invested in making Mary a penitent sinner and a reformed convert. The Mary Magdalene that is most familiar to us today – the former prostitute who washes Jesus’s feet with expensive ointment and weeps at his Crucifixion – was cemented in the Middle Ages, she adds. There is no reference to Mary being a prostitute or a sinner in any of the New Testament gospels, says Hetta Howes. Listen to Reza Aslan comment on the historical Jesus: Was Mary Magdalene a prostitute? A history of the Bible: who wrote it and when?. 
How much is known about the birth of Jesus?. It says nothing of the resurrection, and it says nothing of Jesus appearing to his disciples. The earliest version of Mark, the oldest gospel, says no more than that. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)Īnd it was Mary Magdalene who went to the tomb of Jesus on the third day and found that it was empty. 
Entombment by Rogier van der Weyden (c1400–64).
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