Apostle to the Apostles

Because the risen Lord sent Mary Magdalene to announce His Resurrection to the disciples (John 20:17–18), the Church has from antiquity called her apostola apostolorum, “the apostle to the apostles.” The Eastern tradition crowns the same dignity with the title isapostolos, “Equal-to-the-Apostles,” reserved for a small company of great evangelizers. This file traces the title from its patristic roots — Hippolytus already in the early third century calls the myrrh-bearers “apostles” — through the Byzantine and Latin tradition, and explains what “Equal-to-the-Apostles” means and does not mean.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Equal-to-the-Apostles, Myrrh-bearer)

The Title’s Scriptural Root

The title rests on a single, secure datum: the risen Christ gave Mary Magdalene a message and sent her to deliver it to the apostles. “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father” (John 20:17, RSV); “Mary Magdalene went and said to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Lord’” (John 20:18). To be sent — apostellein, the verb from which “apostle” (apostolos, “one sent”) is formed — is the heart of apostleship; and Mary is sent, by the risen Lord Himself, to the apostles. Hence the precise and ancient title: not “an apostle” simply, but “the apostle to the apostles” — the one sent to those who would themselves be sent.

Hippolytus and the Earliest Patristic Witness

The earliest surviving text to apply apostolic language to the women at the tomb is the Commentary on the Song of Songs of Hippolytus of Rome, written in the early third century — the oldest extant Christian commentary on that book. Reading the bride’s search in Song of Songs 3:1–4 (“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves… I held him, and would not let him go”) as a figure of the myrrh-bearers seeking Christ at the tomb, Hippolytus has Christ commission them: “that the female apostles also might not be doubted by the apostles,” and he names them, in a celebrated phrase, apostoloi sent to the apostles — Eve becomes an apostle, the curse reversed (Hippolytus, Commentary on the Song of Songs 24–25; ed. and trans. Yancey Smith, 2015; cf. the Georgian and Slavonic versions on which the text survives). The link of the Song of Songs to the myrrh-bearers, and of the bride’s “I would not let him go” to Mary’s clinging (John 20:17), becomes a fixed theme of the Eastern reading. Hippolytus thus attests, by about AD 200–235, the conception that the women — Mary Magdalene foremost — were “apostles to the apostles.”

The Title in East and West

The phrase apostola apostolorum itself is Latin and recurs through the Western Middle Ages. Notably it appears in the work of Thomas Aquinas, who, commenting on John 20, writes that Christ appointed Mary Magdalene “the apostle to the apostles” (apostolorum apostola), in that she was sent to announce the Resurrection to them (Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of John, on John 20:17–18, lectio 3). The title was therefore current in the medieval West even as the West held the conflated “penitent” image of Mary (see The Three Marys) — a sign that her apostolic dignity survived alongside the conflation. When Rome reformed her feast in 1969 and raised it in 2016, the documents explicitly recovered the ancient title, the 2016 decree of the Congregation for Divine Worship calling her apostolorum apostola (Congregation for Divine Worship, decree Apostolorum Apostola, 3 June 2016).

In the East the dignity is expressed by the rank of isapostolos, “Equal-to-the-Apostles.” This is a liturgical title of honor, not a claim that Mary was numbered among the Twelve or ordained to their office; it marks those whose labor in proclaiming the Gospel and converting peoples was apostolic in scope. The company of the Equal-to-the-Apostles is small and includes both men and women: the Emperor Constantine and the Empress Helen; Mary Magdalene; the Protomartyr Thecla; Nina the Enlightener of Georgia; Photini the Samaritan woman; the brothers Cyril and Methodius; the Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev. The women among them — Mary Magdalene, Thecla, Nina, Photini, Helen, Olga — form a luminous band whom the Church honors as evangelizers (see Women Disciples in the Gospel; and the sibling collections on St. Thecla and St. Nina of Georgia).

What “Equal-to-the-Apostles” Means

The title requires careful definition, because it is easily misread in both directions. It does not mean that Mary Magdalene was one of the Twelve, nor that she held the apostolic office in the sense of the ordained ministry that the Twelve transmitted by the laying-on of hands; the Orthodox tradition distinguishes the unrepeatable office of the Twelve, and the ordained priesthood derived from it, from the honorific isapostolos (see the treatment in Women in Orthodoxy). Nor, on the other hand, is it a merely sentimental compliment: it is a real liturgical rank, conferred for a real apostolic labor — in Mary’s case, being the first to proclaim the Resurrection and (in the tradition) carrying the Gospel to Ephesus and, in one account, to the imperial court itself (see Ephesus and the Theotokos and The Red Egg Tradition).

The Fathers ground the dignity in the order of the Resurrection witness itself. Gregory of Antioch, in a sixth-century homily on the myrrh-bearers, places on the lips of the risen Christ the charge that they be “apostles to the apostles,” sent to proclaim what they had seen — the women’s commission given the same word, and the same authority, as the men’s later sending (Gregory of Antioch, Homily on the Myrrh-bearing Women). The Eastern hymnography for July 22 hails Mary as having “preached Christ, the risen God,” and as an isapostolos who “ran to the apostles” — the title woven directly into her praise (The Menaion, July 22, apolytikion and stichera).

The Title and the Conflation

The survival of “apostle to the apostles” through the centuries of the Western conflation is itself instructive. Even when the Latin West remembered Mary chiefly as the penitent prostitute, it did not forget that she was the first witness and the one sent — the two images sat, uneasily, side by side. The Eastern tradition, by never conflating her with the sinful woman of Luke 7, kept the apostolic dignity unclouded: the Magdalene of the East is the Equal-to-the-Apostles, full stop, with no penitential overlay to qualify her standing (see The Eastern Tradition). The title and the non-conflation are thus two faces of the same fidelity to the Gospel datum: that Mary Magdalene was the first to see the risen Lord and the first sent to proclaim Him.

References

The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: John 20:17–18; Song of Songs 3:1–4.
Hippolytus of Rome. Commentary on the Song of Songs 24–25. Ed. and trans. Yancey W. Smith, The Mystery of Anointing: Hippolytus’ Commentary on the Song of Songs (Gorgias Studies in Early Christianity and Patristics). Piscataway: Gorgias Press, 2015.
Gregory of Antioch. Homily on the Myrrh-bearing Women. (Sixth-century homily; cited in Eastern liturgical and patristic anthologies.)
Thomas Aquinas. Commentary on the Gospel of John, on John 20:17–18 (lectio 3). Trans. Fabian Larcher, Aquinas Institute.
Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments. Decree Apostolorum Apostola, 3 June 2016. (Roman elevation of the feast and recovery of the title.)
The Menaion, July 22. (The apolytikion, kontakion, and stichera to St. Mary Magdalene.)