The Eastern Tradition

The Christian East never merged Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman of Luke 7 or with Mary of Bethany. Its liturgical books commemorate the three on separate days; its hymnography knows Mary Magdalene as the Equal-to-the-Apostles and Myrrh-bearer, never as a reformed prostitute; and its inclusion of Mary of Bethany among the myrrh-bearers, beside Mary Magdalene, presupposes that they are two women. This file sets out the Eastern non-conflation, shows it in the calendar and the services, and explains why it preserves Mary Magdalene’s apostolic dignity intact.

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

Three Women, Three Commemorations

The clearest evidence that the East keeps the three women distinct is the calendar itself, which commemorates them separately and at different times of the year:

  • Mary Magdalene, the Holy Myrrh-bearer and Equal-to-the-Apostles, is celebrated on July 22 and on the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women (The Menaion, July 22; The Pentecostarion). Her service hails her deliverance from seven demons, her place at the tomb, her preaching of the Resurrection, and her repose at Ephesus — and never describes her as a penitent harlot.

  • The sinful woman of Luke 7 is not commemorated as a saint at all but is encountered liturgically on Holy Wednesday, whose services meditate on “the woman who had fallen into many sins” who anointed the Lord’s feet — the celebrated Hymn of Kassiani (the Doxastikon of the Aposticha at Holy Wednesday Matins, by St. Kassia the Hymnographer, ninth century). The Eastern services treat her as the anonymous penitent of the Gospel, set deliberately against Judas the betrayer, and nowhere call her Mary Magdalene.

  • Mary and Martha of Bethany, the sisters of the righteous Lazarus, are commemorated together (most commonly on June 4, and again in connection with Lazarus Saturday and the raising of Lazarus). Mary of Bethany is honored as the sister who “chose the good portion” (Luke 10:42) and who anointed the Lord before His Passion (John 12:3) — a distinct person with her own commemoration (The Great Synaxaristes, June 4; the services of Lazarus Saturday).

Three women, three commemorations: the calendar is the plainest refutation of the conflation. The East did not need to “undo” a merger because it never made one.

The Myrrh-bearers Presuppose the Distinction

A second, internal proof lies in the very list of the myrrh-bearers. The Byzantine tradition gathers the women of the Resurrection into a fixed company and, among them, names both Mary Magdalene and Mary the sister of Lazarus (with Martha) as distinct members of the band (The Pentecostarion, the Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women; see The Myrrh-bearing Women). If the East had identified Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, it could not list them side by side as two of the myrrh-bearers. The liturgical roster itself encodes the non-conflation.

No “Penitent” in the Eastern Magdalene

The Western composite hung on reading “seven demons” (Luke 8:2) as a figure for a life of sin — precisely Gregory the Great’s gloss, “what did these seven demons signify, if not all the vices?” (Gregory, Homily 33 [PL 76:1239]). The East never made that move. In the Eastern reading, demonic possession is an affliction healed, not a vice absolved (see Mary of Magdala); the seven demons are the measure of Mary’s bondage and of Christ’s deliverance, not a catalogue of her sins. Consequently the Eastern hymnography for July 22 praises Mary as one “set free from the tyranny of demons” and made a herald of the Resurrection, with no suggestion of prostitution or sexual penitence (The Menaion, July 22, stichera and canon).

This is why the Eastern Mary Magdalene is iconographically and devotionally a different figure from the Western penitent. The icon shows her dignified, bearing the alabaster jar of myrrh or the red egg, often in the proclaiming gesture of the apostle — never the dishevelled, half-clothed penitent of Western art (see The Iconography). The title that everywhere accompanies her name is “Equal-to-the-Apostles,” not “the Penitent.”

The Patristic Reading

The Greek Fathers, reading the Gospels, generally kept the figures apart. They did not universally and explicitly theorize a “three-women” doctrine — the question was not a controversy in the East as it became in the West — but their commentaries treat Mary Magdalene at the tomb (John 20) without importing the sinful woman of Luke 7, and treat the Lukan anointing without naming Mary Magdalene. Chrysostom, expounding the women at the tomb and the anointing scenes, distinguishes the events and does not identify the women across them (Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew, Hom. 80 on the anointing at Bethany, and Hom. 88–89 on the women at the Cross and tomb; Homilies on John, Hom. 85–86 on Mary Magdalene at the tomb). The Eastern exegetical tradition thus reads what the conflation overrode: that the Gospels present several women whom the text does not equate.

There is a complication worth naming honestly. [Disputed: the Gospels themselves record more than one anointing — the anointing by "a sinful woman" in Galilee at the house of Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36–50) and the anointing at Bethany by Mary the sister of Lazarus six days before the Passover (John 12:1–8; cf. Matt. 26:6–13; Mark 14:3–9). Whether these are two distinct events or variant accounts of one is debated among interpreters. The Eastern liturgical tradition treats the Bethany anointing (Mary of Bethany) and the Galilean anointing (the unnamed sinner) as distinct, and keeps both distinct from Mary Magdalene; the harmonization of the anointing accounts is a separate question from the conflation of the women, and the East resolves both in favor of distinction.] What is not in dispute is that the East never identified Mary Magdalene with either anointing woman.

Affirming the Eastern Reading

This collection affirms the Eastern reading: Mary Magdalene, the sinful woman of Luke 7, and Mary of Bethany are three distinct women, and Mary Magdalene is not the penitent prostitute of Western legend but the healed disciple, Myrrh-bearer, and Equal-to-the-Apostles. The judgment is not merely confessional preference; it is the better reading of the text. Luke introduces Mary Magdalene by name in 8:2 immediately after narrating the sinful woman in 7:37–50 without the least hint that they are the same — a juxtaposition that tells decisively against identifying them. Mary of Bethany is everywhere fixed to her family and her village, never to Magdala. And the now-corrected Roman calendar of 1969 concedes the point, commemorating on July 22 “only Mary Magdalene… not the sister of Lazarus nor the sinful woman” (Calendarium Romanum, 1969; see The Three Marys). On this question, East and West have, since 1969, come back into agreement — and the agreement is the East’s longstanding reading.

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version: Luke 7:36–50; 8:1–3; 10:38–42; John 11; 12:1–8; 20:11–18.
  • The Menaion, July 22. (The service to St. Mary Magdalene.)
  • The Pentecostarion. Trans. Holy Transfiguration Monastery. Boston, 1990. (The Sunday of the Myrrh-bearing Women; the myrrh-bearers’ roster.)
  • The Lenten Triodion, Holy Wednesday. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. (The Hymn of Kassiani, “The woman who had fallen into many sins.”)
  • Chrysostom, John. Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, Hom. 80, 88–89; Homilies on the Gospel of St. John, Hom. 85–86. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vols. 10 and 14.
  • Gregory the Great. Homily 33 on the Gospels [PL 76:1238–1246]. Trans. David Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies. Kalamazoo, 1990.
  • Calendarium Romanum. Vatican City, 1969.