The Three Marys

The Western image of Mary Magdalene as a reformed prostitute rests on a conflation that merged three distinct Gospel figures into one: Mary Magdalene (out of whom seven demons were cast), the unnamed sinful woman who anointed Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:36–50), and Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus (Luke 10; John 11–12). The merger was crystallized by Pope Gregory the Great in his Homily 33 on the Gospels (AD 591) and governed Latin piety for fourteen centuries, until Rome’s Calendarium Romanum of 1969 quietly distinguished the three again. This file traces the conflation, its texts, and its undoing.

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

Three Distinct Women in the Gospels

The Gospels present three women whom nothing requires us to identify with one another:

Mary Magdalene — named in all four Gospels, introduced as the woman “from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2), foremost of the myrrh-bearers, first witness of the Resurrection (John 20:11–18). The Gospels never call her a sinner and never connect her with the anointing of Luke 7 or with Bethany.
The unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7:36–50 — “a woman of the city, who was a sinner,” who entered the house of Simon the Pharisee, wept over Jesus’ feet, wiped them with her hair, and anointed them; to whom He said, “Your sins are forgiven… your faith has saved you; go in peace” (Luke 7:37–50, RSV). She is unnamed, her offense unspecified (the text says only “a sinner”), and she appears in chapter 7 — immediately before the introduction of Mary Magdalene in chapter 8, where Luke names Mary as if for the first time. Luke evidently did not think the two were the same woman.
Mary of Bethany — sister of Martha and Lazarus, who sat at the Lord’s feet to hear His word (Luke 10:38–42), whose brother He raised (John 11), and who anointed His feet with costly ointment six days before the Passover (John 12:1–8). She lived at Bethany near Jerusalem, not at Magdala in Galilee, and is always identified by her family, never as Magdalene.

These are, on the face of the text, three women: one named and freed from demons, one unnamed and forgiven her sins, one named and of Bethany. The Christian East reads them so to this day (see The Eastern Tradition).

The Gregorian Conflation

The merger of the three into one is the work, above all, of Pope Gregory the Great (Gregory I, pope 590–604). In a homily preached at Rome and preserved in his Forty Gospel Homilies, Gregory declared: “She whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom seven demons were ejected according to Mark. And what did these seven demons signify, if not all the vices?” (Gregory the Great, Homily 33 on the Gospels [PL 76:1239]; trans. Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies, 1990). In a single sentence Gregory identified the sinful woman of Luke 7, the Mary who anointed Jesus in John (i.e. Mary of Bethany), and Mary Magdalene of Mark 16:9 as one and the same person — and, fatefully, glossed the “seven demons” as “all the vices,” reading Mary’s deliverance as the cleansing of a life of sin.

Gregory went further, supplying the sin: “It is clear, brothers, that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts” (Gregory, Homily 33 [PL 76:1239]; Hurst, 1990). With this, the “sinner” of Luke 7 became specifically a woman of sexual sin, and that sin was transferred to Mary Magdalene. The composite “penitent Magdalene” — the reformed harlot with loosed hair and an alabaster jar, weeping at Christ’s feet — was born. It is essential to be fair to Gregory: he did not invent the identification out of nothing (a tendency to associate the anointing women had appeared earlier in some Latin writers), and his aim was pastoral, to hold up a great penitent as a figure of hope for sinners. But the historical and exegetical result was a conflation that the text does not support.

Fourteen Centuries of the Composite Figure

Gregory’s authority fixed the composite Magdalene for the Latin West. Through the Middle Ages she became the patron of penitents and of the contemplative life, the heroine of the Provençal legend (see The Provençal Legend), the subject of the lengthy vita in the Golden Legend (Jacobus de Voragine, c. 1260), and the model for an immense iconography of penitence — the weeping Magdalene of the Renaissance and Baroque, half-clothed, jar in hand, gazing on a skull. The composite was so deeply rooted that “Magdalene” entered the English language as a common noun for a reformed prostitute, and the “Magdalen laundries” and asylums for “fallen women” took her name (Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor, 1994).

Not all the West accepted the merger. In the sixteenth century the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples argued in De Maria Magdalena (1518) that the three were distinct women, igniting a sharp controversy; the Sorbonne condemned his thesis, but the question was never fully settled in Western scholarship thereafter (Haskins, 1994). The Eastern Church, of course, had never made the merger and so had nothing to undo.

The 1969 Roman Correction

The Roman Catholic Church formally distinguished the three figures only in the twentieth century. In the liturgical reform that followed the Second Vatican Council, the Calendarium Romanum of 1969 revised the feast of July 22 so that it commemorated Mary Magdalene alone — and explicitly not the sinful woman of Luke 7 nor Mary of Bethany. The revised calendar’s notes specified that on July 22 “only Mary Magdalene is celebrated, to whom Christ appeared after the Resurrection; it is not a question of the sister of Lazarus nor of the sinful woman” (Calendarium Romanum, Vatican, 1969, note on 22 July). The Gospel reading for the day was changed to John 20, the Resurrection appearance, in place of the old Luke 7 anointing. With this, Rome aligned its liturgical reading with the Eastern tradition it had departed from in Gregory’s day — distinguishing, at last, the three women the Gregorian homily had merged. The trajectory was completed in 2016, when her commemoration was raised to a feast and the ancient title “apostle to the apostles” recovered (see Apostle to the Apostles).

Why the Distinction Matters

The conflation is not a harmless devotional shorthand. It cost Mary Magdalene her proper Gospel identity: the woman whom Christ delivered from demons and made first witness of the Resurrection became, in the Western imagination, primarily a penitent prostitute — a transformation that obscured her apostolic dignity and, in the modern period, made her an easy target for myth-makers who could project onto the “sinful Magdalene” a sexual relationship with Christ (see The Gospel of Mary and Modern Myths). Reading the three women as three — as the East always has, and as Rome now does — restores to Mary Magdalene the figure the Gospels actually give: not the harlot but the healed disciple, the Myrrh-bearer, the Equal-to-the-Apostles.

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; Mark 16:9.
Gregory the Great. Homily 33 on the Gospels (XL Homiliarum in Evangelia, Hom. 33) [PL 76:1238–1246]. Trans. David Hurst, Forty Gospel Homilies (Cistercian Studies 123). Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990.
Calendarium Romanum. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969. (Note on 22 July distinguishing Mary Magdalene from the sinful woman and from Mary of Bethany.)
Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques. De Maria Magdalena. Paris, 1518.
Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea), “Saint Mary Magdalene.” Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Haskins, Susan. Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.