Jesus is walking from town to town in Galilee, preaching, and Luke stops to say who is walking with him. The twelve, and some women, and the first woman Luke names is Mary called Magdalene. No book of the Bible says she was a prostitute. Luke gives her one line of past, and it is about demons.
Soon afterwards, he went about through cities and villages, preaching and bringing the good news of God’s Kingdom. With him were the twelve, and certain women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary who was called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out; and Joanna, the wife of Chuzas, Herod’s steward; Susanna; and many others who served them from their possessions.
Luke 8:1-3 (WEB)
On the road
The quotations here are from the World English Bible. Seven demons, and then a detail almost nobody repeats: these women had been healed, and they were paying out of their own means for the work going on around them. Magdalene is usually read as “from Magdala,” a town by the Sea of Galilee that Matthew mentions once, in 15:39, so she is known by where she came from, while Joanna next to her is known by her husband.
The order matters. They were healed first, and then they served, which is the reverse of the saying that God helps those who help themselves.
The last verses of Mark, which some early copies of that Gospel do not have, say the same thing about her past and nothing more, in Mark 16:9: Jesus “appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons.” Those seven demons are the whole of her history in the Gospels, and they are gone before the story starts.
At the cross, the burial, and the tomb
After the road, every scene she is in is the end of the story. Matthew and Mark place her among the women watching the crucifixion from a distance, and John has her standing by the cross with his mother. She sees where his body is laid. On the first day of the week she returns to the tomb, in all four Gospels.
John follows her closest. She finds the stone moved and runs to Peter, in John 20:2: “They have taken away the Lord out of the tomb, and we don’t know where they have laid him!” She comes back and stands outside weeping, and she does not know him when he speaks to her.
Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him, “Rabboni!” which is to say, “Teacher!”
John 20:16 (WEB)
He gives her an errand in John 20:17: “go to my brothers and tell them.” In John she is the first person the risen Jesus speaks to and the first he sends. Matthew has her met on the way with the other Mary, and the two of them are sent together. Luke 24:11 says the women’s report “seemed to them to be nonsense, and they didn’t believe them.”
A healed woman who gave from what she had, who stayed to the end, and who carried the first news: that is everything the Gospels say of her, put together.
The woman in Luke 7
The reputation came from the chapter before she is named. In Luke 7 a woman comes into a Pharisee’s house while Jesus is at dinner.
Behold, a woman in the city who was a sinner, when she knew that he was reclining in the Pharisee’s house, brought an alabaster jar of ointment.
Luke 7:37 (WEB)
She is a sinner, and Luke never says what kind. The Pharisee says it again two verses later, and still no sin is named. Jesus tells him in Luke 7:47, “her sins, which are many, are forgiven,” and leaves the list blank, and Luke never gives her name.
Then, at the start of chapter 8, Luke names Mary Magdalene for the first time, with seven demons and no sin at all, and draws no line back to the woman with the jar. John has a different Mary anoint Jesus’ feet and wipe them with her hair, Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, in Bethany, “six days before the Passover.” Both women anoint his feet and wipe them with their hair, which is the likeliest reason readers joined the two. The texts give three women in three settings, and none of them joins any two.
In a sermon usually dated 591, Pope Gregory the Great preached Luke’s sinner, John’s Mary and the Mary of the seven demons as one woman. That reading lasted for centuries, and with it the assumption that the sinner’s unnamed sin was sexual, which is how Mary Magdalene became the prostitute. It took a woman the Gospels present as a disciple and a witness and reduced her to one sin she is never accused of. Many churches today, the Catholic Church included, honor her as the first witness to the resurrection and not as a penitent prostitute.
Could she still be the woman of Luke 7? Nobody can prove a negative from silence, and the text does not rule it out. But Luke names Mary for the first time right after a story about a woman he does not name, and even that woman is never given a trade. The label is not in the Bible.
What she said
What can be said of her, from the text, is short enough to repeat: healed, generous, faithful at the cross, first at the tomb, first sent. The last thing John records of her is the errand done.
Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the Lord, and that he had said these things to her.
John 20:18 (WEB)