No book of the Bible says she was. Luke gives her exactly one line of history, and it has nothing to do with selling anything.
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)
Seven demons, and then a detail almost nobody repeats. She is listed among the women who were funding the operation out of their own property. Whatever her life had been, by the time Luke introduces her she has money and she is spending it on an itinerant preacher and twelve men who are not earning.
Notice also how she is identified. Joanna, in the same sentence, is the wife of Chuzas. Mary is called Magdalene, which is usually read as the name of her town. Luke fixes one woman by her husband and the other by a name of her own, and the second is the more unusual of the two.
Three women were folded into one
We inherited the prostitute by a route that has nothing to do with Luke’s sentence, because three separate figures got read over the centuries as the same person.
There is the unnamed woman in the previous chapter who weeps on Jesus’s feet in a Pharisee’s house. There is Mary of Bethany, Martha’s sister, who anoints him later in John. And there is Mary called Magdalene, who appears at the start of chapter eight with no connection drawn to either.
Luke has all three in his Gospel and joins none of them: the sinner in chapter seven, Magdalene in chapter eight, Martha’s sister in chapter ten. He names Mary Magdalene in 8:2 without a backward glance at the woman in 7:37, which is a strange thing for a careful writer to do if he thought they were the same person.
The woman they confused her with is not called that either
Here is the part that surprised me, and it is in Luke 7, in the description itself.
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)
A sinner. The Greek is hamartolos, the ordinary word, the same one Luke uses for tax collectors and for the company Jesus was criticized for keeping. No trade is named, in that verse or in the Pharisee’s complaint two verses later. Readers have long taken the phrase as a euphemism, and it may well be one, but that is a guess at a word the text does not use.
And the line the chapter is remembered for says her sins were many and are forgiven, without ever specifying one of them.
Seven words I never went and read
I have said the prostitute line out loud, more than once, in a room where people were taking me at my word.
What bothers me is not that I was wrong. It is how cheap the check would have been. There is one clause about her past. Seven words, in the translation above, in a Gospel I have read many times, and I never once went and looked at it before repeating what I had absorbed from somewhere else.
The story about who did it is also too tidy
The usual explanation is that Pope Gregory the Great made her a prostitute in a sermon in 591, and that the Church then taught it for fourteen centuries. Gregory’s Homily 33 does fold the figures together. The sentence people quote from it runs: she whom Luke calls the sinful woman, whom John calls Mary, we believe to be the Mary from whom Mark says seven devils were ejected. Three books, stitched into one woman.
But a homily is a sermon, not a decree, and what Gregory preached was repentance. What he dwells on is a woman turning toward God what she had spent on herself.
He does not leave that abstract. It is very evident, he says, that this woman, formerly addicted to forbidden deeds, had used perfume to give her flesh a pleasant odor. What she had shamefully granted to herself, she now offered to God in a manner worthy of praise. Then her eyes, her hair, her mouth, and that is as far as he goes. Forbidden deeds is not a trade, and the trade is no more in his text than in Luke’s. It accumulated afterwards, through art and drama and the sort of retelling that wants a clean before and after.
Which means the tidy version of this correction is wrong in the same way the thing it corrects is wrong. Somebody handed it to me and I took it without checking that one either.
Where she is actually standing
Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned and said to him, “Rabboni!” which is to say, “Teacher!”
John 20:16 (WEB)
All four Gospels put her at the cross or the tomb or both. John has her there alone in the dark, mistaking him for the gardener. What happens next is that he gives her an errand: go to my brothers and tell them. She is the first person told and the first sent, and by that evening the men she was sent to were behind a locked door.
Calling the legend a slander is putting it too high. What it does is demote her, taking a woman the Gospels present as a patron and a witness and a messenger, and reducing her to one sin she is never accused of. Naming a person by a sin is a habit with a long reach, and it does not get gentler when the sin is the only thing you can remember about them. Tradition did something similar with an innkeeper who does not appear in Luke at all, and in both cases the invented detail is smaller and easier to preach than what the text has.