Mary Magdalene and the Early Jesus Movement

Summary Mary Magdalene was a 1st-century disciple of Jesus. Along with other women, she followed and served Jesus and his itinerant ministry in Galilee, including by supporting it using her own material and financial resources. In this capacity, Magdalene also received some of Jesus’s teachings and, together with his twelve closest disciples, formed part of the growing circle of people who responded positively to Jesus’s ministry. Magdalene and other women followed Jesus on his last journey from Galilee to Jerusalem, where they witnessed his crucifixion. Notably, Magdalene is the only person identified by the New Testament Gospels as a witness to Jesus’s death, burial, and the events surrounding his resurrection. These primary sources for Magdalene’s life thus cast her as the main witness to all the key events that proved foundational for the Christian movement that grew out of the proclamation of Jesus’s death and resurrection. By some accounts, Magdalene was also the first person to encounter the resurrected Jesus and to share news of his resurrection with others. In the centuries following the composition of the New Testament Gospels, the sparse primary evidence for Magdalene’s life and role in the early Jesus movement is interpreted in various ways. Some ancient texts portray her as a visionary and teacher who receives special revelation from the resurrected Jesus. And there is an increasing tendency to blur or merge her identity with that of other women depicted in the New Testament Gospels, such as Jesus’s mother and Mary of Bethany. By the Middle Ages, a composite figure that identifies Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and the unnamed penitent woman of Luke 7:36–50 became prominent in Western Europe. This conflation has been challenged in the modern era, when scholars increasingly seek to distinguish Magdalene from these other women and better understand the explicit New Testament descriptions of her within their 1st-century contexts. Feminist concerns and approaches to biblical interpretation have been especially prominent in this task of attempting to distinguish the real, 1st-century Mary Magdalene from her subsequent interpretations and to reassert her roles as key witness to, and proclaimer of, Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.