Mary Magdalene - Apostle to the Apostles

(Mary Magdalene by He Qi, China)

The 22 of July is a major feast day in the church calendar celebrating St. Mary Magdalene.  This feast day is observed in the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, and in the Lutheran Church.  But this wasn’t always the case, especially in the Catholic and Anglican traditions.  The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene was included in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, but when the book was revised three years later, her day was removed from both the greater feasts and lesser feasts.  There wasn’t even a collect in her honor included until the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  It wasn’t until our current 1979 Book of Common Prayer that the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene once again was included amongst the Major Feasts.  In fact, Mary Magdalene is the only woman in the Bible afforded a major Feast Day.  (Mary, the mother of Jesus, is represented by feast day events—i.e. the annunciation and the visitation.  But she does not have a feast day for herself.) 

From the perspective of proclaiming the good news of the resurrection of our Lord, Mary Magdalene is the most important woman named in the New Testament.  She was the first to see the resurrected Christ as concurred in all four gospels.  She was the first apostle (apostle derives from the Greek word apostello meaning  “to send”) sent to tell the others of Jesus’ resurrection.  Mary is a prominent figure in the passion story and resurrection, yet is not referred to anywhere else in the four canonical gospels, with the exception of Luke 8:2, where she was named as being cured of “seven demons”.  A hint is given as to her importance to Jesus and his followers in the next verse that admits that she and a few others of the women followers were the ones who provided financial support for Jesus and his entourage out of their own means.  Yet someone with apparently so little consequence is given such an important role as to be the first apostle.  

History indicates that the early years of Christianity included a powerful and widespread following of Mary Magdalene to rival those of the Johannites (followers of John, the Baptist) and Petrarchs (followers of Peter, which eventually became the Christian Church with which we are most familiar).  Mary’s gospel, the teachings that Jesus gave to her alone, shows similarities enough to indicate they are Jesus’s words (like use of the phrase “those with ears, hear me”), but is otherwise quite different.  Her gospel, of which only a few pages remain, can be viewed as two parts.  The first part includes direct questions put to Jesus that he answers more directly than he ever does in the four canonicals.  The second part seems to refer to a private conversation between Jesus and Mary about his three days spent between his death and resurrection. The radical implication is made with Mary’s gospel that salvation comes through the understanding and assimilation in one’s life of Jesus’ teachings rather than through his death and resurrection. (You can find her gospel included in the Nag Hammadi Library or here.) This was exceedingly controversial and the faction was a clear threat to a church founded on the teachings of St. Peter.  So it was systematically repressed and eradicated until not even her feast day remained in the church calendar. 

By discounting other gospels and witness to Christ’s life and teachings, all unwanted, threatening traces of Mary and her strange perspective could be ignored.  Thus, very little is known about Mary Magdalene.  Speculation of Mary’s relationship with Jesus was rejected, to the point that the Church (specifically, Pope Gregory the Great) referred to her as and adulteress and a prostitute.  In 1969, the Vatican recanted this, but the damage had been done.  Evidence of her life has been lost through denial and ignorance or obscured in the proliferations of Mary’s throughout the New Testament.  Regardless, Mary Magdalene was important enough as Christ’s first apostle that she warrants the honor of a feast day.