To make matters infinitely worse, the woman in question is a notorious character with an ill-earned reputation. For a woman to let down her hair in public was regarded as scandalous, and for this woman to then anoint the body of a male rabbi was shocking in the extreme. While this occurrence would be considered outlandish enough in our modern milieu, it is all the more jarring given the social customs of the time. The interaction takes place in Galilee, in the home of a certain Simon the Pharisee. The first of these, delineated only in Luke, is the scene of an anonymous “woman of the city, who was a sinner” who comes to Jesus with a flask of ointment and uses this, mingled with her tears, to wipe his feet (Luke 7:37). For the bulk of the Western tradition, however, it is evident that there were two anointings, and only two. An unwelcome roadblock for homilists today is the seeming surfeit of nameless women in the Gospels coming to anoint the feet of Jesus with their hair. We begin by examining the reasons for identifying Mary of Bethany with the woman from Luke 7. Like him, it is my firm conviction that if the traditional depiction can be vindicated, then Mary Magdalene shines forth as a far greater saint as a result-a vivid instantiation of John Henry Newman’s “ Saint of Love,” the model of perfect penitence whose heart burned with ardent longing for her Master and Friend. In making this case, I have freely drawn from Fr. In addition, it suggests that modern critics have been overly hasty in jettisoning-and, more often than not, ridiculing-some fifteen hundred years of liturgical and hagiographical testimony which favors the traditional view. If my argument is successful, then it demonstrates that the traditional Western view remains exegetically reasonable, and believers today can be intellectually justified in holding to the ancient devotion. Secondly, I shall argue that a plausible case can be made for the further identification of this composite figure with the person of Mary Magdalene. On the basis of what the French exegete André Feuillet termed a “convergence of probabilities,” I shall argue, first, that Mary of Bethany is very likely the same person as the “woman of the city, who was a sinner” (Luke 7:37). I shall therefore attempt to recover the alluring yet elusive figure of Mary Magdalene as presented to us in the canonical Gospels. I think these critics are wrong, and I am convinced that the Medievals and the early Western Church got it right. Some feminist scholars went even further, arguing that by depicting the saint as a reformed prostitute, the Medieval Church was actively trying to disparage the role of women in the Christian community. With the rise of critical scholarship in the twentieth century, it became increasingly fashionable for academics to dismiss the ancient devotion as pious reverie. Yet today the traditional view has been almost entirely rejected. Here was one who had dramatically overcome her vices, offering hope to the most hardened sinner.Īlthough a number of Eastern Fathers took a different view, this vision of the Magdalene as sinner-turned-saint became the consensus position in the West for over a thousand years. The popular portrayal of her as a reformed prostitute (a characterization never explicitly stated in Scripture, but often inferred on the basis of Luke 7), far from being an attempt to denigrate her, served only to strengthen ordinary people’s devotion to this fascinating heroine. Thus conceived, Mary Magdalene garnered extraordinary appeal throughout the Middle Ages as a potent symbol of what God’s grace could accomplish in the hearts of his wayward children. From its earliest days, Western Christianity championed the view that Mary Magdalene is simply another title for Mary the sister of Martha and Lazarus, whom today we tend to call Mary of Bethany and they further identified this Mary with the unnamed sinful woman who anoints the feet of Jesus in the seventh chapter of Luke’s Gospel. Upon reading Davidson’s work, I quickly learned that the enormous cult to Mary Magdalene that existed during the Middle Ages was animated by a very particular perspective. The title of the book was Saint Mary Magdalene: Prophetess of Eucharistic Love, and my friend assured me that it did a good job clarifying the various Marys who appear on the pages of the Gospels. Later on that same trip, one of my fellow pilgrims recommended to me a book by an Irish priest called Fr. Realizing I was just a few feet away from the spot where this profound exchange took place brought tears to my eyes. While sitting at the base of one of the many columns in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I found myself meditating on Saint John’s description of the first encounter between Mary Magdalene and the Risen Lord (see John 20:11–18). It was during a visit to the Holy Land in the summer of 2019 that I first got to know one of history’s most mysterious saints.
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