It’s not that I object to her profession but Mary Magdalene was not a sex worker; she was the sugar mama of Jesus

My brother and I were shopping with my father at some department store. We were gleefully hiding in the center of those round clothing racks. We had planned to jump-scare our father whenever he came by. Unfortunately for us, he didn’t seem to be in the same section. After waiting for what felt like an eternity, we decided to modify our prank. We quietly snuck back out of the clothing rack and began to search the store for him.

I pointed out my father to my little brother using improvisational sign language like I was in a war movie and had just discovered the target. Very, very softly we snuck up on him, and I kicked him in the pants from behind. 

We laughed and laughed until the man turned around; it was not our father.

That day I learned a valuable lesson, always confirm your mark before an attack. Some of the greatest mistakes in history have been made because people didn’t just double check their sources and mistook a person for someone else. Sometimes, that results in kicking the wrong dude, but on occasion, it can have way bigger societal consequences of.

Unholy Sh+t: An Irreverent Bible Study

Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Today’s Reading: Matthew 13:1-23, Luke 8:1-15

Sometimes the gospels line up nearly perfectly. Sure, there might be minor differences in phrasing, or maybe one of the authors will make a story a bit shorter than the other. Then, there are times when the differences seem so profound that it makes you start to wonder which version of the tales you should believe. 

The parable of the sower is pretty straightforward: Jesus is teaching a large crowd, he speaks to them in parables, and one of the stories is about a sower who throws seeds out onto the ground. Some of the seeds land on the road, other seeds were eaten by little birdies, and a few of them grow but get a sunburn. Finally, a few of the seeds land on good soil and are able to be harvested. Honesty, I think the moral of the story is that this is about nepotism; this guy is clearly not a professional sower. Motherf+cker is just out there tossing seeds wherever the hell he likes. This isn’t someone who graduated sower school or whatever. 

Rocky and the gang are also confused, so they ask Jesus about it and he’s all, “You really don’t get this? The seeds that don’t grow are people who refuse to listen; the ones that grow but get sunburnt are people who listen to me for a while but burn out. Then, the seed on good soil is everyone who loves me until the end.”

It does seem like a pretty straightforward story, right?

Well, it seems to be if you are reading the Gospel of Matthew. The way that Matt tells it is that Jesus has another crowd of people show up while he is hanging out at his mom’s house. Jesus, having forgotten to turn his locations off on Snapchat, walks outside his family home and sees a bunch of folks waiting outside to see what he will do next. Jesus and the boys get onto a boat and paddle out a little ways so the crowd can see him better. The whole scene is a culmination of events: Jesus had been going from town to town healing people, realizes he can’t do it all on his own, teaches the disciples how to heal people, sends them on a side quest, Jesus decides to go back home for a bit, accidentally insults his mom, and now he is hanging out at home. At the beginning of this, Matthew gives a long explanation of who the twelve disciples are and talks a lot about other crowds. But he doesn’t really mention anyone else.

Luke, on the other hand does not mention anything about boats or water. He doesn’t begin the story with Jesus hanging out with his mom. Instead, he begins the story not with the disciples going out on a boat but with explaining who the women are with Jesus. Luke makes a point to say that Jesus is traveling with the twelve and “Mary (called the Magdalene), Joanna, Suzanna, and many others.” What is very interesting is that he then goes on to say that these women were with Jesus and the twelve but also that they were “supporting him with their own resources.”

Matthew does not mention Mary Magdalene until way later in his Gospel; she doesn’t get a credit until the death and resurrection of Jesus. But Luke is providing context for who Mary is very early on in the telling, as if she is around from pretty much the beginning, along with the twelve—not just hanging around them but that she is a woman of great means and has the ability to be the benefactor of the mission of Jesus.

You might be saying to yourself, “But I thought she was a sex worker?”

As best we can tell, she absolutely was not. 🎶It's not that I object to that profession; it’s just that there is no evidence whatsoever in the scripture to even imply that she was🎵. She was likely a wealthy business owner or widow. Whatever the case is, it appears that Mary was pretty loaded and was entirely sold out to seeing the message of Jesus being delivered to the masses. The other twelve don’t seem to have money, most of them were peasant fishermen, and there are references to Judas stealing money. It was the badass women of the Bible who helped finance the entire operation. Mary Magdalene is like the Lucile Ball of the disciples.

So how did Mary Magdalene go from boss babe to pretty woman? Like most f+ck ups in Christian history, you have the Roman Catholic Church to thank. Most specifically, Pope Gregory gave a sermon in 591 on Easter Sunday, and he must have had too much of the sacramental wine, because he was jumping all the f+ck over the place. Old Greg gets up there and mushes together a whole bunch of stories from the Bible. He mistakenly equates Mary Magdalene and the woman with the alabaster jar as the same person.

This is where things get a bit confusing, stick with me here because this is the part of the gospels that was directed by Quentin Tarantino. 

Jesus has his feet washed with perfume not once but twice in the scriptures. These stories are mentioned in Luke 7 and John 12. However, they are seemingly not the same event. The description of events according to John describes Jesus being in the town of Bethany, visiting his old friend Lazarus and his two sisters, Mary and Martha. When Jesus arrives at the house, Mary (not Magdalene, Laz’s little sister) pours perfume all over Jesus’ feet and then washes them with her hair. Judas is all like, “What the actual f+ck? That sh+it is expensive. Y’all don’t even care about poor people. We could have sold that for like thirty pieces of silver *Judas looks directly into the camera*” Then John throws shade and is like, “Judas didn’t even like poor people; he was just stealing the money.” Then Jesus and Judas get into a singing battle while the other apostles chant “What’s the buzz!”

There is a similar incident where Jesus is hanging out as the house of a well-known Pharisee named Simon and a “sinful woman” comes running into the house and begins to weep at the feet of Jesus. She uses her tears to wash his feet and then anoints them with perfume. There is no singing, Judas is nowhere to be found, and it's a totally different location. This woman of ill repute was not Mary of Bethany, and Mary of Bethany is not the Magdalene. I know this, Luke knew this, John new this, Jesus absolutely knew this. But you know who didn’t f+cking know? The goddamn Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.

This resulted in the “sinful woman” becoming a prostitute but also Mary Magdalene in the mind of the Bishop of Rome, and the message spread quickly. Soon, icons were made of Mary Magdalene holding alabaster jars and she was deemed the symbol of penance. However, not everyone was on board with this mess. It was a contention point for Eastern Christians and a major debate that led to the reformation. For many, this proved without question that the Pope was not some infallible figurehead. He too, could make big mistakes and they would have real consequences.

For Mary Magdalene, those consequences were that for hundreds of years in the West, she was stripped of her title as “the apostle to the apostles” and the first patron of the Church. It sort of seems that Matthew might align more with Pope Gregory; I mean, he did omit that the women were with him during the time that Jesus was giving the sermon with the parable of the sower. But, then again, Matthew is no Paul and there isn’t evidence to support that he intentionally left the women disciples out of the narrative. Something else might be going on all together.

Jesus is traveling from town to town, and we know that he is healing the sick, raising the dead, and presumably turning some water into wine because he was popular as f+ck. Because he was traveling all over the place, it’s unlikely that he was giving a different sermon every single time he was with a new crowd. Chances are, he told many of the same stories over and over again. It is entirely possible that Matthew was recounting the time Jesus told the story from a boat, and Luke is telling about the time when Jesus was hanging out with the twelve and the ladies. It is likely that Jesus told those stories countless times. The surroundings might be different, but the message is the same: some of us are going to listen about caring for our neighbor, loving our enemies, and fighting injustice, and some of us won’t.

Or also, the Bible is a collection of stories passed down by oral tradition and then written decades or even centuries after the fact before then being translated from Aramaic and Greek into Latin and then German before then being massed produced in every language known to humanity. I think it's possible someone f+cked something up along the way, just like Pope Gregory did with Mary Magdalene.

One thing is absolutely certain, Jesus couldn’t have done what he did, and we wouldn’t be reading these stories to this day, if it weren’t for the Magdalene being the benefactor of the message of peace, hope, and love. May she receive all the credit and praise she deserves as one of the mighty women of the Bible. Some of whom washed Jesus’ feet with their tears, others who boldly stood down Roman guards to anoint his body, and for those who financially supported this broke band of brothers.