The Ancients - Mary Magdalene

Episode Date: April 17, 2022

Who was Mary Magdalene? Jesus' confidant, a devout follower, or a sex worker?In this Easter special, Tristan is joined by Professors Helen Bond and Joan Taylor, authors of 'Women Remembered' to explore Mary Magdalene and her role in the bible. Through looking at both ancient and contemporary source material, depictions in art across the centuries, and exploring religious themes they hope to offer a new narrative on the vital roles women played in the Bible.Their book 'Women Remembered' is out now.For more Ancients content, subscribe to our Ancients newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store.

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We're talking all about the life and legacy of Mary Magdalene. We've not one, but two contributors, Professor Helen Bond and Professor Joan Taylor. Now, Helen and Joan, they've just released a new book called Women Remembered, where they follow the lives of several women from the biblical narrative, one of which is Mary Magdalene. This was a great episode for me to interview because I know next to nothing about Mary Magdalene, I must admit. So it was very enlightening for me as an interviewer to listen to Helen and Joan explain all about the legacy of this figure,

who was supposedly present at the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So without further ado, to talk all about Mary Magdalene, here's Joan and here's Helen. And here's Helen. Joan, Helen, it is wonderful to have you both on the podcast today. Thank you. Great to be here. Yes, it is wonderful to have you both on the podcast today, especially for this topic. Mary Magdalene, and of course it is Easter for this podcast episode. Because Mary Magdalene, Joan, first of all, the most attested woman in the Gospels and in early Christian literature, aside from the Virgin Mary. Do we think that her story by the later sources,

she was a female disciple and all of that, that actually some of the Gospels, her story is not taking to the fore as much as it perhaps could have been? In some ways, she couldn't be more important because she is the central player in terms of a witness to Jesus' crucifixion, his burial, and his resurrection. And the whole of the Christian proclamation is based on what she reports. So yeah, I don't think I would agree that she'd been marginalized within the New Testament in terms of the Gospels. But I think what happens is later on, the memory of Mary Magdalene has been a little bit difficult for the church. And there are reasons for that.

But in terms of her role in the story of Jesus, she's incredibly central. So fair enough. Thank you for pointing that out straight away, Joan. Helen, is it fair to say that we have traces in the Gospel writers of their being, as Joan has highlighted there, these female disciples, not just Mary Magdalene, a whole host of them, and they're incredibly important in the mission of Jesus? Yes. I mean, you do have to look for the clues. That's the thing. If you're just looking at what the men are doing, you can easily not spot them. But in Mark's gospel, he tells us right at the end, right when after Jesus has died on the cross, he suddenly says, oh, and there were some other women and they traveled with him from Galilee, many women, he says, and then he names three of them.

And the other gospel writers also name some of the women, although they're different women. So there's a whole host of women who've been with Jesus in Galilee. They've seen what he's been doing there, his teaching, his miracles, and then they've been on the road with the disciples and Jesus. So these are all part of Jesus's disciple group. It's made of men and women. So this kind of mental picture we have of Jesus surrounded by 12 men is just completely wrong. It's clearly a very mixed group that's making its way to Jerusalem. And correct me if I'm wrong, but do we also have an early letter from Saint Paul that also seems to perhaps affirm this too?

Yes. I mean, the thing about Paul is that his letters are actually far more open to women than people usually realise. And probably the best example of this is the last chapter in Paul's letter to the Romans. So this is Romans 16, and he's writing to a church that doesn't know him. So he says at the end, oh, all of these people can vouch for me. And a third of those people are women. So this is just a snapshot of people that Paul knows in the church. And yet a third are women. And they're doing things like running house churches, and they're apostles. And he talks about another woman who's a deacon. And, you know, these are prominent women. And it's clear that women are going out as

missionary pairs. Prisca and Aquila, married couples, are taking the message out around the Mediterranean. So there's plenty of evidence for women being disciples just as much as the men. Well, then let's delve into now the figure of Mary Magdalene. And Joan, first of all, no such thing as a silly question, especially for someoneene. And Joan, first of all, no such thing as a silly question, especially for someone like myself. Who, first of all, is Mary Magdalene? I mean, how does she feature in the New Testament? Well, there's a question. She appears in the Gospel of Luke earlier on than in the other Gospels. In the other Gospels, she appears around the time of Jesus' crucifixion with no introduction whatsoever. And actually, that sort of appearance out of the blue should point to the fact that people knew her very well.

Someone who is just introduced like Alexander and Rufus are introduced in the Gospel of Mark as the children of Simon of Cyrene. You have to remember that there is this culture in which people were talking about these characters that they knew about these characters, and we've just lost their story. So, Mary Magdalene just appears as this person that doesn't need any introduction in the three Gospels when she suddenly appears at the crucifixion. In the Gospel of Luke, she appears earlier on in a group of other women, this list of other women who were with Jesus in Galilee. And she is introduced there as Mary called the Magdalene who had seven demons thrown out of her. There is an idea that she had been healed

of some terrible thing that was represented by these seven demons. And she is in this list of other women that includes Joanna and Susanna, who are also healed of terrible ailments. So it's interesting, just to repeat what you're saying, that this seems to have been a figure who would have been well known to the story before the Gospels, as it were, that she needs no introduction, as it were. Yes, we have to remember that we're in an oral society in the ancient world. Writing is a strange activity, largely done by the elite, for the elite, and not that many people could read and write. So we have to ask why the Gospels were ever written down, especially given the fact

that they thought that the world was going to be completely transformed very, very soon. They weren't writing for us. They weren't writing for a group of people far into the future. And they were trying to encourage each other by writing things down. And they were also trying to record certain things. But alongside this writing activity, they were telling stories. And in the ancient world, you just have to imagine the storytelling endeavor taking place in groups of men, groups of women, mixed groups among children, among older people, and the story about Mary Magdalene developing in all sorts of different directions with the storytelling. Okay, then. So let's delve into the resurrection story as told in the canonical gospel. So I'm

going to go to you on this one, Helen. I mean, if we first of all focus in, I've got the gospel of Mark here. It seems to be the oldest gospel, but correct me if I'm wrong on that. But what does this account say of Mary Magdalene and her role in the resurrection story? Well, she is one of the women who's mentioned by Mark at the end. She's there at the crucifixion and she sort of follows on to see what happens to the body afterwards. So she follows whilst Jesus is being buried. And then because that's happening just before a Sabbath where, you know, you can't do any kind of work, she has to go away and then she waits till the Sabbath is over and she comes back with a couple of other women very early in the morning. And Mark says that they've come to anoint Jesus,

to anoint the body. Whether that's true or not, we don't know, because the body has obviously already been in the tomb for a couple of days by then. But at any rate, she's come back with these other women. And this is what women did in the ancient world. You know, the beginning and the end of the life cycle is particularly associated with women. So women are the ones who care for the dead, who mourn the body. So they've come back to be at the grave. And of course, what they find, according to Mark, is completely startling. The stone has been pushed to one side, they go in, they see this sort of angelic character who says that Jesus has been raised and that he's going to go before them to Galilee. And they're told to go and tell the disciples. But in Mark's gospel, they don't do that.

Mark says they just ran away and said nothing to anybody because they were afraid. And that's where he stops his gospel. So it's a very strange story. Most people think that the original ending to Mark's Gospel was at that point. And so the women run away and say nothing. Later Gospel writers use Mark as the basis for their own work, and they add extra stories. Probably Mark knew different stories too, but he wanted to end his at this sort of very provocative ending. He's sort of saying to his audience, what are you going to do? How are you going to respond? But then Matthew and Luke and John add extra stories. And in Matthew, the women are running away and then they see this vision

of Jesus. And in John's gospel, that's where we get this really beautiful story of Mary Magdalene coming back on her own and she finds the empty tomb and she doesn't know what's happened and then she sees Jesus and she thinks he's the gardener and he says her name and at that moment when he says her name she realizes who he is and starts to cry so we do get different pictures in the different Gospels, but they all agree that it was women who found the empty tomb. And they also agree that the first people to see the risen Jesus were the women. And Mary Magdalene is the one most frequently singled out there. Helen, do we have any idea why there is such variation in these Gospels in regards to whether Mary Magdalene sees Jesus alone or whether she's with others,

whether they run away? Do we know why there is this variation? I think it's because the story is just so kind of amazing and unlike anything that anybody can sort of grasp somehow, you know, and you can imagine the Gospels are written several decades later. Mark is, like you say, written several decades later. Mark is, like you say, the earliest one, probably about 40 years later. John is probably written, you know, 60, 70 years later. So a good deal of time has gone by. But this is an oral culture, stories are being passed around. There's a lot of agreement that it's the women who find the empty tomb, agreement that the women who first see Jesus. But there's all kinds of different accounts of where that happened, who exactly was there. And I think that's kind of what you would expect, really, if you've got these stories circulating around. At the same time,

though, you have another tradition in Paul's letters, Paul, who is usually fairly okay with women, you know, quite accommodating to women. But when he tells the story of the resurrection and exactly who gets to have appearances, he says that the first person to have an appearance was Peter, and he doesn't mention women at all. And I think the reason for that is probably not that Paul doesn't know anything about the women, but simply that in the ancient world, women's testimony wasn't regarded as important. Or if you wanted to prove something, you wanted to make sure that a man could tell you. And so what Paul is doing, I think, is listing the men who had seen the risen Jesus. But it's clear from the Gospels

that actually it was the women. And one final question on that, and this is just me going on a slight tangent. So if we don't know, just let me know. But in regards to this story and other early Christian literature, do we have other references to Mary Magdalene in the resurrection story from other Christian literature from these first few centuries? There is another version of the ending of Mark, which we think was added later on, in which it just refers in passing to after Jesus had appeared to Mary Magdalene. It clearly doesn't want to focus on that story of Mary Magdalene, but it knows that there is a story circulating about her witnessing to the risen Jesus, very similar to the Gospel of John, but it's not considered part of the original ending of the Gospel of Mark. But it goes to show that there are these other Gospels, there are other oral stories going around, there are also

other written stories going around in the 1st and 2nd century, and we don't know how many actually there were. We just have little fragments of a few. So, for example, there's one in the Gospel of Peter, which people debate about how early the Gospel of Peter was, but say early to mid-second century, where Mary Magdalene comes to the tomb. And it's very much, she's the driving force. She is the one who's been given the responsibility to look after burial rites. And the Gospel of Peter says how she's doing this because it was the practice for women who were looking after their loved ones who died. her responsibility that it's not just any woman who was in the Jesus movement, and she's sort of taking a surprising amount of initiative. It was really her job to look after the burial rites of

Jesus. So that implies a certain relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene, that she was the leader of the women disciples, that she was perhaps especially close to Jesus. And then the resurrection experiences that are told follow on from that primary role that she then has in burial rites. Well, you mentioned other gospels. So, Jen, I'd love to delve into that a bit more now to get more of that story, as it were, because I've got in my notes here, the Gospel of Mary. There's a Gospel of Mary. I mean, Joan, what is this? Well, the Gospel of Mary has been found in different fragments. At the end of the 19th century, they found some fragments And it exists in a Coptic version and two bits of Greek. And from these bits, one can reconstruct a certain amount of it, but we don't actually have the whole of the Gospel of Mary. So it remains a bit mysterious, and there's a lot of discussion about what exactly

it means when you've only just got fragments of a text rather than the whole thing. But it really shows Mary as, and it doesn't say Mary Magdalene, it just says Mary. So one assumes it's Mary Magdalene, but there has been some debate about who this Mary is. But she really presents to the male apostles a vision that she's had, an encounter with the risen Christ, and really encourages them to go out and do what they're supposed to do because they're absolutely terrified. They've been given this mission to go to the Gentiles and spread the good news, very much like the end of the Gospel of Matthew. And they think, well, hang on. This isn't a very good thing. We're going to die horribly. And she encourages them. She gives them this vision that she has had. And at the end of the Gospel, they're encouraged on one hand,

but they're also a bit skeptical about whether or not Jesus would have spoken to her as a woman. Why didn't he just reveal himself to us? Why would he have spoken to you? And she's very hurt. She feels really quite aggrieved that her testimony is doubted. But ultimately, they do feel encouraged by her and they go off and do what they're supposed to do. So, she is this pivot which takes the male Apostles from a place where they're very downhearted and fearful to a place where they have the courage to do the manly thing of going out and actively preaching the good news in the world. So it's very curious in terms of the gender dynamics. I mean, absolutely indeed, does it also seem to suggest that Mary, as you say, one of

these disciples, but she may also too have had her own following at the same time? Can we potentially say that? One could. We have to remember that the ancient world was very gendered. And so there were appropriate things that men did, and there were appropriate things that women did. There were appropriate spaces for men and appropriate spaces for women. And men were not supposed to just go into women's spaces and start doing stuff. Whether it's healing or talking to women, it's really not what you do. And you get a sense of that actually in the story of the Gospel of John where Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman by the well. The idea that a man is just talking to a woman in a woman's space of drawing water is just not normal. So in the ancient world, you could imagine, well, we have to use our

imagination about what the women disciples were doing, but certainly, to imagine them as going into women's spaces, whether it's the laundry by the river or into the weaving house where women would gather to weave and make clothing, this is a space where women would be talking to each other and sharing the good news and passing on these stories. So in that kind of environment, Mary Magdalene and the other women disciples of Jesus, we think, would have been very active. Well, you mentioned the women disciples there. So I just like to kind of expand on that a bit longer before we focus in on Mary Magdalene again. Because Helen, your book is not just about Mary Magdalene. As you mentioned, it's about all these women disciples. I mean,

what other examples do we have? Who are some of these other figures who seem to take such prominent roles? And we have clues. What are clues about? Yes, that's the difficulty, really. We have clues about them. And because these texts are not written to tell us about the women particularly, and because actually the texts have very good reasons sometimes to minimise the role of women. I think that does give us a certain license to kind of look for the backstories where we can. So we looked at pretty much all of the named women and a lot of the unnamed women too. So we see other women who are named like Joanna, the wife of Herod's steward, Chusa. So she is actually a woman of some status. She's probably lived in the palace of Herod Antipas in Tiberias, this beautiful pagan city that Herod Antipas has built on the Sea of Galilee.

So she's a very different kind of status to most of the women who are following Jesus along the road. Probably most of them are fishing women, perhaps some of them related to the disciples of Jesus, maybe even Jesus himself. There's a woman called Salome, who may well be Jesus's sister. We know later on that Jesus's brother becomes quite prominent in the Christian church. So, you know, it's not impossible that other members of the family were there too. So lots of women who are healed and who become

part of the movement. Jesus's mother herself, of course, who is prominent in the Gospels right at the very beginning in the birth stories. But John certainly puts her there at the cross at the end. And the book of Acts suggests that she's there at Pentecost and she becomes part of the movement. So we also take things up into the time of Paul and the sort of later decades. And it's really clear from Paul's letters that women are doing all of the things that men are doing. They're deacons, they're apostles, they're teachers, they're leading house churches. They are going out as missionaries, often in pairs with men. So they're doing all the things that men are. And in this early period, they're all expecting that the end of the world is going to come quite soon. And so they're all trying to get that message out. And this is a movement where women's participation, women's work is equally important to men's work, because there's this urgency of getting the message out quickly.

of getting the message out quickly. I mean, that's really interesting, Helen. I didn't really realise that urgency, that they felt like the world was going to end, that it was almost like they were running against the clock, as it were. Absolutely. And that's really crucial to the whole story, actually, because, and that's, I think, why women are allowed such prominence early on, because you've got to get the message out quickly.

These are the last times. The church doesn't really see itself living in the world. You know, it's just passing through until Jesus comes back again on the clouds of glory. And then as the decades go on, the church starts to see that there's a kind of a difference because Jesus isn't coming back. And instead of just sort of being here for the short term, they realise that actually they need to sort of put down roots and start to look respectable and plan for a longer journey. And that's where the patriarchy really starts to kick in, because the church now becomes interested in how it looks to outsiders. You know, if we're here for the long term, if we have to start having a leadership structure, which they never had before in the beginning,

it's just very sort of vague leadership roles. But now they need deacons and ministers, and they start to get this whole structure that's sort of drawing from the pagan world around them. And it's from this period that we start to get more and more patriarchal. period that we start to get more and more patriarchal. In April 1982, armed forces from the United Kingdom and Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands. This month, 40 years later, we are dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this conflict was all about and what it was like to fight on either side. The Seaharriers were flying over and they attacked us.

They trusted us and we felt we had let them down. I really don't know whom I would be now if I had not gone through that experience when I was 19 years old. You can't take a submarine prisoner. You have to find it and you have to destroy it. And if it goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. To follow along, tune in every Friday to the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Well, it very much does sound that what you have been doing,

as you've described, has been a detective story, therefore trying to figure out more about these figures and if we therefore go back to Mary Magdalene and detective storying around Mary Magdalene for a bit longer because whether it's Jesus Christ Superstar or Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code one of the things you might think of immediately with Joe Bloggs if you're thinking Mary Magdalene you might think that she had this special relationship with Jesus. Now I'm going to throw that to the floor here. Whoever would like to answer this question, absolutely go ahead. But do we have any evidence from the early writings of there being a special relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene? Some of the Gospels from the second

century do indicate that quite specifically. There's one gospel called the Gospel of Philip, and it talks about Mary Magdalene as Jesus' companion. And he kissed her very often, and the other disciples were really jealous that Mary had this special place in Jesus' heart, really. So that kind of memory of Mary Magdalene is being preserved in this particular circle of the Gospel of Philip. She does appear also in a really extraordinary writing by a very mainstream Roman called Hippolytus, who wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs. And I don't know if you know the Song of Songs, but it's biblical erotic literature in some ways. It's a very

passionate love story that people allegorize largely in terms of interpretation in the early church. But what Hippolytus does is he weaves together the Song of Songs with the resurrection narrative, largely the resurrection narrative of Matthew and John. And it's all about this amazing love between Jesus and Mary, who in his story is a kind of composite Mary-Martha figure. But it's love. It's all about love. And actually, I think people, when they read the Gospel of John, often the account of the resurrection feel that as well. There is some sort of special relationship that's going on between

Jesus and Mary when he calls her name, when she sees him, and she immediately wants to touch him. She wants to hug him. And he says, no, don't touch me. I haven't ascended yet. But her response is tactile. So there is something there in terms of the early stories that are told about Mary that she had a special relationship with Jesus. But as the leader of the female disciples, she may have well have had a special role in terms of helping Jesus get to the women's places, being with Jesus when he had to go in to heal women in their private homes. So we don't know, but there is something that is remembered in the early church about Mary. Well, keeping on that a bit longer, Joan, and as I appreciate, you know, we only have clues and we can never know for certain. But the name Magdalene, why is this also sometimes seen as a clue into this relationship, this close bond between Mary Magdalene and Jesus?

Right. So the name the Magdalene, it's always with the definite article, the Magdalene, and Luke says she's called the Magdalene as if it means something, as a nickname. Now, it could mean that she just comes from a place called Magdala. However, there's no really specific place just called Magdala. Magdala means the tower. And in ancient Judea, Galilee, there were various places called the Tower of Something. It was quite a common name for a place. So just calling her Mary from the Tower doesn't really give us one particular place. So then the question is, does the tower mean something in terms of her status? And there's various different ways of interpreting the term. If we think of it as an Aramaic term, it could

mean also someone who is magnified. Magdalaitha can mean one who is magnified. So does that indicate something about her? Certainly among early church scholars like Jerome, who translated the Vulgate, he thought that she gained the name of the tower because of her exceptional faith. This was something that was given to her as a special nickname by Jesus, actually. So that idea that there could have been something in her nickname that indicates her status, it's just one of those clues we can't know, and we can only just explore it. It's still extraordinary just to do that, to explore it nonetheless, Joan. One last question for me before I go back to more general talk about these disciples

of these figures that you feature in your book is that recently I did a podcast with Catherine Nixie about Christian role at the end of the classical period and in certain destruction of certain buildings but also how there was sometimes some pushback against the Christians by some early Roman writers and one of them was a figure very interesting figure called Celsus or Celsus. Now, how does he fit into the story of Mary Magdalene as well? And also if we go back to the Gospel of Mary, because he might also seem to perhaps this vehement anti-Christian shine some light on Mary Magdalene. Yes, Celsus, our friend Celsus, he really didn't think very much of Christianity. And what he really seized

upon as an example of how absolutely dreadful Christians were, is that their entire faith is based on the testimony of a delirious woman. So you couldn't really count that as a grand thing. He thought that it was a philosophy for women slaves and small children. He uses women as a stick to beat the Christians with. So Christians had to be very careful around the likes of Celsus because what we might think of as something wonderful that there are these women who had such an important role to play in the early church for Celsus, not good at all. And he does refer to different Christian groups as there's a group who follow Mariamme, there's a group that follow Martha, Salome. So he actually remembers the names

of the women that we have also recorded in the Gospels, but for him it was definitely not a good thing. Am I barking up the wrong tree here, therefore? Does he potentially mention Mary Magdalene or is that not certain at all? Well, he does. He mentions her as a delirious woman. That is her, not by name. Okay, fair enough. So that was the delirious woman. Okay, well, I'm glad we got that

in there just to mention it is that we have this other source which is really interesting but of course we don't it's just interesting to highlight this has been a really interesting chat so far just before we start wrapping up helen i'm going to come back to you now because as we've mentioned several times before your book is not just mary magdalene there are several other of these women disciples too that you have focused on. Helen, from the research that you've done, were there any other particular women disciples that the story, the legacy of which you found particularly interesting to launch a detective story into almost?

Yeah, I mean, one of the interesting things I found is that actually some of these women have great afterlives. They continue in people's imagination, in people's stories, whilst others just completely stop. There's nothing more that you hear about them. One of my favourite women in terms of the afterlives is Martha, the sister of Mary and the sister of Lazarus, who Jesus raised from the dead. And I mean, she's clearly a prominent woman in her own right. She may well have had a sort of a safe house in Bethany where Jesus stayed with his disciples. And she's clearly part of this sort of Jerusalem group of disciples. And there's a tradition that she and her sister and brother, they go to France and they all become saints. And she starts up a new career as a dragon slayer. So she's going around with nothing but a cross and a prayer book. And she's kind of like this female St. George. I mean, it's incredible that there are all these stories about St. Martha and how she's ridding the whole area from this marauding dragon. And it's, yeah, I mean, amazing that this biblical woman has just sparked all of these memories.

I'm so glad we got that in there, especially how close Easter is to St. George's Day. So there you go, St. Martha. I mean, I guess also if we focus on, we mentioned her legacy, so I've got to ask a bit about the legacy of Mary Magdalene, because that is also really, really interesting. And I guess one of the common misconceptions, conceptions we get of Mary Magdalene from later sources is her as a repentant prostitute. Now, how does this version of Mary come about?

It's really a conflation of several different stories about Mary. One of the difficulties is that lots and lots of women in the first century were called Mary. And we know that from tombstones, from, you know, inscriptions and things. There were really a lot of people called Mary, which is partly why you get this form of nicknames and things like that. You know, you needed some other way to identify which Mary you're talking about. So the figure of Mary Magdalene very easily gets conflated with other characters in the tradition.

So there's another Mary in Bethany who anoints Jesus. And then she also gets mixed up with a woman in Luke's gospel who anoints Jesus as well. But the woman in Luke's gospel, who's probably a different woman, is said to be a sinful woman from the city. So, you know, what else could a sinful woman be but a prostitute? And then all of these other Marys, they get mixed up with the woman in John's Gospel, who's the woman caught in adultery. And Jesus says, you know, whoever's without sin casts the first stone. So all of these women get kind of conflated together and they turn into this sort of composite Mary Magdalene. So it was in the beginning of the sixth century where, first of all, a pope sort of put them all together and said, you know,

here she is, this great symbol of a repentant sinner. And she was used to great effect throughout the Middle Ages as the great symbol of a fallen woman who had repented of everything and became sort of the number one disciple of Jesus. So she served a useful purpose in that way and in Christian preaching. But there's absolutely no evidence for any of that in the text. I mean, if you look at the passages that just mentioned Mary Magdalene, she's nothing but a thoroughly respectable follower of Jesus. Well, that's what we want. That's what we want in the ancients. We want the myth-busting right there and then. I mean, last thing before I completely wrap up, I saw these two words in the chapter on Mary Magdalene, which is that if we go to Mary Magdalene in the 20th and the 21st

century, and it does, correct me if I'm wrong, but whether it's literature, films, theatres, correct me if I'm wrong, but whether it's literature, films, theatres, maybe even music, you do seem to regularly get this idea or this portrayal of sexy Mary, as it were. Absolutely. It's that that really sees the current imagination in terms of Mary Magdalene, whether or not she's the wife of Jesus, she has some sort of special bond with Jesus, and she's a sexy young woman. But actually, we don't know the age of Mary Magdalene at all. We don't know really anything about her background, other than most likely she was very sick, according to the Gospel of Luke. But we do know that she was independent, because she's not described as the mother of anyone, the wife of anyone.

We have to imagine the sort of situations that could lead to a woman being independent and also possibly having her own resources because she is with other women giving her resources to the movement in the Gospel of Luke. But yes, it is just so fascinating that the idea of Mary Magdalene as this sort of hot babe has really taken hold, and that's what people really like today. But one of the things about Mary Magdalene is she is a real shapeshifter over the centuries. She gets configured in whatever way seems to suit ideals of the time or fit in with certain ideas of femininity. And as theology changes, she changes. So it's very hard to sort of peel back after all of these centuries of building her up to create an idea of who she really was.

Well, that legacy absolutely is extraordinary. I mean, is it fair to say, just think of like Cleopatra, when you actually look at the story of Cleopatra, she becomes a role model for women. Has Mary Magdalene in her legacy at all, has she become a feminine role model at times? I think it has been quite hard to find her a role model because of the way that she is presented. I mean, a role model for repentance, as Helen said, that was very much the paradigm for Mary Magdalene from the time of Pope Gregory onwards. And repentance, of course, is an enormously important part of the Christian message that anyone, no matter what you've done, you can turn and God loves you.

So to have Mary representing that has been very powerful within the Western tradition. Nowadays, there is a shift in seeing Mary Magdalene more in terms of women's empowerment and women's equality with men within the churches, so that Mary, as a leader of the women disciples, can really stand for women's role within churches now. Well, I think we'll wrap it up there. Joan and Helen, it's been an absolutely fascinating chat. Thank you so much for both taking the time to come on the podcast. And last but not least, your book, Women Remembered, it is out now, if I'm not mistaken'm not mistaken well both of you it just goes to me to say once again thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thanks thank

you very much well there you go there was professors helen bond and joan taylor explaining all about the life and legacy of mary magdalene i hope you enjoyed the episode now last thing for me if you'd like more ancient content in the meantime, well you're in luck, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter via a link in the description below. You've heard me say it before and you're going to hear me say it again today. Every week I write a little blurb for that newsletter explaining all about what's been happening in Team Ancient History Hit. You would also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating on either Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You know I would greatly appreciate it. But that's enough from me. I wish you all a fantastic

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