If you grew up believing Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, you are not alone. For fourteen hundred years, Western Christianity taught it from the pulpit, painted it on cathedral walls, and pressed it into catechisms. The image is everywhere. The woman kneeling at Christ's feet with her hair loose. The reformed sinner. The penitent in the cave.

There is only one problem. The Bible never says it.

The gospels mention Mary Magdalene by name twelve times. She appears more often than most of the apostles. Luke tells us she followed Jesus from Galilee and helped fund his ministry from her own resources. All four gospels place her at the crucifixion after most of the men had fled. All four place her at the empty tomb. In John's account, she is the first person to see the risen Christ, and he gives her a message to carry to the others. The apostles, in other words, learned of the resurrection from her.

Nowhere is she called a prostitute. Nowhere is she named as the woman who anointed Jesus's feet. Nowhere is she conflated with Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus.

That work was done by one man, on one Sunday, in one sermon.

Homily 33

In the year 591, Pope Gregory I stood before a congregation in Rome and delivered what scholars now catalog as Homily 33. Gregory was a careful administrator and a gifted preacher, later canonized and given the title the Great. He was also, on this particular morning, about to make an interpretive leap that would define a woman for more than a millennium.

Gregory told his congregation that three women in the gospels were actually one. Mary Magdalene, from whom Jesus had cast out seven demons. Mary of Bethany, who sat at Jesus's feet while her sister Martha worked. And the unnamed sinful woman in Luke 7 who washed Jesus's feet with her tears.

He went further. The seven demons, Gregory explained, were the seven deadly sins. And the sins of a woman, he suggested, were of a particular kind.

The leap was not supported by the text. The Eastern churches never accepted it. But in the Latin West, Gregory's authority was considerable, and his reading stuck. From the seventh century onward, Mary Magdalene entered Western imagination as the redeemed harlot. Artists gave her flowing red hair and a jar of ointment. Preachers used her as a cautionary figure. Entire religious orders were built around her penitence.

The gospel witness, the bankroller of Jesus's ministry, the first person entrusted with the resurrection, vanished behind the invented sinner.

The Long Correction

The Catholic Church has been walking this back, slowly and with little fanfare, for about sixty years.

In 1969, Pope Paul VI issued a revision of the Roman Calendar. Buried in the changes was a correction: Mary Magdalene would no longer be identified with the sinful woman of Luke 7 or with Mary of Bethany. Three women, not one. It was the reversal of Gregory's homily, offered without much comment.

Almost nobody noticed.

The correction sat in liturgical footnotes for another forty-seven years, until Pope Francis, in June 2016, elevated her feast day on the twenty-second of July to the same liturgical rank as the feast days of the male apostles. The Vatican's own decree used the title medieval theologians had preserved for centuries, a title Thomas Aquinas himself had used: Apostola Apostolorum. Apostle to the Apostles.

The logic is straightforward. The word apostle means one who is sent. In John's gospel, the risen Christ sends Mary to tell the others. She is, by the strictest reading of the text, the first apostle of the resurrection.

The title is not new. The restoration is.

What the Story Leaves Us

History is not only written by the winners. Sometimes it is rewritten by a single preacher on a single Sunday, and the rewrite lasts so long it becomes the story.

What strikes me about the Magdalene correction is how small it was. No encyclical, no headlines. A liturgical note in 1969. A feast day rank adjustment in 2016. The quiet undoing of fourteen hundred years of received image, delivered with the understatement of a footnote.

It makes you wonder what else is sitting in a footnote, waiting.