For 1,400 years, the church called her a prostitute.
She wasn’t.
Mary Magdalene is one of the most recognizable figures in Christian history and one of the most misrepresented. The Gospels never describe her as a sinful woman. That story came from a single sermon, preached by Pope Gregory I in 591 AD, in which he conflated three different women into one with no textual basis for doing so.
The Eastern church never accepted it. Scholars spent centuries pointing to the actual text. The Catholic Church corrected it in 1969: 1,378 years later.
The real Mary Magdalene stood at the cross when most of the disciples had fled. She went to the tomb before dawn. She was the first person the risen Christ chose to speak to, and the first person he sent with a message.
The church fathers called her the apostle to the apostles.
This episode tells the story the Gospels actually tell and asks why the other version lasted as long as it did.
