Mary Magdalene: Why has she been so maligned? New film goes back to origins

Yet where her namesake is held up as the ideal of virginal perfection as the mother of Christ, Mary Magdalene has become known as a prostitute, a lust object and even as the hidden wife of Jesus.

But now a new film starring Rooney Mara as Magdalene and Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus might redress the balance – and help clear the name of one of the most misrepresented figures in history.

“The more I got into it and the more I learned about who Mary really was, the more shocked I was that most people know her to be a prostitute,” says Mara.

“All these men who are in this story have churches around the world in their name yet she is known as the whore. It made me kind of angry actually.”

According to the widely disseminated view, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute “saved” by Jesus after she gatecrashes a party he was at, washes his feet with her tears, anoints them with perfume and then dries them with her hair.

The problem is: there is no reference anywhere in the Bible to Mary Magdalene ever being a prostitute, reformed or otherwise.

There is not even a reference to her being a sinner.

The foot-washing incident, as mentioned in the Gospel of Luke, is ascribed by the author to an unnamed “woman of that town who had lived a sinful life”.

In fact the only suggestions that there is anything less than wholly virtuous about Mary Magdalene at all are references in the Gospels of Luke and Mark to Jesus ridding her of “seven demons” – and many scholars believe the latter wasn’t even in the original text but added sometime in the second century.

But from that single verse have come centuries of character assassination.

From medieval and Renaissance paintings of her as a doe-eyed, semi-naked seductress, to the sexy sinner in films such as 1988’s The Last Temptation Of Christ or 2004’s The Passion Of The Christ, Mary Magdalene has become ingrained in popular culture as the archetypal fallen woman.

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Jesus Christ Superstar had the character of Mary singing “I’ve had so many men before, in very many ways”, and in the best-selling Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown even put forward the theory that Mary Magdalene and Jesus had married and had a child together.

The facts, as described by the nearest thing to a definitive text we have about her – the Bible itself – are somewhat different.

“Mary Magdalene is an absolutely fascinating figure,” says Professor Suzanne Frey-Kupper, a specialist in classics and ancient history and researcher of Christian depictions in art at the University of Warwick.

“In the Gospels she’s not described as a prostitute. When she met Jesus it simply says he tore out her demons. But it’s never said that she’s a prostitute. That’s something that came up in the Middle Ages.

“What’s really important about her is that she was with Jesus at the cross. She is also the one who discovers his empty tomb and after his resurrection she was the first person to see him – that makes her very important. That puts her right at the centre of the Gospels.”

So how did this “centrally important” figure come to be recast so dramatically? The fault lies with Pope Gregory I, who in 591 forever linked Mary Magdalene with the sinful “woman of that town” described by St Luke.

“What did these seven devils signify, if not all the vices?” he wrote. “It is clear that the woman previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts. What she therefore displayed more scandalously, she was now offering to God in a more praiseworthy manner.”

The idea was later seized upon by medieval and Renaissance artists. She became the most commonly depicted female figure in art after the Virgin Mary and was often shown as an object inspiring desire, rather than reverence.

Frequently painted semi-naked, when she does wear clothes they are usually red – traditionally symbolic of loose morals – and her hair is long and fl owing, sometimes to tantalisingly hide what her lack of clothes has left bare.

According to the standards of the time, long hair was worn loose in public only by prostitutes, the other women of the New Testament are shown with their hair hidden beneath scarfs or headdresses.

Painted weeping at Christ’s crucifixion, or meeting him at his resurrection, she still carries a perfume jar as her signifier.

Even her name was twisted against her. In the Bible she is referred to as Mary “the Magdalene”, meaning she came from Magdala, a town on the western shore of the sea of Galilee.

But later scholars decided that it probably meant something else altogether.

According to the 17th century theologian John Lightfoot: “Whence she was called Magdalene, doth not so plainly appear; whether from Magdala, a town on the lake of Gennesaret, or from the word which signifies a plaiting or curling of the hair, a thing usual with harlots.”

According to Professor Frey-Kupper, an important reason why the Church was so keen to portray Mary Magdalene as a fallen woman was because: “In the Middle Ages the Church became very focused on penitence and conversion – which opens the way for reconciliation with God.

“And this idea of the importance of conversion led to the idea of her being a reformed prostitute. For the Church it was all about morals. It was in its interests to use her as an example of repenting and the importance of staying virtuous.”

She also points out that Pope Gregory’s proclamation of Magdalene as a prostitute rather conveniently confuses her with another Mary.

“She has been merged with the ‘sinful’ woman described anointing Jesus’s feet and drying them with her hair,” she says.

“Although that woman remains anonymous in Luke’s Gospel, in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and John she is named as Mary of Bethany.”

In Rooney Mara’s film, called simply Mary Magdalene, she is depicted not as a sex symbol, seductress or harlot, but simply as she is in the Bible, a morally driven woman at the very heart of Christ’s story.

It is a Mary Magdalene that the director Garth Davis has described as being “hidden away for 2,000 years”.

And if it was principally the influence of art that helped shape the false image of Mary Magdalene, Professor Frey-Kupper believes that it may yet be art that redeems her.

“The real Mary Magdalene is simply not very well known, we still think of her as a prostitute because that’s how she has always been pictured,” she says. “Art is very strong and very influential and so that’s how we think of her.”

Two thousand years after her first mention it seems it’s time to set the record straight.