Mary Magdalene a Prostitute?

I don’t know how we get things so mixed up (so confused, is just another way of saying the same thing). “Fuse” simply means “to blend together into one,” and the prefix, “con,” (a variant of “com”) has as one of its major meanings: “together.” Thus, confuse has come to mean: “ to blend together into one, things that don’t properly fit together.” Why and how is it that we so commonly mix together things that don’t belong together? Again, I don’t know the answer. All I know is that we do it. Just now, I’m talking about the ways we confuse things in the Bible, which, when we do, inevitably makes an unholy mess of our religion: both our thoughts about it and our practice of it. More particularly, just now, I’m considering our confusion of women and the Christian ministry, and later, the confusion of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. First, some terms can stand clarification. What is a preacher, what an apostle, and what a deacon? One of the two primary words from Greek New Testament that we use to translate as preacher literally means, “One who carries a message of good news, one who announces good news.” “Apostle” literally means, “one commissioned and sent to carry an official message.” The Greek word we translate–actually transliterate–as deacon means, ”servant.” Now, to the specific confusions. According to the Bible, Mary of Magdala was the first to see, as well as the first to speak to Jesus after his death, burial and subsequent live appearance. Jesus told her (commissioned) to go (sent) and tell The Eleven (no longer the Twelve, Judas having been lost) that he had been raised and would meet with them. By clear word meaning, this makes Mary Magdalene one of Jesus’ apostles, even though the word itself is not used in the text. She also is, by clear word meaning, a preacher, in fact, the first preacher of the good news of the resurrection of Jesus. She is, as some early Christian writers acknowledged, “the apostle to the apostles,” and, under the direct order (ordination?) of Jesus, she is a Christian preacher. Perhaps Christian women should be holding meetings to consider whether men should be ordained to Christian ministry. After all, the men had run away, defeated, discouraged, and ready to revert to their old life. When Mary related to them the gospel of the resurrection, they were unbelievers; they paid her no mind. Except for subsequent cultural developments, there is no reason that women should not be included in, and ordained to the Christian ministry. Now to deacons. The woman, Phoebe, is identified by Paul as a “deacon.” The Greek words used to identify Phoebe is, in the New Testament, always translated, “deacon.” Except when they refer to her! Although the original text of the Bible calls her deacon, the translators almost universally use “servant” in the Phoebe passage, with no word of explanation for the word change. Clearly, the word does mean servant, but when it refers to men, the translators uniformly transliterate rather than translate the Greek, diakonos, as deacon. Again, cultural developments after the 1st Century seem to have caused Phoebe to be re-designated. Several more reasons could be adduced for routinely including women in Christian ministry, and perhaps on another occasion I will relate those. My more direct interest in this blog is to clear up the long-standing con-fusion of Mary the Magdalene and “prostitute.” Again, for cultural reasons and from an early date, Mary was identified as a converted prostitute. I suggest the best way for you to clear this mix-up is to read each of the New Testament passages that refer to Mary Magdalene by name. Other, unnamed, women often have been identified, by mere assumption, as “Mag” (I play loosely with her name only because I have an aunt named Magdalene, and the family usually calls her, “Mag”). There is no evidence at all that any of these unnamed women actually were Mary.