Although this is a popular myth, the Bible never said Mary was a prostitute. The Church just made it up. The short explanation is this; there are many women in the gospel who are prostitutes, women of sin (usually assumed by the Church to be sexual sin), and various groveling repentants, none of whom are referenced by name. The real Mary Magdalene apprears almost out of nowhere and discovers the ressurrection, the single most important event in Christian mythology. For various reasons I won’t go into here (check out our website for my complete ramblings on Yahwism and Paganism), the Medieval Church combined all of these women into one character and used Mary Magdalene for the identity of this invented repentant prostitute.
The Church has already apologized for this. It’s amazing that they have maintained this composite character of the Magdalene Prostitute for hundreds of years when all along (at least since Martin Luther) anyone could have checked the Bible and discovered that there was no such person portrayed. But even more amazing is that the Western world still accepts this image of the Magdalene, even in contemporary “liberal” pop culture. “Jesus Christ Superstar” and “The Last Temptation of Christ”, in spite of being called Heresy by the church, have chosen to embrace this invented Magdalene character while simultaneously criticizing the established doctrines and assumptions of the Church.
Granted, this play is not about historical accuracy, it is about myth. Regardles of it’s verifyable truth, the Christian Bible is the central Mythology of most of the Western world today. And in choosing the characters of this mythology to tell our story, we have chosen the characters suggested in the scriptures (as well as mythic characters from other belief systems) rather than the characters suggested by the Church.
