Person

Mary Magdalene

Follower of Jesus from Galilee, named in all four gospels, and the first person recorded as seeing the risen Christ (John 20.17, Mark 16:9, Matthew 28.8-9). Her name marks her home town, Magdala, a fishing settlement on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee, distinguishing her from the other Marys in the gospel narratives.

She is apologetically significant out of proportion to the number of verses she occupies, because the gospels' decision to make her the primary resurrection witness is one of the strongest internal indications that the accounts were not shaped for persuasive convenience.

What the texts say

She was healed and became a supporter. Luke introduces her among women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities, noting that seven demons had gone out of her, and records that she and others supported the ministry out of their own means (Luke 8.1-3). This makes her a patron as well as a follower.
She was present at the crucifixion when most of the male disciples were not (Matthew 27:55-56, Mark 15:40-41, John 19:25).
She observed the burial and the location of the tomb (Matthew 27:61, Mark 15:47).
She came to the tomb early on the first day of the week and found it open (all four gospels).
She was commissioned to tell the others (John 20.17), which is the basis of the ancient title apostola apostolorum, apostle to the apostles, used of her by Hippolytus in the third century and repeated through the medieval West.

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The women-witnesses argument

The most-deployed apologetic use of her, and it is a strong one when stated carefully.

In first-century Jewish and Roman legal culture, the testimony of women was widely discounted. Josephus states plainly that women should not be admitted as witnesses because of their levity and boldness (Antiquities 4.219), and comparable attitudes appear in rabbinic material. The point is not that women could never testify in any circumstance, which would overstate it, but that a fabricated account aiming at credibility had an obvious reason not to build itself on female testimony.

The gospel writers did it anyway, in all four accounts, and in Mark and John the male disciples are shown disbelieving the report until they check for themselves (Luke 24:11 calls it idle talk). Inventing a story in which your movement's central claim rests on a witness class your audience discounts, and in which your own leadership is depicted as slow and dismissive, is not what invention looks like.

The point sharpens further with the detail that Luke records seven demons cast out of her. A fabricator constructing an ideal witness does not give her a history of demonic affliction.

This is the criterion of embarrassment applied to a structural feature rather than an isolated saying. See Argument from the Resurrection and Resurrection of Jesus.

Two persistent confusions

She was not a prostitute. No text says so. The identification arises from conflating her with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7:36-50, who anoints Jesus's feet, and with Mary of Bethany. The conflation was popularised in the West by a homily of Pope Gregory the Great in 591, and the Roman Catholic Church formally separated the figures in its 1969 calendar revision. The Eastern churches never made the identification.

She was not married to Jesus. The claim rests on the third-century Gospel of Philip, which calls her his koinōnos, companion, and says he loved her more than the other disciples, with a lacuna in the damaged manuscript at the point where the popular reading supplies a kiss. The text is a Gnostic composition two centuries after the events, its language of companionship is used elsewhere in Gnostic literature for spiritual rather than marital relation, and the reconstruction depends on filling a physical hole in the papyrus. The 2003 popular fiction that circulated the claim has no historical standing.

Later tradition

Eastern tradition holds that she went to Ephesus with the mother of Jesus and died there. A later Western legend places her in Provence, and the tale of her presenting a red egg to the emperor Tiberius is medieval rather than ancient. The Gospel of Mary, a fragmentary second-century Gnostic text, presents her as receiving special revelation and being challenged by Peter, and is evidence of second-century Gnostic interest rather than of first-century events.