How a Patron, Disciple, and Apostle Became a Penitent Sinner.
This is a first for the Semaj MindSpa. I am sharing this Substack article by Dr. Sandra Palmer with my fellow ‘Mind Travellers’. I would love to hear your views.
Picture a monk in an Egyptian monastery near what’s now the town of Nag Hammadi, in the year 367. He’s just read the letter from Alexandria. Bishop Athanasius has settled, once and for all, which books count as Christian, twenty-seven, not one more and ordered everything else destroyed. This monk is holding texts that didn’t make the list. He could burn them, as instructed. Instead, he wraps them in leather, seals them in a clay jar, and buries them in the desert.
This is the explanation most historians favor, though not everyone agrees. But even as a possibility, it changes the question worth asking. Because in 1945, a farmer digging for fertilizer found that jar. Inside were the gospels someone chose to save instead of burn.
I’m opening with this because it frames everything that follows. The question isn’t “why were these texts lost.” The truth is that there was more than one possible interpretation of Christianity, and the version we inherited won not necessarily because it was truer, but because the people who held it also held the power to decide what got copied and what got burned. And in that story, one woman wasn’t just written out. She was rewritten into someone else entirely. Why?
The woman we actually know existed
Let’s start with what isn’t in dispute, because the plainest facts are usually the ones that get repeated least.
Mary Magdalene bankrolled Jesus’s ministry out of her own pocket, Luke’s gospel says so plainly, no hedging. Her hometown, Magdala, wasn’t some backwater village. It was an industrial hub for the salted-fish trade, exporting across the Mediterranean. A woman with independent means in that region, in the first century, fits within the inheritance and widowhood law of the time. Nothing exotic is required to explain where her money came from.
And the four gospels, which rarely agree on details, agree on this. Mary Magdalene was the first person to see Jesus alive again after the crucifixion. In a world where a woman’s testimony carried no legal weight, that detail survived anyway. Why? Probably because it was already too well known, too early in the tradition, to quietly edit out.
Neither of these is my interpretation. Both are in the text the Church itself preserved.
The sermon that turned her into someone else
Now the part that actually stings.
In 591, Pope Gregory the Great gave a sermon in Rome that took three separate women from the New Testament — Mary Magdalene, Mary of Bethany, and an unnamed “sinful woman” from Luke 7 and fused them into one character. The “seven demons” attributed to Mary (likely an ancient way of naming an affliction or illness) became, in Gregory’s reading, the seven deadly sins. That’s how the Mary Magdalene most people know was born, the repentant prostitute.
The Catholic Church didn’t formally correct that error until 1969. It didn’t restore her full title being Apostle to the Apostles, with her own feast day until 2016, under Pope Francis.
Between the sermon and the first real apology was a period of thirteen hundred and seventy-eight years. Let that sink in for a second. This does more work than any analysis I could layer on top of it.
It is also worth sharing that this was never a unanimous Christian decision. The Eastern Orthodox Church never adopted Pope Gregory’s version. To them, Mary Magdalene was always “Equal to the male Apostles” with no penitent-prostitute subplot attached. In other words, it wasn’t “Christianity” that rewrote her. It was the Roman Catholic church, specifically, in a sermon we can date, and that version dominated the West for nearly fourteen hundred years while the East simply kept a different one.
The argument the text itself couldn’t quite erase
There’s a gospel that never made it into the Bible, the Gospel of Mary, discovered only in 1896. This gospel preserves something telling. It tells the story of a real fight and jealousy.
In it, Peter and Andrew openly challenge Mary’s authority. They refuse to believe Jesus would have entrusted her with something he didn’t entrust to them. Levi aka Matthew defends her, and calls out Peter’s pride directly. What’s striking is that this tension doesn’t stop there. In the Gospel of Thomas, Peter goes as far as saying women “are not worthy of life.” In another text, the Pistis Sophia, he complains that she “won’t let anyone else speak”, referring to her conversations with Jesus on specific matters.
Three separate texts, written at different points, recording the same friction. Though not proof of an organized conspiracy it does suggest the question of whether a woman could hold full spiritual authority was a live argument in early Christianity. This is not a modern invention layered on after the fact. And we know who won that argument, because we’re living with the outcome.
She wasn’t the only one
Mary Magdalene is the best-documented case, but she was not the only one.
Paul, writing to the Romans, names Junia as “outstanding among the apostles.” For centuries, translators and commentators turned her name into “Junias” masculine name. And as far as we can tell, didn’t actually exist in the Roman world. In the same chapter, Paul names Phoebe as a deacon; her title has been softened in translation more than once. Joanna, named alongside Mary as another patron of Jesus’s ministry, all but vanished from popular memory.
These cases aren’t identical some are translation choices, some are editorial omission, and Mary Magdalene’s is, so far, the only one with an exact date and sermon attached to it. But together they trace a pattern; whenever there was more than one way to remember these women, the version that stuck was the one that left them the least authority.
What if…………..
Here’s something that I want you to think about.
What if the scripts that monk buried in the desert, the one where spiritual knowledge didn’t run through a male hierarchy, where a woman could teach with full authority; had won?
Nobody knows. But the question is useful anyway, because it exposes something real. Much of what gets experienced today as “the only possible” form of Christian faith, hierarchical, closed to women in the priesthood, isn’t the only way Christianity could have organized itself. It’s the version that won a specific fight, in a specific century, decided by men with names and dated letters. That doesn’t invalidate anyone’s faith today. But it should cause you to question the idea that the narrative that won is the oldest reading, the most original one, or the only true one.
It’s simply the version that survived because someone decided it should. And surviving isn’t the same as being right.
Next time someone tells you a woman’s place in the Church “has always been this way,” ask them since when and who decided.
With my love
Dr Sandra