Over the holidays, numerous outlets proclaimed that archaeologists excavating in “Magdala” may have identified her birthplace
Three years in the making, this article reviews the literary data for much of what we know about Mary and comes to some persuasive and eye-opening conclusions about the meaning of her name.
When it comes down to it, the association of Mary Magdalene, the apostle of Jesus, with this town on the Sea of Galilee rests on two assumptions. First, that Magdalene is a kind of surname that gestures to her geographical origins as ancient names often did. Second, that this city by the sea was called “Magdala” in the first century CE. Once you drill into the historical foundations of the argument, Schrader and Taylor show, cracks start to emerge.
There was, Schrader told me, considerable disagreement about the meaning of Mary’s name. The fifth-century translator St. Jerome thought that it was a nickname, meaning “tower.” Nicknames like this were common in antiquity, especially among Jesus followers. Just as Peter was the “rock,” and James was the “just” so too Mary was the “tower of faith.” Some ancient authors did think it referred to her birthplace, but no two ancient writers thought the same thing.
Her name aside, ancient opinion about where Mary was from also varied. Several of the earliest commentators on the Gospels—for example, the third-century writer Hippolytus of Rome—assumed that Mary Magdalene was the sister of Martha and Lazarus mentioned in the Gospel of John. If true, this would mean that Mary, like her siblings, was from Bethany and is the woman who anoints Jesus in
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