• rowrowrowyourboat@sh.itjust.works
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    22 days ago

    Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute. That’s a common misconception.

    The portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute began in 591, when Pope Gregory I identified Mary Magdalene, who was introduced in Luke 8:2, with Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:39) and the unnamed “sinful woman” who anointed Jesus’s feet in Luke 7:36–50.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Magdalene

    But Jesus was most certainly very accepting of people from all walks of life. That was like his whole purpose. So the other comment about him rejecting people from the community is dead wrong. If anything, people reproached him because he was too accepting of the “sinners”.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      22 days ago

      Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

      Part of the problem with all of these stories is that they’re largely intended as parables and are cobbled together from a litany of testimonials of which only four remain canonical.

      Mary as a holy woman and as a sex symbol aren’t in contradiction. Quite a few of the early underground Christian organizations had their own bacchanals and orgiastic rituals, right in line with the traditions of their Roman-Era Middle Eastern peers. Age the stories 580 years and put them within the context of a far more conservative and doctrinaire church, obsessed with lineages and bloodlines rather than parties and popular evangelism, and Mary transforms from a kind-of Aphrodite-esque esoteric priestess into a harlot running a brothel.