The Mary We Forgot

August 12, 2024
McNutt (Calvin Meets Voltaire), a professor of biblical studies at Wheaton College, sketches an uneven portrait of the woman who first witnessed Christ’s resurrection and whose legacy has been transformed and warped across history. The author traces how biblical interpreters in the Middle Ages in most of Europe cast Mary as a penitent prostitute “saved by her fervent love of Jesus” (though in France she was lauded as the first apostle and garnered popularity surpassing that of “the almost ethereal Virgin Mary”); how female Protestant reformers in 16th-century Europe drew on her example for permission to preach the gospel; and how during the 19th century, as her associations with prostitution returned, evangelicals headed a “Magdalenist” movement to “rehabilitate” prostitutes. McNutt’s rigorous textual analysis provides a revealing window into the ways societies stereotyped—and overlooked—scriptural women according to shifting cultural and social mores, though her use of Mary’s example to comment on present-day Christianity feels underbaked (“Mary Magdalene can serve as a model of steady faith in Christ, even when our churches fail us and hurt us”). The result is a shaky reconstruction of an oft-forgotten figure.