The New Yorker:

The subject of numerous controversies, she is defined by ambiguity, welcoming outcasts to the Church and provoking more imaginative approaches to faith.

By Eliza Griswold

An ancient depiction of a naked woman hung on the wall of my father’s study. Skeletal, stupefied, and wildly bedheaded, she contemplated distances across time and space, as saints and mystics do. As with many of the unsettling religious tchotchkes scattered around the rectory where I spent my childhood, I didn’t give much thought to the unkempt icon, until more recently, when I grew curious about Mary Magdalene and began to read into the controversies swirling around her.

Magdalene is the most famous woman in Christianity after Jesus’ mother; she is also arguably the most hotly contested figure in the New Testament. A companion to Jesus in all four Gospels, she is present at his tomb, and, in some versions, is the first to see him after his Resurrection. In the Book of John, Jesus commissions her to share the good news of his return with the other disciples, which is why Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century theologian, names her “the apostle to the apostles.” Nonetheless, Magdalene has been maligned by Church fathers throughout the centuries; in the present day, feminist scholars have championed her.

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