There’s Something About Mary: From Power to Prostitution and Back Again
Details
Sunday, November 16, 2025, Lunch at 2pm and lecture at 3pm
There’s Something About Mary: From Power to Prostitution and Back Again
Speaker: Ryan Fitzgerald – George Mason University
Second only to Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene is perhaps the most famous, and famously misunderstood, woman of the New Testament. For most of Christian history she has been the exemplar of repentance, a former prostitute who turned from her sinful ways to follow Jesus in righteousness, honoring Jesus (to the chagrin of some of the disciples) by anointing him with expensive perfume, washing his feet with her hair and penitent tears before his crucifixion. It is a good story, and one that has been told for over a thousand years to impel Christians to contrition and devotion.
This story is also, in almost every detail, wrong.
This lecture will explore the role of Mary Magdalene in the New Testament, dispelling such erroneous tales that she was ever a prostitute, that she was the “woman caught in adultery,” or that she was the woman who anointed Jesus at Bethany. Instead, by examining what is actually recorded in the New Testament, we can tell Mary’s story anew in both a more accurate, faithful, and empowering way. Rather than a woman of sexual ill-repute, we find Mary to have been a powerful benefactor of the early Jesus movement, whose role may have enkindled the rise of Christianity itself.
Beyond the Mary of the New Testament, this lecture will also survey the archaeology of the Galilean town of Magdala to offer some possible context for Mary’s background outside of her relationship to the fledgling Jesus movement. Some attention will also be given to Mary’s potential importance in the early centuries of Christian debate on apostolic authority, inspiration, and institutional (and sexist) spiritual hierarchy.
This event will be held at Tandoori Restaurant: 10312 Willard Way / Fairfax, VA 22030. Luncheon begins at 2 pm; lecture at 3 pm
Reservations are required. Please register.at:
https://basonova.org/next-lecture-reservation.html