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Mary Magdalene = #NotAProstitute
What do you get when you mix myth, legend, incorrect interpretation, and a dose of Hollywood all together? The misrepresented life story of Mary Magdalene—shaken, not stirred. For centuries Mary Magdalene’s reputation as a reformed prostitute has lived on, despite her official Roman Catholic exoneration from bad-girl status in the 1960s. Just do a simple online search for Mary Magdalene and you’ll quickly feel overwhelmed by the plethora of books and movies that portray her not only as the penitent prostitute, but also as Jesus’s secret lover, an apostle greater than John or Peter, and the poster child of gnostic literature. Yet of the thirteen times the New Testament mentions…
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New Resource: “Was Junia Joanna?” and Other Questions Worth Exploring
Long before second-wave feminism influenced researchers to include biographies of “women worthies,” historians writing on the Greco-Roman world included at least passing references to the Caesars’ wives. The dust jacket on the 1962 publication of Roman Women: Their History and Habits said its release marked the first time a book in any language addressed women’s influence on Roman history and the public and private lives of Roman women. Still, it covered mostly upper-class women. Thirteen years later in 1975 Sarah Pomeroy published a pioneering social history of women in Greece and Rome. Her provocatively titled book, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, covered an enormous range, from…
