When people started talking about Mary Magdalene again, a lot of emphasis was placed on the "new information" that she "wasn't actually a prostitute".

But when this was brought up, it was brought up on the assumption that everyone already knew Mary Magdalene was supposed to be a prostitute. And…not everyone did. The intent was to clear her name, but it actually backfired in a way. People seem to like it *more* when she’s a fallen woman, it makes everything more dramatic and significant and brings up whole new interesting symbolizism and metaphor.

So what it really accomplished was that now everyone is going around saying “Jesus had a girlfriend and she was a hooker? That’s awesome!”

The unfortunate truth is also that she wouldn’t need to literally accept money for sex to be thrown into the role of whore in her own era. Probably just hanging around with Jesus in the first place would draw such an accusation. In Mary Magdalene’s world, there was no gray area for women. You went from your parents house to your husband’s, and they didn’t just take your word for it that you were a virgin, you were supposed to keep your bridal sheets to prove it. That is why we have the confusion over Mary the mother of Jesus and the “virgin birth”. Because all young, unmarried women were assumed to be virgins, and later versions of the story just assumed that assumption was literal fact. She was *supposed* to be a virgin, so there is no way she couldn’t have been, since she obviously wouldn’t have lied to her parents or fiancé about that. In spite of the evidence of her being pregnant(And this is all bound in with men’s issues about their mothers. It’s because they are very uncomfortable with the idea of their mothers ever having had sex).

So a woman who was not married and went around having sex with men and not even really trying to hide it was no better than a whore anyway, whether or not she was getting money for it. Women weren’t even really supposed to have prolonged conversations with strange men.