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Velázquez's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, c. 1618: a kitchen scene with the Gospel episode visible behind
Diego Velázquez, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, c. 1618 (public domain).

Women Around Jesus

Women are present at every turning point of the Gospel story — funding the ministry, first at the tomb, first to carry the news. These profiles stay close to what the Gospels actually say, and clearly label what later tradition added.

A note on method, used throughout this page: “In the Gospels” means what the four canonical Gospels say. “Later tradition” means what was added afterward — by sermons, legends, art, and apocryphal writings. The two are kept in separate lanes.

Mary Magdalene

In the Gospels: Luke introduces her among the women who traveled with Jesus and supported the ministry “out of their means”: “Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out” (Luke 8:2). She is named at the crucifixion (Mark 15:40; John 19:25), at the burial (Mark 15:47), and — most importantly — at the resurrection. In John’s account she comes to the tomb alone while it is still dark, finds the stone moved, and becomes the first person to see the risen Jesus, who sends her to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord” (John 20:1–18).

Later tradition: In 591, Pope Gregory the Great preached a famous homily (Homily 33) identifying Mary Magdalene with two other Gospel women — the unnamed “sinful woman” who anoints Jesus’ feet (Luke 7) and Mary of Bethany, sister of Martha and Lazarus. The composite “penitent prostitute” dominated Western art and preaching for over a thousand years. The Eastern churches never fully accepted the conflation, and in 1969 the Vatican’s revised liturgical calendar treated the three women as distinct. Gnostic-era writings such as the Gospel of Mary (2nd century, non-canonical) portray her as a leading disciple — interesting, but not Gospel evidence. What the Gospels give us is plainer and stranger: a woman freed from torment, present at the worst hour, and chosen as the first witness of the resurrection. Later tradition called her “the apostle to the apostles.”

The Samaritan woman

In the Gospels: John 4 records one of the longest conversations in the Gospels — Jesus, tired at a well in Samaria, talking with a woman drawing water at noon. The scene crosses three boundaries at once: Jew and Samaritan (historic enemies), man and woman alone in public, rabbi and a woman with a complicated past. To her, Jesus speaks the plainest self-revelation in the Gospels: when she mentions the coming Messiah, he answers, “I who speak to you am he” (John 4:26). She leaves her water jar, tells the town “come, see a man who told me everything I ever did,” and many Samaritans come to believe — first through her word, then through their own encounter (4:39–42).

Later tradition: Eastern tradition names her Photini and honors her as a saint and evangelist; Western tradition largely left her unnamed in art. None of that is in John. What is in John is the pattern: the first person to hear Jesus say “I am the Messiah” outright is a Samaritan woman, and the first missionary of the Gospel in the narrative is the same woman — not one of the Twelve.

Duccio's Christ and the Samaritan Woman, a Maestà predella panel from 1310–1311
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Christ and the Samaritan Woman, 1310–1311 — a predella panel from the Maestà altarpiece (Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid). Public domain.

Mary and Martha of Bethany

In the Gospels: Sisters from Bethany, friends of Jesus, with their brother Lazarus. Luke 10:38–42 gives the famous household scene: Martha “distracted with much serving” while Mary sits at Jesus’ feet listening; when Martha complains, Jesus answers that “Mary has chosen the good part, which will not be taken away from her.” In John 11, at the raising of Lazarus, it is Martha who makes one of the Gospels’ great confessions of faith — “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God” (11:27) — before the miracle happens. In John 12:1–8, Mary anoints Jesus’ feet with costly ointment and wipes them with her hair; Jesus defends her against Judas’s objection.

Later tradition: Western tradition, following Gregory the Great’s 591 homily, long folded Mary of Bethany into the composite “Mary Magdalene.” The Gospels keep them separate: Mary of Bethany is always identified by her village and her siblings, never as the Magdalene, and never as the sinful woman of Luke 7. French medieval legend made Mary Magdalene a missionary to Provence — legend, not Gospel.

Mary, the mother of Jesus

In the Gospels: She is central to the birth narratives (Luke 1–2: the annunciation, the Magnificat, the manger), then recedes. Mark shows the family — mother and brothers — coming to take charge of Jesus during his ministry, thinking him “out of his mind” (3:21, 31–35), and names four brothers: James, Joses, Judas, and Simon (6:3). At Cana she prompts his first sign (John 2:1–11). She stands at the cross, where the dying Jesus entrusts her to “the disciple whom he loved”: “Woman, behold, your son” (John 19:25–27). After the ascension she is with the disciples in prayer in the upper room (Acts 1:14) — the last Gospel-era mention.

Later tradition: Enormous — and mostly post-biblical. Doctrines of the perpetual virginity, the Immaculate Conception, and the Assumption developed over centuries and are treated differently across Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant teaching (see Beliefs vs. scholarship). The Gospels themselves give us a young woman who says yes to an angel, ponders things in her heart, misunderstands her son’s mission at least once, and outlives him to the cross.

The woman with the issue of blood

In the Gospels: Twelve years of hemorrhaging, a fortune spent on physicians, ritual impurity that would have cut her off from communal life — and then, in a crowd pressing around Jesus, she touches the fringe of his cloak from behind (Mark 5:25–34; also Matthew 9:20–22; Luke 8:43–48). “Immediately her flow of blood ceased.” Jesus stops, asks who touched him, and when she comes forward “in fear and trembling” he does not rebuke her: “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace.” Mark sandwiches her healing inside the story of Jairus’s daughter — two daughters, twelve years apart in age and affliction, restored in a single journey.

Later tradition: Early Christian legend named her Veronica and credited her with the cloth that captured Christ’s face — a story with no Gospel basis, though it made her one of the most painted women of the Middle Ages.

The woman caught in adultery

In the Gospels — with a textual footnote: The scribes and Pharisees bring Jesus a woman caught in adultery and demand a ruling: the law of Moses commands stoning. Jesus stoops to write on the ground, then says, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 7:53–8:11). One by one the accusers leave; he does not condemn her, and tells her to leave her life of sin. The footnote matters: this passage is absent from the earliest manuscripts of John’s Gospel and its original place in the text is uncertain — scholars debate whether it was an authentic early tradition added later. It is canonical in the form the Church received it, but the manuscript evidence is real and should be named.

Rembrandt's The Woman Taken in Adultery, 1644: the accused woman in light before Christ in the temple
Rembrandt van Rijn, The Woman Taken in Adultery, 1644 (National Gallery, London) — light isolates the accused woman; Christ stands calm and taller than her judges. Public domain.

The women who funded the ministry

In the Gospels: Luke 8:1–3 names women who traveled with Jesus and the Twelve and “provided for them out of their means”: Mary Magdalene, Joanna — identified as the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager — and Susanna, “and many others.” The detail is easy to skim past and hard to overstate: the Galilean ministry had financial backers, and Luke names women first. Joanna reappears at the empty tomb (Luke 24:10). These are not background figures; they are the logistical reason the traveling ministry was possible.

Others, briefly

Source notes

Limitations