On Easter morning the men sat behind locked doors. Meanwhile a woman stood in the garden, crying at an open grave. John says the risen Jesus showed himself to her first, and then sent her to tell the others. That errand is why later writers called her the Apostle to the Apostles.
That errand earned Mary Magdalene a title. Apostle to the Apostles is not a slogan from a modern campaign. A Roman writer used it in the third century, a pope buried it in the sixth, and another pope dug it out again in 2016.
Where the Title Apostle to the Apostles Comes From
Hippolytus of Rome wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs around 220. In it he calls the women at the tomb apostles, and Mary stands at their head. The Latin phrase that stuck to her is Apostola Apostolorum.
His point turns on a pairing. First Eve took the fruit and brought death into the garden. Then Mary left a garden with news of life. Early readers loved that symmetry, and consequently it kept the title alive in sermons for centuries.
Nothing about the phrase was controversial at the time. It described a job, not a rank. Mary had been sent, and being sent is what the Greek word apostolos means.
Later writers kept using it without fuss. Bernard of Clairvaux called her Apostle to the Apostles in the twelfth century, and Thomas Aquinas did the same in the thirteenth. Neither of them was making a case for women in office. They were simply repeating what the text of John says happened.
How Mary Lost the Title
Then a pope preached a sermon. In 591 Gregory the Great told his congregation that three women in the Gospels were one woman. Luke’s weeping sinner, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene became a single figure with a single past.
However, no Gospel says that. None of the four calls Mary Magdalene a prostitute, and none links her to Bethany. Rather, Gregory built the picture out of two passages that sit close together, plus a guess about the seven demons Luke mentions.
Nevertheless the guess held for fourteen centuries. Painters gave her loose hair and a jar of ointment. Meanwhile preachers gave her a brothel to repent of. The first witness of Easter turned into a cautionary tale about sex, and the title Apostle to the Apostles faded behind it. Our piece on the misconceptions around Mary Magdalene untangles the three women again.
What John Actually Says
The garden scene is short and strange. At first Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener. Then he says her name. She reaches for him, and yet he tells her not to hold on.
Then comes the errand. John 20:17-18 reads:
“Jesus said to her, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, “I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.”‘ Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: ‘I have seen the Lord!’” — John 20:17-18 (NIV)
Paul lists two marks of an apostle in 1 Corinthians 9:1. You must have seen the risen Lord, and you must be sent. Mary has both, in that order, in the space of two verses. You can read the passage in full and count them.
John never applies the noun to her. He does not have to, because the story does the work. The men she tells will run the church, and the first thing any of them knows about Easter comes from her mouth.
That is the whole basis of the title. Apostle to the Apostles is a summary of a scene, not a claim about office. The people she was sent to were themselves apostles, and the phrase says no more than that.
The Title Apostle to the Apostles Against the Men Who Ran
Set the scene beside the rest of the chapter. Peter had denied Jesus three times in a courtyard. Most of the others had scattered. Mary stayed at the cross, watched the burial and came back before dawn with spices.
John draws no moral from this, and that restraint is worth noticing. He simply puts her where the men are not. Instead loyalty and presence earn the first sight of the risen Jesus, while rank counts for nothing at all.
Mark’s ending goes further and turns the men into an obstacle. Mary tells them, and they do not believe her. The oldest account of the first Easter sermon ends with the audience calling the preacher a liar.
Luke says the same thing in plainer words. The women come back from the tomb, and their report strikes the eleven as nonsense. The woman later known as Apostle to the Apostles begins her mission by being ignored.
Mary in the Gospel of Mary
A second-century text gives the argument a name and a stage. The Gospel of Mary survives in a torn Coptic book plus two small Greek scraps, so we have perhaps half of it. Nobody thinks Mary wrote it, and a survey of the manuscripts sets out what is missing.
The story opens after Jesus has gone. The disciples panic and will not go out to preach. Meanwhile Mary steadies them, then tells them about a vision she has had, and describes the soul climbing past hostile powers on its way home.
Peter does not take it well. He asks whether Jesus really spoke in private to a woman, and whether the rest are now supposed to listen to her. Andrew says the teaching does not sound like anything he was taught.
Levi cuts in, and his reply is the point of the whole book:
“If the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well. That is why He loved her more than us.” — The Gospel of Mary 18:10-15
This is a second-century quarrel dressed as a first-century scene. Some Christians trusted visions and the people who had them. Others trusted the men who had walked with Jesus. Our article on the dispute between Mary and Peter follows how that split runs through several texts.
The Gospel of Philip and the Word Koinonos
One line in another Nag Hammadi book has caused more trouble than any of this. The Gospel of Philip calls Mary the koinonos of Jesus. The word means partner or companion, and it turns up in Greek contracts for business associates.
Novelists read it as wife and built bloodlines on it. Most historians instead read it as partner in the work, or as the disciple who grasped the teaching. Besides, the manuscript is late, its world is full of ritual and symbol, and it makes poor evidence for anything that happened in Galilee.
What the text does show is a memory. Somebody still wanted to say that Jesus had favoured her, and that the other disciples had minded. Our guide to the Gospel of Mary and its teaching sorts the useful parts of this material from the rest. Meanwhile Mary Magdalene in Gnostic tradition traces the wider picture.
Peter and Mary Are Not a Pair of Teams
Modern retellings like to set the two against each other. Peter gets structure, keys and an office. Mary, by contrast, gets vision, insight and a private word. It makes a neat story, but the sources are messier than that.
John gives Peter the sheep to feed and gives Mary the first announcement, in the same book, a chapter apart. Neither passage cancels the other. The apocryphal texts sharpen the clash because their authors were arguing about who could teach, and characters are a handy way to argue.
Read that way, the fight in the Gospel of Mary is real evidence, just not about Peter and Mary. It tells us what second-century congregations were shouting about. A fuller account of the women in these texts is in authority, vision and the dispute with Peter.
Why Apostle to the Apostles Came Back
In June 2016 the Vatican raised Mary Magdalene’s day from a memorial to a feast, the level kept for the Twelve. The decree used Apostola Apostolorum and quoted Thomas Aquinas, who had used it too.
The wording mattered more than the date on the calendar. It said the old title had never been wrong, and that the penitent prostitute had been a mistake all along. A Catholic reference article on Mary Magdalene shows how tangled the older accounts had become.
None of this settles the arguments about ordination, and the decree did not try to. It settles a smaller thing. The first person to carry the Easter message was a woman, the church said so in the third century, and it says so again now.
So Apostle to the Apostles is really a story about memory. The title was there from the start, then a sermon covered it over for fourteen hundred years, and a few scholars dug it out again. What changed was never the Gospel. What changed was who bothered to read the garden scene closely.
Check out the author’s book here: The Gospel of Mary Magdalene.
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