ABSTRACT
This chapter’s woman warrior is Mary Magdalene, one of the best-known and indubitably most exciting female figures in the New Testament. She is traditionally represented as the repentant prostitute, but recently this image experienced a radical metamorphosis. In the past decades, her active and intellectual role in salvation history was highlighted as a result of historical, theological, and feminist research, and the conventional identification of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute was abandoned. The adjustments in the field of scholarship have had enormous consequences for the way she is currently perceived and represented in popular culture. In the wake of the unequalled success of The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s novel (2003), she is celebrated as the most important apostle, Jesus’ equal partner, and indeed the long suppressed but re-emerged female ‘other’ of Christianity. Rather than the embodiment of sin and repentance, she is now the epitome of courage, leadership, loyalty, and strength (Burstein and Keijzer, 2006).
