TV Review : ‘Magdalen’ Shows Bible’s Bad Girl in a Different Light

So, Mary Magdalen was the name of the reformed whore who followed Christ, no? Right, if the only biblical texts you’ve relied on recently are the gospels of Scorsese or Lloyd Webber and Rice. If, on the other hand, you prefer to stick with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, then there’s not a whit of evidence that this key female figure of the New Testament was ever a prostitute, or indeed ever engaged in any sexual sin.

Lifetime’s Palm Sunday special, “Intimate Portrait: Mary Magdalen,” is an hourlong attempt to rehabilitate the sullied image of “the other Mary,” recorded in all four synoptic Gospels as one of Jesus’ most faithful followers. Or, as host Penelope Ann Miller asks, “How did she become the bad girl of the Bible?”

The answer is that the same fate befell Magdalen as a lot of modern actresses: She was recast as a hooker because the male authorities didn’t quite know what else to do with her. The beginning of the popular legend of her prostitution is traced back to the 6th Century, when Pope Gregory was apparently the first to combine Mary’s supreme faith with the story of an unnamed harlot whose sins were forgiven by Christ in the book of Luke.

This combining of characters may have just been a kind of dumb dramatic shorthand or--as the feminist slant of this hour would have it--a deliberate attempt to make the major female figure of the New Testament who wasn’t a virgin into a whore, relieving the need for 14 subsequent centuries of lazy Bible readers to think of women as anything but one or the other. (Little did Pope Gregory know how much easier he was making the jobs of directors of juicy Hollywood biblical epics to come.)

As the narration indicates, everything the Bible says about Mary Magdalen can be read in a few minutes--which renders the “Intimate Portrait” of the special’s title something of a misnomer, and which forces the producers to resort to footage of runway models and talk about “temptress” images once the hour runs out of speculative priests and theologians.

But, for all its padding, the show does a significant job of reinforcing for the layman that the biblical authors’ pointed inclusion of Mary Magdalen--especially as the last to leave the Crucifixion and the first witness to the Resurrection--was itself an astonishing act of feminism, at a time when women were almost as a rule not singled out in texts of any sort.

* “Intimate Portrait: Mary Magdalen” airs Sunday at 10 p.m. on Lifetime cable.