Mary of Bethany is a biblical figure mentioned by name in the Gospel of John and probably the Gospel of Luke in the Christian New Testament. Together with her siblings Lazarus and Martha, she is described as living in the village of Bethany, a small village in Judaea to the south of the Mount of Olives near Jerusalem.See the Gospel texts, and Schiller, Gertud, Iconography of Christian Art, Vol. I, pp. 158–59, 1971 (English trans from German), Lund Humphries, London,
Western Christianity initially identified Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene and the sinful woman of Luke 7 (). This influenced the Roman Rite liturgy of the feast of Mary Magdalene, with a Gospel reading about the sinful woman and a collect referring to Mary of Bethany. After the liturgical revision in 1969 and 2021, the feast of Mary Magdalene continues to be on 22 July, while Mary of Bethany is celebrated as a separate saint, along with her siblings Lazarus and Martha on 29 July.Martyrologium Romanum (Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2001 ), pp. 383, 398 In Eastern Christianity and some Protestant traditions, Mary of Bethany and Mary Magdalene are also considered separate persons.Carol Ann Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, Jacqueline E. Lapsley (editors), Women's Bible Commentary, p. 532: "Although Eastern Orthodox Scholars never subscribed to this conflation of Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and the unnamed sinner, Gregory The Great's interpretation cemented Mary Magdalene's reputation as a penitent sinner for most of her interpretive history in the West" (Westminster John Knox Press, 2012 Third Edition Revised and Updated, ) The Eastern Orthodox Church has its own traditions regarding Mary of Bethany's life beyond the gospel accounts.
Biblical references Gospel of John
In the Gospel of John, a Mary appears in connection to two incidents: the raising from the dead of her brother Lazarus and the anointing of Jesus. The identification of this being the same Mary in both incidents is given explicitly by the author: "Now a man named Lazarus was sick. He was from Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. This Mary, whose brother Lazarus now lay sick, was the same one who poured perfume on the Lord and wiped his feet with her hair." The mention of her sister Martha suggests a connection with the woman named Mary in Luke 10:38–42.
In the account of the raising of Lazarus, Jesus meets with the sisters in turn: Martha followed by Mary. Martha goes immediately to meet Jesus as he arrives, while Mary waits until she is called. As one commentator notes, "Martha, the more aggressive sister, went to meet Jesus, while quiet and contemplative Mary stayed home. This portrayal of the sisters agrees with that found in Luke 10:38–42." When Mary meets Jesus, she falls at his feet. In speaking with Jesus, both sisters lament that he did not arrive in time to prevent their brother's death: "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died." But where Jesus' response to Martha is one of teaching, calling her to hope and faith, his response to Mary is more emotional: "When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled." As the 17th-century Welsh commentator Matthew Henry notes, "Mary added no more, as Martha did; but it appears, by what follows, that what she fell short in words she made up in tears; she said less than Martha, but wept more." The Greek word used for Jesus' 'love' towards the two sisters in the Gospel of John account of the raising of Lazarus, is meaning divine or self-sacrificial love.Kenneth S. Wuest. (July–September 1961). "The Holy Spirit in Greek Exposition". Bibliotheca Sacra. v. 118. no. 471. p. 220. The Internet Archive website Retrieved 29 July 2025.
Anointing of Jesus
A Narrative in which Mary of Bethany plays a central role is the anointing of Jesus, an event reported in the Gospel of John in which a woman pours the entire contents of an alabastron of very expensive perfume over the feet of Jesus. Only in this account is the woman identified as Mary, with the earlier reference in establishing her as the sister of Martha and Lazarus.
The woman's name is not given in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, but the event is likewise placed in Bethany, specifically at the home of one Simon the Leper, a man whose significance is not explained elsewhere in the gospels.
According to the Markan account, the perfume was the purest of spikenard. Some of the onlookers were angered because this expensive perfume could have been sold for a year's wages, which Mark enumerates as 300 denarii, and the money given to the poor. The Gospel of Matthew states that the "disciples were indignant" and John's gospel states that it was Judas Iscariot who was most offended (which is explained by the narrator as being because Judas was a thief and desired the money for himself). In the accounts, Jesus justifies Mary's action by stating that they would always have the poor among them and would be able to help them whenever they desired, but that he would not always be with them and says that her anointing was done to prepare him for his burial. As one commentator notes, "Mary seems to have been the only one who was sensitive to the impending death of Jesus and who was willing to give a material expression of her esteem for him. Jesus' reply shows his appreciation of her act of devotion." The accounts in Matthew and Mark adds these words of Jesus, "I tell you the truth, wherever this gospel is preached throughout the world, what she has done will also be told, in memory of her".,
Easton (1897) noted that it would appear from the circumstances that the family of Lazarus possessed a family vault and that a large number of Jews from Jerusalem came to console them on the death of Lazarus, that this family at Bethany belonged to the wealthier class of the people. This would help explain how Mary of Bethany could afford to possess quantities of expensive perfume.
A similar anointing is described in the Gospel of Luke as occurring at the home of one Simon the Pharisee in which a woman who had been sinful all her life, and who was crying, anointed Jesus' feet and, when her tears started to fall on his feet, she wiped them with her hair. Luke's account (as well as John's) differs from that of Matthew and Mark by relating that the anointing is to the feet rather than the head. Although it is a subject of considerable debate, many scholars hold that these actually describe two separate events.Discussed in Van Til, Kent A. Three Anointings and One offering: The Sinful Woman in Luke 7.36–50 , Journal of Pentecostal Theology, Volume 15, Number 1, 2006, pp. 73–82(10). However, the author of this article does not himself hold to this view.
Jesus' response to the anointing in Luke is completely different from that recorded in the other gospels to the anointing in their accounts. Rather than Jesus' above-mentioned comments on the "poor you will always have with you", in Luke he tells his host the Parable of the Two Debtors. As one commentator notes, "Luke is the only one to record the parable of the two debtors, and he chooses to preserve it in this setting. ... If one considers the other gospel accounts as a variation of the same event, it is likely that the parable is not authentically set. Otherwise, the powerful message from the parable located in this setting would likely be preserved elsewhere, too. However, if one considers the story historically accurate, happening in Jesus' life apart from the similar incidents recorded in the other gospels, the question of the authenticity of the parable receives a different answer. ... John Nolland, following Wilckens' ideas, writes: 'There can hardly be a prior form of the episode not containing the present parable, since this would leave the Pharisee's concerns of v 39 with no adequate response'."Hersey, Kim. The Two Debtors , Wesley Center for Applied Theology, Northwest Nazarene University.
Luke 10
In chapter 10 of the Gospel of Luke, Jesus visits the home of two sisters named Mary and Martha, living in an unnamed village. Mary is contrasted with her sister Martha, who was "cumbered about many things" while Jesus was their guest, while Mary had chosen "the better part", that of listening to the master's discourse."Mary", Easton's Bible Dictionary, 1897.
For Mary to sit at Jesus' feet, and for him to allow her to do so, was itself controversial. In doing so, as one commentator notes, Mary took "the place of a disciple by sitting at the feet of the teacher. It was unusual for a woman in first-century Judaism to be accepted by a teacher as a disciple."
Most Christian commentators have been ready to assume that the two occurrences of sisters named as Mary and Martha refer the same pair of sisters.
Medieval Western identification with Mary Magdalene In medieval Western Christian tradition, Mary of Bethany was identified as Mary Magdalene perhaps in large part because of a homily given by Pope Gregory the Great in which he taught about several women in the New Testament as though they were the same person.Reid, Barbara E., "Mary of Bethany, a Model of Listening", L'Osservatore Romano, August 11, 2017, p. 6 This led to a conflation of Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene as well as with another woman (beside Mary of Bethany who anointed Jesus), and the woman caught in adultery. Eastern Christianity never adopted this identification. In his article in the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia, Hugh Pope stated, "The Greek Fathers, as a whole, distinguish the three persons: the 'sinner' of ; the sister of Martha and Lazarus, and ; and Mary Magdalen."Pope, H. (1910). St. Mary Magdalen, in The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
Father Hugh Pope enumerated the accounts of each of these three persons (the unnamed "sinner", Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Bethany) in the Gospel of Luke and concluded that, based on these accounts, "there is no suggestion of an identification of the three persons, and if we had only Luke to guide us we should certainly have no grounds for so identifying them [as the same person]." He then explains first the position, at that time general among Catholics, equating Mary of Bethany with the sinful woman of Luke by referring to , where Mary is identified as the woman who anointed Jesus, and noting that this reference is given before John's account of the anointing in Bethany:
John, however, clearly identifies Mary of Bethany with the woman who anointed Christ's feet (12; cf. and ). It is remarkable that already in John 11:2, John has spoken of Mary as "she that anointed the Lord's feet", he aleipsasa. It is commonly said that he refers to the subsequent anointing which he himself describes in ; but it may be questioned whether he would have used he aleipsasa if another woman, and she a "sinner" in the city, had done the same. It is conceivable that John, just because he is writing so long after the event and at a time when Mary was dead, wishes to point out to us that she was really the same as the "sinner". In the same way Luke may have veiled her identity precisely because he did not wish to defame one who was yet living; he certainly does something similar in the case of St. Matthew whose identity with Levi the publican (5:27) he conceals. If the foregoing argument holds good, Mary of Bethany and the "sinner" are one and the same.
Hugh Pope then explained the identification of Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene by the presumption that, because of Jesus' high praise of her deed of anointing him, it would be incredible that she should also not have been at his crucifixion and resurrection. Since Mary Magdalene is reported to have been present on those occasions, by this reasoning, she must therefore be the same person as Mary of Bethany: