linguistic:paraphrasing, quality:corruption, information:highlighting
During Jesus's ministry

Mary Magdalene's epithet Magdalene (ἡ Μαγδαληνή; literally "the Magdalene") most likely means that she came from Magdala, a village on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee that was primarily known in antiquity as a fishing town. Mary was, by far, the most common Jewish given name for girls and women during the first century, so it was necessary for the authors of the gospels to call her Magdalene in order to distinguish her from the other women named Mary who followed Jesus. Although the Gospel of Mark, reputed by scholars to be the earliest surviving gospel, does not mention Mary Magdalene until Jesus's crucifixion, the Gospel of Luke 8:2–3 provides a brief summary of her role during his ministry:

Soon afterwards he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. The twelve were with him, as well as some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, and Joanna, the wife of Herod 's steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their resources.

According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus exorcised "seven demons" from Mary Magdalene. That seven demons had possessed Mary is repeated in Mark 16:9, part of the "longer ending" of that gospel – this is not found in the earliest manuscripts and is possibly a second-century addition to the original text, possibly based on the Gospel of Luke. In the first century, demons were believed widely to cause physical and psychological illness. Bruce Chilton, a scholar of early Christianity, states that the reference to the number of demons being "seven" may mean that Mary had to undergo seven exorcisms, probably over a long period of time, due to the first six being partially or wholly unsuccessful.

Bart D. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity, contends that the number seven may be merely symbolic, since, in Jewish tradition, seven was the number of completion, so that Mary was possessed by seven demons may simply mean she was completely overwhelmed by their power. In either case, Mary must have suffered from severe emotional or psychological trauma for an exorcism of this kind to have been perceived as necessary. Consequently, her devotion to Jesus resulting from this healing must have been very strong. The Gospels' writers normally relish giving dramatic descriptions of Jesus's public exorcisms, with the possessed person wailing, thrashing, and tearing his or her clothes in front of a crowd. By contrast, that Mary's exorcism receives little attention may indicate that either Jesus performed it privately or that the recorders did not perceive it as particularly dramatic.

Because Mary is listed as one of the women who supported Jesus's ministry financially, she must have been relatively wealthy. The places where she and the other women are mentioned throughout the gospels indicate strongly that they were vital to Jesus's ministry and that Mary Magdalene always appears first, whenever she is listed in the Synoptic Gospels as a member of a group of women, indicates that she was seen as the most important out of all of them. Carla Ricci notes that, in lists of the disciples, Mary Magdalene occupies a similar position among Jesus's female followers as Simon Peter does among the male apostles.

That women played such an active and important role in Jesus's ministry was not entirely radical or even unique; inscriptions from a synagogue in Aphrodisias in Asia Minor from around the same time period reveal that many of the major donors to the synagogue were women. Jesus's ministry did bring women greater liberation than they would typically have held in mainstream Jewish society.