Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

Part of the problem with all of these stories is that they’re largely intended as parables and are cobbled together from a litany of testimonials of which only four remain canonical.

Mary as a holy woman and as a sex symbol aren’t in contradiction. Quite a few of the early underground Christian organizations had their own bacchanals and orgiastic rituals, right in line with the traditions of their Roman-Era Middle Eastern peers. Age the stories 580 years and put them within the context of a far more conservative and doctrinaire church, obsessed with lineages and bloodlines rather than parties and popular evangelism, and Mary transforms from a kind-of Aphrodite-esque esoteric priestess into a harlot running a brothel.