Which Mary had the alabaster box of oil?

Answer 1

A:

Mark chapter 14 says that a woman brought an alabaster box of ointment and anointed Jesus at the house of Simon the leper, shortly before the arrest of Jesus. There is no suggestion that the woman was a prostitute, and she anointed Jesus, rather than washing his feet.

Luke 7:36-50 says that a a sinful woman anointed Jesus' feet from an alabaster box of ointment at the house of Simon the pharisee, early in Jesus' ministry.

In John 12:1-8, Mary sister of Martha and Lazarus anointed the feet of Jesus with ointment. This occurs at the start of the final week, much later than in Luke but earlier than in Mark's Gospel.

Pope Gregory I noticed that in Mark and John, the ointment "could have been sold for 300 pence." He also noticed that in Luke and John, the woman anointed his feet and wiped them with her hair. Unaware of the literary dependency among the gospels, he concluded that these were different accounts of the same event by the same woman. This conclusion made Mary Magdalene the same person as Mary sister of Martha and Lazarus and also the same as the sinful woman of Luke 7:36-50. We now know that each subsequent evangelist simply created a new story based on the original in Mark's Gospel, which does not use the name Mary.