Christianity & the Distortion & Erasure of Women: Eve, Mother Mary & Mary Magdalene

"There are no girl parts to play." That's what Rebecca's daughter Zoe said about her school's Easter play, and it sparked the walk-to-school conversation that this whole podcast (and Rebecca's in progress book) was born from.

In Episode 3 of For Goddess Sake, Rebecca takes on Christianity directly, as the operating system underneath modern Western society, whether you set foot in a church or not.

Starting with Eve, who was the template patriarchy built every subsequent "difficult woman" from, Rebecca traces how women's near-total absence from Scripture wasn't proof they didn't matter, but proof of who was holding the pen. She unpacks the real, largely untold picture of Jesus's ministry: one that was structurally and financially built on the backs of independent women. Then she goes deep on the two women history split the feminine into. The impossibly pure Virgin Mary, and Mary Magdalene, whose reputation was rewritten by a 6th-century Pope and only officially corrected by the Vatican in 1969 and further in 2016.

This episode makes the case that the "Virgin and the Fallen Woman" isn't ancient history, it's a sorting mechanism still running underneath purity culture, the trad wife movement, and the instinct to doubt women's testimony today. It closes with an invitation into Rebecca's new offering, Sub Rosa, a six-month mystery school journey into the feminine archetypes.

What You'll Learn in This Episode

• Why Eve became the template for how women's judgment gets treated as the crime
• How literacy, power, and who "held the pen" shaped which women's stories survived
• The real, largely untaught picture of women funding and structurally supporting Jesus's ministry
• Why Mary, Mother of Jesus became a purity standard no real woman could reach
• The suppressed story of Mary Magdalene. A powerful healer, first witness to the resurrection, and possibly far more central to Jesus's ministry than church history admits
• How Pope Gregory I's 6th-century sermon rebranded Mary Magdalene as a "sinner" for 14 centuries, with no textual basis
• The quiet 1969 and 2016 Vatican corrections that restored Mary Magdalene's true role, including her title "Apostle to the Apostles"
• How the Virgin/Fallen Woman split still operates today, from purity culture to the trad wife movement
• Why women's testimony still gets met with "doubt first, corroborate later"
• An invitation into Sub Rosa, Rebecca's new six-month mystery school for reclaiming the feminine archetypes. Sign up to the waitlist here: https://subrosawl.therosealmanac.com/form-410928

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