Mary, sister of Lazarus

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Mary anoints Jesus' feet in Bethany in this modern Greek icon. Her sister Martha serves the meal in the background.

In the Gospel of John, Mary of Bethany (Hebrew מרים Miryām, Miryam "Bitter"), the sister of Lazarus appears in connection with the visits of Jesus to Bethany and the death and rising from the dead of her brother Lazarus (John 11:20,31,33).

In the Gospel of Luke (10:38–42), 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. According to the author of Luke she sat at Jesus' feet, but in the iconic tradition (illustration right) she is seen to anoint his feet, the role of the unidentified "sinner" in the house of the Pharisee of Luke 7:36-50. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910) states that " there is no suggestion of an identification of the three persons (the "sinner", Mary Magdalen, and Mary of Bethany), and if we had only St. Luke to guide us we should certainly have no grounds for so identifying them." The Catholic authors go on to adduce the gloss to John 11.2, "Mary was the one who had anointed the Lord with perfumed oil and dried his feet with her hair; it was her brother Lazarus who was ill."

Thus the Johannine tradition explicitly identified Mary sister of Lazarus with the unidentified "sinner" in the house of the Pharisee. Western tradition as early as the 3rd century ^{[citation needed]} further identified the woman who was a sinner as Mary Magdalene.

Easton (1897) noted that it would appear from the circumstances that the family of Lazarus possessed a family vault (11:38) and that a large number of Jews from Jerusalem came to condole with them on the death of Lazarus (11:19), that this family at Bethany belonged to the wealthier class of the people.

On the occasion of Jesus's last visit to Bethany, an unidentified woman who brought "a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the head of Jesus" as he reclined at table in the house of one Simon, who had been a leper (Matthew 26:6; Mark 14:3; John 12:2,3). Though there is no hint of the woman's name, or any reason given in the canonic gospels to connect her with Mary other than the circumstance of this anointing episode's happening in Bethany, in the Latin churches it has become the tradition of many Christians to identify the woman with Mary sister of Lazarus. The Greek churches continue to distinguish Mary Magdalene, this Mary sister of Lazarus, and "the sinner" of Luke 7:36–50.

To Protestants, nothing more is known of her. In folk Catholicism, this Mary is also Saint Mary Magdalene, of whom both the Bible and legends apart from it tell more.