Who washed Jesus's feet with her tears and dried his feet with her hair?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward a genuine contradiction

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The Gospels contain four anointing scenes, and sorting them is the heart of this entry. Mark 14:3-9 and Matthew 26:6-13 are clearly the same event: Bethany, the house of Simon the Leper, two days before Passover, an unnamed woman pouring costly ointment over Jesus' head as a proleptic burial anointing. John 12:1-8 is also at Bethany but dates the meal six days before Passover, sets it in the household of Lazarus, names Mary (the sister of Martha and Lazarus), and moves the anointing from the head to the feet, which Mary then wipes with her hair. Luke 7:36-50 stands apart: it occurs much earlier in the Galilean ministry, in the house of Simon a Pharisee, and features an unnamed "woman who was a sinner" who weeps over Jesus' feet, wipes them with her hair, kisses them, and anoints them, prompting a parable about forgiveness and debt.

The third SAB answer — "Or was it Mary Magdalene?" — invokes a conflation that is historically traceable and textually baseless. It stems from Pope Gregory the Great's Homily 33 (591 CE), which fused the sinful woman of Luke 7, Mary of Bethany, and Mary Magdalene into a single penitent prostitute. Nothing in any of the four anointing pericopes links the woman to Mary Magdalene. Luke in fact introduces Mary Magdalene afresh in the very next pericope (Luke 8:2) as one "out of whom went seven devils," with no hint that she is the woman of 7:36-50; the juxtaposition tells against, not for, the identification. Jane Schaberg traces how the composite "Magdalene" image was built in Western tradition and dismantled by modern scholarship (the Catholic calendar itself dropped the identification in 1969).

The strongest apologetic harmonization, defended by Craig Blomberg, distinguishes the events: Luke 7 is one anointing (Galilee, early, a sinful woman), and Mark/Matthew/John report another (Bethany, late, Mary). On this view the shared motif of wiping the feet with the hair is simply a repeated act, and there is no contradiction because different women are described. The distinction between Luke 7 and the Bethany event is genuinely defensible and resolves the bare question. What remains strained is the duplication of so distinctive a gesture — a woman loosening her hair (itself a scandalous act in that culture) to wipe Jesus' feet, with costly ointment — occurring independently on two occasions, with one of those women being the same Mary of Bethany John ties to the Lazarus story.

The critical reconstruction, set out by Raymond Brown and Fitzmyer, is that Luke and John draw on a common anointing tradition that each evangelist has redacted. The hair-and-feet detail, absent from Mark/Matthew, appears in both Luke 7 and John 12 precisely because they share a source distinct from the Markan head-anointing. Luke relocated the episode early and recast the woman as a penitent sinner to serve his recurring Sondergut theme of Jesus and the marginalized; John kept the Bethany setting of Mark but moved the anointing to the feet and named Mary to bind it to the Lazarus narrative and to anticipate the foot-washing of John 13. The residue is two accounts that agree on a vivid gesture but disagree on the woman, the place, and the time.

Where the critical reading lands: the bare question is harmonizable by distinguishing events, but the Magdalene identification is a later conflation and the underlying data points to one tradition reworked.