Salome (disciple)

Salome was a follower of Jesus who appears briefly in the canonical gospels and at greater length in apocryphal writings. Mark names her among the women present at the crucifixion and as one of the Myrrhbearers who found the empty tomb. Later interpretation identified her with women mentioned but not named elsewhere in the gospels, most often the wife of Zebedee and mother of the apostles James and John, and sometimes with the unnamed sister of Jesus's mother in John 19:25, which would make her Jesus's aunt. Non-canonical texts treat her more prominently, and several describe her as a disciple rather than a follower: she is named among Jesus's disciples in the Gospel of Thomas and questions him directly in the Greek Gospel of the Egyptians, where the exchange implies a tradition that she was childless. A Salome also appears in the Protevangelium of James as the woman who doubts and then attests the virgin birth, a figure often identified with the disciple from the High Middle Ages onwards and depicted as a midwife in Nativity iconography. Writing in the 2nd century, Celsus recorded a Christian sect that traced itself to her. Salome is venerated as a saint, commemorated in the Eastern Orthodox Church on the Sunday of the Myrrhbearers and on 3 August, and in the Latin liturgical rites of the Catholic Church on 24 April. A medieval legend held that Saint Anne bore three daughters by different husbands, the Three Marys, among them Salome as "Mary Salome", making her the half-sister of the Virgin. Popularised by the Golden Legend and widely painted as part of the Holy Kinship, the legend was rejected by Protestants at the Reformation and by Catholic theologians at the Council of Trent.