Magdala ("tower") was a small village in Galilee, which seems to have been the birthplace of Mary Magdalene, or "Mary of Magdala", in the Christian New Testament. Magdala is its Aramaic designation; in Hebrew it was known as Migdal. Galilee (Hebrew hagalil הגליל, Arabic al-jaleel الجليل), meaning circuit, is a large area overlapping with much of the North District of Israel. ... Mary Magdalene is described, both in the canonical New Testament and in the New Testament apocrypha, as a devoted disciple of Jesus. ... History Main article: History of Christianity See also: Timeline of Christianity The history of Christianity is difficult to extricate from that of the European West (and several other culture-regions) in general. ... The New Testament, sometimes called the Greek Testament or Greek Scriptures is the name given to the part of the Christian Bible that was written after the birth of Jesus. ... Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. ... Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by 6 million people mainly in Israel, parts of the Palestinian territories, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world. ...

The name given for Magdala in the Revised Version of Matthew 15:39 is Magadan. This is probably another name for the same place, or for a village so near it that the shore where Jesus landed may have belonged to either village. The Revised Version (or English Revised Version) of the Bible is a late 19th-century British revision of the King James Version of 1611. ... Jesus, also known as Jesus of Nazareth or Jesus Christ, is the central figure of Christianity, most of the adherents of which worship him as the Messiah, son of God, and God incarnate. ...

The Jewish Talmud mentions two places named Magdala. One Magdala was in the east, on the Yarmuk near Gadara (in the Middle Ages "Jadar", now Mukes), thus acquiring the name Magdala Gadar. There was another, better-known Magdala near Tiberias, Magdala Nunayya, ("Magdala of the fishes"), which would locate it on the shore of the lake. Josephus mentions a wealthy Galilean town destroyed by the Romans in the Jewish War (III, x) with the Greek name Taricheæ (Josephus does not give its Hebrew name), from its prosperous fisheries. Judaism is the religion of the Jewish people. ... The Talmud (תלמוד) is considered an authoritative record of rabbinic discussions on Jewish law, Jewish ethics, customs, legends and stories. ... Tiberias in 1862, the ruins reminiscent of its ancient heritage. ... Josephus (c. ... Jewish War is a book written by the historian Josephus as a description of Jewish history up to the events of the Destruction of Jerusalem. ...

External link

• Catholic Encyclopedia — Magdala, the two possible locations mentioned in the Talmud