The Virgin Mary is best known today as the Mother of God. Ancient Christians held the same belief, but it’s unclear what else they knew about her. The New Testament, apocryphal writings, and biblical archaeology shed light on certain aspects of her life, such as her likely age was when Jesus was born. Mary also serves as a lens through which we can view the history of Christian theology and the nature of Jesus. In this interview, biblical scholar Mary Joan Leith discusses the role of Mary in early Christianity.
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How did you come to study the Virgin Mary?
That’s a good question, since I was raised (and am) Protestant. Furthermore, as a little girl, I was not happy to be cast as the Virgin Mary in a Sunday School Nativity pageant. She was so boring, sitting there meekly, in contrast to the angels who had wings and sparkly haloes and got to sing.
My interest grew out of two things:
- Archaeological discoveries. Most importantly, the fact that I am a biblical scholar (and archaeologist in my pre-PhD days), and my time in grad school coincided with the explosion of archaeological evidence for an Israelite goddess.
- College course. I found myself teaching in the Religious Studies department at Stonehill College, a small Catholic liberal arts college, which did not have a Virgin Mary course. My Virgin Mary course combines goddess studies with Church History. And the Virgin Mary is the perfect unifying theme to frame a Church History course around because she turns up in so many theological contexts from the earliest times to the present.
How does the Virgin Mary intersect with the history of Christian theology?
Here’s an example to consider. One of the earliest documented theological controversies in Christianity is a heresy called Docetism. The term comes from the Greek verb to seem and refers to the belief that Jesus only “seemed” to be human when he was 100 percent divine during his time on earth.
In other words, Jesus only “seemed” to suffer and die on the cross. Of course, orthodox Christian doctrine insists that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, but many people could not wrap their minds around the idea that anyone who had lived a normal human life could be divine. It was unseemly for a god to need to eat and sleep, have normal bodily functions, or, most importantly, feel pain.
Whom did Ignatius bring up but Mary?
In the early second century, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch called those “misguided” Christians who thought like this “ravening dogs.” For Ignatius, Jesus’s death on the cross made all the difference for salvation: “I do not place my hopes in one who died for me in appearance but in who died for me in reality.”
To prove the point that Jesus was human and thus really suffered on the cross, whom did Ignatius bring up but Mary?
He pointed out,
Mary then did truly conceive a human body which had God inhabiting it. …. He was carried in the womb, even as we humans are…and was really born, as we also are; and was in reality nourished with milk, and partook of common meat and drink, even as we humans do.
Disputes about how Jesus’s nature could combine the human and the divine would obsess Christian theologians and Christian rulers alike for centuries. And almost invariably (as at the beginning), the fact of Mary as Jesus’s human mother played a role in their claims and counter-claims.
What did the earliest Christians think about the Virgin Mary?
This is a great question because it’s likely that different Christians—or rather, other followers of Jesus— held distinct ideas about Mary (we can’t really talk about Christians per se for the first century or so of what I call the “Jesus movement”).
If you look at the New Testament, our earliest source, Mary has what has been called “a slim scriptural persona.” Read any part of the New Testament while consciously resisting any preconceptions based on Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2, and you won’t find any hint that Jesus was miraculously conceived or that his childhood involved anything unusual.
Paul famously refers to the “brothers of our Lord” in 1 Corinthians, suggesting Mary had more children than Jesus. Still, Paul only makes a passing comment in Galatians 4 that Jesus was born of a mother.
Presumably, if the authors of the New Testament knew about Jesus’s miraculous conception, they would have been eager to bring it up.
John, who refers to the “mother of the Lord—never “Mary”—places her at Jesus’s first miracle, turning water into wine at Cana and the Crucifixion. But the Gospel of John expressly doesn’t care how Jesus came to be born because, for John, Jesus the Word (Logos) existed before creation.
Fun Fact. The Syriac (Eastern Christian) version of John called Jesus the “only begotten son who is from the womb of the father.”
Is there any historical evidence for the Virgin Mary?
Biblical Insights
If you mean any objects or texts from the actual time of Mary—the first half of the first century—then no. Despite this, a natural human desire to be able to touch something connected directly to Jesus or Mary later manifested itself in a belief in holy relics such as the true cross or, in the case of Mary, the cloak she wore when Jesus was born.
Historically, though, all we know comes from the Bible. And it tells us that Mary was Jewish, likely came from Nazareth, and married a man named Joseph.
If we read the Gospels without presuming any later beliefs about Mary, she also gave birth to other sons and daughters after her first-born Jesus.
It is also likely that Mary was widowed by the time Jesus began his ministry, and that she survived as part of the community of believers in Jerusalem led by James, Jesus’s brother.
Apocryphal Accounts
There are later so-called apocryphal (non-scriptural) writings about Mary, particularly the fascinating Proevangelium of James, also known as the Infancy Gospel of Mary.
I call these writings “fan fiction” because that’s exactly what they are if you consider the pious writers to be “fans.” They fill in gaps in the scriptural stories that people wanted to know more about, like who Mary’s parents were, how she grew up, more about Jesus as a little boy, etc.
Unfortunately, they don’t contain any additional historical information but are wonderful examples of what early Christians thought and cared about.
History and Archaeology
Other than the scriptures, archaeology and history fill in a few of the gaps, even if they can’t tell us anything specific about Mary herself. Because this was the usual practice in first-century Jewish communities, Mary was likely in her early teens when she married and gave birth to Jesus.
She would have observed Jewish life practices, such as eating only with fellow Jews, using stone vessels, and ritually bathing in a Mikveh after her monthly period.
It’s also important to remember that Galilee, Mary’s home territory, was not only part of King Herod the Great’s realm but, within Jesus’s lifetime, was also the site of violent Roman reprisals against Jewish uprisings against Roman occupation, so an awareness on Mary’s part of the larger world of the Roman Empire would have been inescapable.
Can you say something about Mary and the idea of God’s Plan of Salvation?
Let me explain what is meant by “God’s Plan of Salvation.” This is a way of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures that began in Second-Temple Judaism and became part of Christian practice as well (for great reads about this, take a look at Jim Kugel’s book, The Bible as it Was or How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now).
In essence, many Jews of Jesus’s time believed the Hebrew Scriptures described not only history but also, for the pious and learned reader, offered prophecies and foreshadowings about God’s future plans as well.
For Second Temple Jews, much of this prophecy concerned the coming Messiah; once Jesus’s followers came to believe Jesus was the promised Messiah, all those prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures about the coming Jewish Messiah were applied to Jesus. If you have ever wondered why Christianity “kept” the Jewish scriptures, this is a big part of the answer.
Hence Mary’s unprecedented virginal conception.
In Matthew’s Nativity story, Mary demonstrated the fulfillment of prophecy in Isaiah 7—at least, in the Greek translation of Isaiah 7—which referred to a virgin who would conceive and bear a son. The miraculous conceptions by Elizabeth and Mary in Luke echo in word and plot miraculous Old Testament conceptions like those by Sarah, Samson’s unnamed mother, and Hannah.
The language of Mary’s song of praise (often called the Magnificat) in Luke 1 paraphrases much of Hannah’s song in 1 Samuel 2.
Jesus’s story is the fulfillment of the continuous story of God’s past deeds brought into the new Messianic era—hence Mary’s unprecedented virginal conception, a “new thing” in the words of Isaiah.
About the Interview Participant
Mary Joan Winn Leith is an expert on the life of the Virgin Mary in early Christianity. She is an Associate Professor of Religion at Stonehill College, and serves as Chair of the Department of Religious Studies. Leith holds a PhD from Harvard University and has published numerous books and articles, including The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction. As a professor, she takes an interdisciplinary approach that examines archaeology, history, gender studies, and doctrinal evolutions. Some of her relevant courses include “The Virgin Mary,” “Renaissance Virgin Mary,” and “Introduction to the New Testament.”
Further Reading
- What Is the Christmas Story in Luke?
- How Did All the Apostles Die?
- Were the Pharisees Bad?
- Who Was Mary Magdalene?
- How Did Early Christians Observe the Sabbath?
The Blessed Virgin Mary Resources
- The Virgin Mary: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford)
- Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion (Yale)
- Born of a Virgin? Reconceiving Jesus in the Bible, Tradition, and Theology (Eerdmans)
- Subject Guide: Mary, Blessed Mother of Jesus (Yale Library)
- The Doctrine of the Virgin Mary and Blessed Wisdom (Britannica)
