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If you are interested in Christianity, then you will be interested in Jesus of Nazareth, his life and mission. You might prefer to regard the gospels as narrating pure history told from four different perspectives, but if you heed the advice of the majority of biblical scholars today, some of them representing the Churches, then you will accept that there is a large element of myth and legend, material that is not historical but which expresses theological truths in symbolic forms. If so, then the passages that narrate the virgin conception and birth of Jesus are among the strongest candidates to be regarded as metaphorical and not historical.
However, that would include the majority of verses in the New Testament which speak about Mary. Where does that leave us in terms of understanding the Mary of history? In this book, we have shown that there is enough evidence in the gospels and Acts to construct a portrait of her. These are drawn from traditions that reflect her importance in the earliest Church that emerged after the resurrection appearances of Jesus.
Despite the image of the isolated figure that meets the angel in the annunciation narrative, Mary was remembered as being in the company of others. In the gender demarcated society of the first century (one that continues into Eastern Mediterranean culture today), Mary was intimately associated with:
· The brothers of Jesus, who worked with the apostles in preaching the gospel of Jesus, and of whom at least James was given authoritative status in the Jerusalem Church;
· The women in the community who followed Jesus from Galilee to the cross, some of whom were able to provide resources which funded and supported the ministry of Jesus; of these, Mary Magdalene was the most prominent.
The Gospel of John confirms that Mary the mother of Jesus could be understood in the first century as the adopted mother of an important apostle, the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved’. We have shown that this idea extended further back in history beyond simply being a symbolic device for John to express the idea of Jesus’ family of faith. Mary was the mother not only of James and Joses (plus Judas and Simon), who were most probably her actual children, but she is also described as being of the household of Clopas, and perhaps also the mother of John Mark. All of these people were associated with the Jerusalem Church. For a man to hold authority in the Jerusalem Church in the first decades of Christianity, he needed to call Mary his mother.
The writer or compilers of the Gospel of Mark, for reasons that made sense to them in terms of the requirements of the Gentile mission, preferred to stress that Mary and the brothers of Jesus were unnecessary mediators for faith in Jesus. The other gospels followed suit, but they reinstated Mary when utilizing and developing traditions about the birth of Jesus and the wedding at Cana. In addition, all the gospels contain traces of her involvement in the crucifixion and the events that followed.
Mary preceded Jesus; the Gospels of Luke and John had no difficulty with the inclusion of passages portraying her reflecting on Jesus’ mission while he was still a child and, at Cana, providing the initiative for it. Therefore, we can acclaim her as the original founder of the Christian vision. Doubtless, she had her own sources of inspiration but, beyond the Hebrew Scriptures and possibly the movement behind John the Baptist, we do not know what these were. The New Testament generally attributes to women the initiative for understanding the mission of Jesus as the non-violent Messiah who was destined to be executed, and believing that he was risen from the dead. Mary’s involvement in the origin of Jesus’ mission is remembered, but not Joseph’s.
The metaphor of the Virgin is appropriate but far too easily misleading in describing the woman who stood at the crossroads of history; it says nothing about sexuality and everything about the profound inspiration of her vision and that of her son. It is extremely likely that she was the mother of several children; the New Testament says so and it takes a convoluted argument to deny it. She is the ‘Ever Virgin’ because her decision to undertake the mission to the poor and disadvantaged of ancient Israel belongs to eternity as well as history, but it is not a statement about her attitude to sex. As there is no mention of Jesus being married in the gospels, he is a better role model for the celibate than Mary.
What this means for the theology of Mary will be a matter for debate; the Churches in East and West have tended to see Mary in union with Jesus as a mother figure for Christianity, never quite fully divine but a figure of supernatural power and quality, nonetheless. The Protestant Reformation took the cue from Mark’s Gospel in seeing Mary’s mediation as unnecessary. This had the unfortunate consequence of Mary being associated too closely with hierarchical models of the Church in Roman Catholicism.
Christian theology and doctrine evolve. Recent social development in terms of gender equality renders the concept of a New Adam who is divine and human, as opposed to a New Eve who is human and subordinate, extremely problematic. This theology of creation is no longer plausible. While Mary’s divine-human nature has been latent in devotion over the centuries, Christianity is leaving it to New Age Goddess worshippers to take the final step that the Churches could never quite countenance because of the testimony of the New Testament that Jesus Christ alone was the incarnate God.
Our modern understanding of humans as social beings might lead us to wonder what it might mean for God to be incarnate in a male individual. This belongs to an ancient world of belief in sacred kings. Some radical modern theologies, the liberationist and the feminist, have emphasized and expanded upon the ancient doctrine that incarnation and salvation are communal and relational. The Incarnation, overflowing beyond the individual person Jesus, begins its journey with Mary the mother of Jesus, in company with the women and men of her community.