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Mary’s Virginity as Theological Metaphor
The word ‘virgin’ had metaphorical connotations in the ancient world just as it continues to do today. It denotes innocence and youth, the promise of a new life that is uncharted and full of potential. Originally, it also meant unspoiled, incorrupt, intact. While we might want to be cautious about this aspect of the metaphor today if we do not regard loving, consensual, and non-abusive sex as something that spoils or corrupts, nevertheless, we can understand the connotations of the word in its original context.
Mary’s virginity conveys the message that, in the Incarnation of the Son of God, God enacts renewal. Israel in the person of Mary was returning to the opportunities present in the liminal virginal state and this time fulfilling its true divine vocation. The original newness of God’s creation was bursting forth once again in the life, ministry, and death of Jesus, something that was not dependent on anything or anyone that had gone before: it did not rely on Jewish history but fulfilled it. This is summed up in John 1.17: ‘The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.’ The virgin conception captures this idea in the simple but wonderful story of the one who came into being through the Holy Spirit and not because of the initiative of human beings.
John’s prologue (John 1.1–18) is very different from Matthew’s and Luke’s birth narratives. It identifies Jesus as the Word of God existent from all eternity and has clear echoes of Genesis 1 in which the world is created through God’s speech. Despite this very different approach, John’s prologue is in many ways equivalent to the story of Matthew’s and Luke’s virgin becoming pregnant by the action of the Holy Spirit. Both stress the divine initiative, speak about the origins of Jesus, and proclaim the advent of new things for the benefit of humanity. One does this with a theological hymn and the others with a story. The birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are prologues of their gospels in the same way as John’s.
In the Christian story, Mary, the young woman between girlhood and marriage, is taken up into cosmic eternity: for each successive generation, she continues to hear the words of the angel and respond with her ‘Let it be’. In this sense, she is the ‘Ever Virgin’. That liminal moment in which the young woman becomes pregnant with the Messiah is forever available to us. She, like Eve, stands in the garden of eternity and makes a decision which is with humanity for all time. Mary is accessed through mythical language and ideas in which she is larger than life: the ‘Ever Virgin’ and ‘New Eve’.
The other moment in which Mary is especially and eternally present is the crucifixion. Christian theology does not make a distinction between the virgin as a young woman and the older woman who now stands as a mother lamenting the execution of her son. The mythical language of eternity does not need to take account of such discontinuities; in its language, she can be virgin and mother, young and old, all at the same time. All aspects of her life present themselves together.
Those two states of Mary, the young virgin and the ageing, sorrowful mother, are not necessarily opposites. The crucifixion as a painful but necessary process – a transition into salvation and the emergence of the Church – was imagined as a birth that moved from pain to joy, a metaphor used in both the Gospel of John (16.21–22) and the book of Revelation, which we will shortly consider further. The image of Mary giving birth to Jesus not only applied to his actual birth from her, but also to the crucifixion and resurrection. It has been suggested that Luke saw it this way too, as the swaddling clothes and the manger in the nativity story (2.7) prefigure the burial shroud and the tomb. We can also wonder whether John regarded the presence of the mother of Jesus at the crucifixion (19.25–27) as indicative of the new birth that the cross represented. Certainly, later artists and sculptors understood this association, using images of the man Jesus with his arms outstretched as they would be on the cross while an infant on Mary’s lap, or images of the Pietà where the dead Jesus in Mary’s arms is only the size of an infant.
Perhaps, then, the virgin is an appropriate metaphor for the older mother in whose presence Christ was raised from the dead, just as it was for the young woman who represented new beginnings. Both are Mary, but also Israel, the virgin daughter of God. From this Mother Israel, the resurrection comes forth as a new birth, to give salvation to all nations.
The virgin metaphor has another important dimension. This is related to the association of the young woman who remains uncompromised with the ‘garden locked’ and ‘fountain sealed’ in Song of Songs 4.12. It also had ancient connotations with virgin goddesses like Athene who represented an unconquered city. We know in everyday life that gardens, fountains, and cities are not unbreachable, and that nobody is immune to abuse, disaster, or disease. However, Christianity teaches that, on the spiritual level, Christ is unconquered and unconquerable and that souls who commit to him are equally so (as described in the image of the Church firm against the gates of hell in Matthew 16.18). The virgin metaphor can refer to the soul itself. Whatever disaster may prevail upon the body and the social position of a person, the soul remains intact and cannot be destroyed. This is an extremely important aspect of the Christian faith. It is far more crucial than the question as to whether God really did create a miracle in making a virgin conceive, or whether she remained a virgin for all of her life. That is transferring the things of eternity to concerns over sexuality, as is the problem when metaphors become literalized so far that they lose their original force.
Therefore, the virgin conception, in the same way as choirs of angels, visiting shepherds and wise men, or the inn at Bethlehem, was an appropriate metaphorical way of describing the beginning of Jesus’ life, which is at the same time the beginning of Christianity and the Church as the community of salvation. Mary in the annunciation, visitation, and birth narratives, above all the other characters in the gospels, has been inspirational as a role model for Christians, both male and female, throughout Christian history. In Luke 1–2, she is the archetype for the Christian who accepts the Word of God and brings Christ into being through living the gospel. This is reinforced by Elizabeth’s words in Luke 1.45: ‘And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfilment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.’ As a virgin and mother, she has also been an important exemplar for people in both religious and family life.
The birth narratives create a picture of a woman who is a representative of believing Israel, an important witness to the birth and infancy of Jesus, and a role model for future Christians. She is also portrayed as the Church in prototype, representing people who lived before the time of the gospels at the very beginning of the Church, that is, Christians who accepted Jesus and thus heard the Word and said, like Mary, ‘Let it be to me according to your Word’ (Luke 1.38). Mark 3.35, which we will discuss in a later chapter, shows us that the idea of being Jesus’ mother or brother was related to ‘whoever does the will of God’, which could be any disciple. The difference between Luke 1–2 and Mark 3.31–35 is that Luke portrays Mary as the role model for Christians, but Mark thinks that looking to Mary the mother of Jesus to provide this example is unnecessary. These opposing tendencies continue today in Catholicism and Protestantism. But, for Luke, Mary was understood as a type or image of the Church itself from the very beginning. He makes it clear that she was a poor Jewish woman who was responsive to the ways in which God spoke to the Jewish people and promised them a better future. In doing this and understanding that Jesus was the promised Messiah, she helped to bring that future into being. She was the archetypal and prototypical Christian in the Jewish origins of the Church.
However, the critical reader will ask: while Mary provides an exemplary image for Christians who ‘give birth to Christ in their lives’, are the stories about her appropriate, however metaphorical and legendary, to the mother of Jesus who actually existed as a historical person? So far all we have discovered about her as a historical rather than mythical figure is the surprising fact that, despite the usual way of describing her as the ‘Virgin Mary’, she was not a virgin in the physical sense, that is, not someone who did not ‘know’ her husband at the time of the conception of Jesus, nor someone who never ‘knew’ him at any time. This will only be a shock if we think that sexuality must always be polluted, even when it is practised between loving and mutually responsive persons. In saying that Mary was not literally a virgin, we do not need to surrender any of our cherished ideas that she was a wonderful woman who, like her son, is remembered for her service to humanity and with whom we do not associate any selfish or abusive act. It does not mean that we should desist from describing her as the Queen of Heaven or Mother of God. Indeed, if the title Virgin is detached from its physical and sexual meaning, perhaps it is an appropriate word to describe such a person.
The Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, in accepting the probability of the metaphorical rather than historical nature of Mary’s virginity, wrote that he was:
…convinced in faith that Mary was incorporated with her whole body-soul existence into the historical salvific mission of Jesus. Have we not then jointly a basic understanding of what her ‘virginity’ means for all of us, even though we do not think that we all know with equal certainty and clarity what exactly this integratedness means ‘biologically’, particularly since we are all sure that this absolute integratedness must also include Mary’s participation in the ordinariness and lowliness of Jesus’ human existence?
(Theological Investigations 19, p. 228)
Yet is there any basis for thinking that Mary was involved in Christ’s mission, in the way that Rahner suggests, and an extraordinary woman who served humanity? If the birth and infancy narratives are legends, do we learn from them anything about the actual person Mary the mother of Jesus? In later chapters, we tackle the question as to how much we can know about the Mary of history as opposed to the Mary of mythology and metaphor.
The Woman Clothed with the Sun in Revelation 12
Apart from the gospels of Luke and Matthew, there is another passage where the birth of the Messiah is described. This can be found in the book of Revelation. It is a famous image, a visionary picture which was never intended to be anything other than metaphorical:
A great portent appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems on his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven and threw them to the earth. Then the dragon stood before the woman who was about to bear a child, so that he might devour her child as soon as it was born. And she gave birth to a son, a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron. But her child was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne; and the woman fled into the wilderness, where she has a place prepared by God, so that there she can be nourished for one thousand two hundred and sixty days.
(Revelation 12.1–6)
The image of the woman in Revelation 12 is clearly a mythical one; while there can be debate about the historicity of the birth stories in Luke and Matthew, no one has ever disputed the fact that the woman in Revelation 12 is a symbolic creation, even if regarded as a divinely inspired vision. She was interpreted, first, as the image of the Church and, later, as a symbol of Mary, because the woman clothed with the sun bore the male child who is clearly meant to represent Christ. It is strange that the connection with Mary was not made earlier; one obstacle to it might have been the belief that Mary’s childbirth was painless, which appeared quite early in Christian tradition. This clearly contradicts the picture of the agonizing delivery that we find in Revelation. The birth pangs are very reminiscent of the images of the crucifixion as a painful birth in the Gospel of John, not by the same author but for centuries thought to be so.
The myth in Revelation 12 is a pictorial way of describing the events of the early Church: the context is the persecution of the early Church at the hands of the Roman and Jewish authorities. The woman, the Church, gives birth to Christ; she will continue to suffer from the enmity of the threatening dragon and so has to flee into the wilderness. She is also Israel, as signified by the twelve stars. The painful birth is the crucifixion, and the taking away of the child into heaven represents the resurrection and ascension. The child will return to judge the world; this is narrated in Revelation chapter 19. The birth story in Revelation has a parallel in Matthew, with the story of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents which, as far as can be known, is not historical. Herod, of course, was a local ruler established by the Roman system. Therefore, there are several points of correspondence between the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke, and the Revelation myth:
This might suggest that all the metaphors involved here are telling us one story:
· That Jesus’ being crucified, buried, and raised is integral to his being the Messiah;
· That the crucifixion of the Messiah is like a painful birth (a metaphor also found in John’s Gospel);
· That the Church is the faithful remnant of Israel which knows that its Messiah has come;
· That the Church by its proclamation of the resurrection is like a mother bringing the child Jesus into the world and thereby giving birth to a new age;
· That the Church is vulnerable to persecution, particularly by the Roman system which promotes emperor worship and for whom the claim that Jesus is the Son of God and God Incarnate is a threat.
The book of Revelation, like the gospels of Matthew and Luke, narrates a birth which precedes the consummation of marriage. Revelation chapters 19–21 narrate the marriage of the Lamb to the Bride, the new Jerusalem. If Matthew’s and Luke’s Mary represents the Church and Israel at the same time, then in all three texts we have the image of a Church as a new Israel or Jerusalem who gives birth as a mother, and then anticipates her marriage. In Revelation, her bridegroom is at the same time her son. The consummation is, of course, spiritual and metaphorical like the images of God as bridegroom to Israel in the Hebrew Scriptures. Matthew and Luke, unlike Revelation, set this story in historical narrative, which brings more mundane matters into play, in particular, the presence of a human bridegroom (Joseph), and the need to answer questions concerning the social awkwardness of a virgin who is pregnant. But the resemblances might make us wonder whether a common template lies behind them both or indeed whether Revelation’s images might be the original basis from which the gospel nativity stories were constructed.
It might be objected that the sequence of birth before marriage does not occur in Matthew. Joseph took Mary ‘as his wife…’ (Matt. 1.24) as soon as he has seen the angel in a dream, and before the birth of Jesus: ‘…but had no marital relations with her [Greek: did not know her] until she had borne a son [in some texts, firstborn son]; and he named him Jesus’ (1.25). This appears at first sight to differ from Luke, where 2.5 tells us that Joseph travelled to Bethlehem ‘with Mary, to whom he was engaged, and who was expecting a child’. Some ancient manuscripts have in Luke 2.5 ‘Mary his wife’, but this is not the normally accepted reading. Nevertheless, Luke is not disagreeing with Matthew; a betrothed woman is already a ‘wife’, as the betrothal was a binding contract, and so the two words ‘betrothed’ and ‘wife’ are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
However, the marriage is not complete in either Luke or Matthew. Matthew quotes from the Greek/Septuagint version of Isaiah 7.14 in 1.23: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son…’ The sense of the word parthenos pertains to the marital state of the person as well as to the question of their physical virginity. You could not be a parthenos and have had your marriage consummated all at the same time. It is not surprising then that Luke, whose sources presumably also included Isaiah 7.14, referred to Mary as being ‘betrothed’ at the time of the birth.
To conclude, the theme of a woman giving birth before the consummation of marriage is present in all three traditions: Matthew, Luke, and Revelation. It is a mythical story which depicts the crucifixion of Christ as a painful birth preceding the consummation of the marriage of Christ with the New Jerusalem, the Church. Christ has died, is risen, and will come again. The metaphorical and mythological nature of this narrative means that there is no problem with the idea that Christ’s mother becomes his wife, because both represent the Church.
The beauty and power of the images of Mary the mother of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, associated with the mythology of Revelation 12, make it easy to understand why she has been described as the Church, or ‘Mother of the Church’, the prototype and archetype for all of those who have followed Christ after her, and the one who works to bring them into close communion with him. Mary in Luke is a human being in history who has been taken up into an eternal space, the place where she says yes to God to bring the Incarnation into birth. This is a wonderful story which has inspired Christians in all centuries. It is only a small step from John’s new understanding of Genesis, in which Jesus is the Word through whom all things were made, superimposed upon Luke’s Mary as heroine of salvation history, to suggest that Mary is the New Eve, as she was described in the second century by Justin Martyr and Irenaeus and then by the generations that succeeded them. She came to be regarded as the one whose answer to a supernatural figure made right what had been made wrong by a previous answer from the first Eve, encountering the anti-archangel, Satan. Mary the mother of Jesus is historical, because she had a human life, and also mythical, a figure of cosmic drama taken up into eternal space. Encountering Mary means encountering both these aspects of her being.
Mary in Luke’s Gospel is an ideal mother type. Like mothers before her in Israel’s patriarchal history, she was regarded as important because of the person that she bears. Edward Sri, in Rethinking Mary, devotes a chapter to the concept of the queen mother, the gebirah, in ancient Israel. During the monarchy period, a widowed queen mother, the mother of the new king, was more important than the king’s wives. This is clear from the books in the Hebrew Scriptures (especially 1 and 2 Kings) that deal with the history of the monarchy. With this in the background, Mary is honoured by Elizabeth in Luke 1.43 as ‘the mother of my Lord’.
So, in that cultural context, it will have been assumed that the mother of Jesus was someone deserving of prestige. But we return to the question: what can we know of the historical Mary who lived as a flesh and blood woman in ancient Israel, and never knew the trappings of a royal court? In order to begin to answer this, we turn to the earliest gospel, that of Mark.