In Search of the Real Virgin Mary

Inside Paris's Notre Dame cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a soprano floats plangently upward in Bach's spectacular Magnificat, the sound hovering in the soaring space before the chorus surges in with joy. "Behold from henceforth, I shall be called blessed by all generations," Mary proclaims in her paean to God, accepting that she will be the mother of Christ.

Inspiration for some of history's most sublime musical, architectural, and artistic creations, the peasant girl from Nazareth also embodies Christianity's thorniest paradoxes. She is a virgin, yet also a mother. She is God's obedient handmaid, yet she is also a strong woman in her own right, a woman of valor, the patroness of victory. She rejoices in the birth of her son, but her salvation comes only through his death.

To the Roman Catholic and Orthodox faithful, Mary remained a virgin throughout her life, and she was herself immaculately conceived—that is, untainted by the original sin of sexual conception. She rose "body and soul" to heaven, the church teaches in a highly polarizing dogma that caused an uproar when Pope Pius xii declared it in 1950. As the mother of God, she sits in heaven with the Trinity; she is above all saints, yet she is human.

And that—her humanity—is the key.

Over the centuries, true believers and skeptics alike have spoken to Mary as a protector, a guide, even a friend in a way they cannot with God and Christ. "Closer to the human plane, she is more approachable by those who have reason to fear, or cannot comprehend, the ineffable mystery of God or the stern authority of Christ," writes Cambridge medieval scholar Steven Botterill. Even Protestants, who broke from the Catholic Church in part because of what Martin Luther abhorred as the "abominable idolatry" of Mary, are giving her a more prominent place in their hearts.

In the West, the Virgin Mother is ubiquitous. Mary has been the favorite baptismal name for girls for centuries; the Ave Maria is repeated millions of times daily. Almost certainly, she has been portrayed in art and music more than any other woman in history. Even in Asia, Mary is a growing presence. Churches as far-flung as South Korea and East Timor honor her name with elaborate shrines.

Revered as a symbol that bridges disparate cultures, Mary appears prominently in the Koran, where she is compared to Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, founder of the Islamic nation. In Mexico, where she appeared to an oppressed Aztec Indian in the 16th century, she is Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, focus of a cult of near-fanatic devotion. Ten million pilgrims a year flock to a shrine honoring the dark-skinned Madonna, a political as much as a religious symbol for the poor and downtrodden, "the mother of Mexico," in the words of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

Apparitions. Mystical Marian visions have been reported thousands of times, beginning with the "woman clothed with the sun" of Revelations and cresting in the 20th century with more than 200 apparitions cited since 1930. Such is Mary's power that Pope John Paul ii credited her with saving his life when he was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981—the same day and hour Mary reportedly appeared to three children at Fátima in Portugal 64 years earlier.

It's a lucky thing Mary inspires, because sketching a picture of her from the meager biblical references requires not a mere leap but an Olympian broad jump of the imagination. In all the Gospels, she appears fewer than 15 times, in accounts that take up a total of less than four pages.

Named for Moses's sister, Mary (Miriam in Hebrew or Maryam in Aramaic, the language she spoke) grew up in Nazareth, a hill town of olive groves, vineyards, and hard-scrabble farms 70 miles north of Jerusalem. Nazareth means "small fort," probably its original function, given the site's commanding view overlooking the Jezreel valley. On an extension of the Silk Road far below, camel and mule caravans bearing silk and saffron made their stately progression from the Jordan River to the eastern Mediterranean port of Caesarea.

Nothing is known of Mary's family, although legends later held that she was the daughter of an elderly couple, Anna and the priest Joachim. In Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, Middle East historian Lesley Hazleton speculates that Mary may have been a shepherd, herding sheep and goats on the craggy hillsides and learning about healing and herbal cures from village women, techniques she passed along to her son.

In Hazleton's account, Mary considered herself an Israeli Jew from the province of Galilee, a region that had been occupied for more than a millennium by foreign rulers, from Babylonians to Persians, Greeks, Seleucids, Parthians, and Romans. Although she could neither read nor write, she most likely absorbed oral histories of David, Solomon, Elijah, and Ruth from the elders.

Mary certainly witnessed peasant farmers ruined by onerous taxes and saw them beaten and imprisoned by soldiers, a recurrent shame that deepened her indignation at injustice and nurtured sympathy for the poor and oppressed people all around her. The Galileans groaned under the brutal rule of Herod the Great, a shockingly rapacious client king of the Roman Empire who built innumerable palaces while his subjects were literally taxed to death. Debt-ridden and living on the edge of starvation, Mary's neighbors no doubt served as the inspiration for Jesus's demands in the Lord's Prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts."

After Herod's death in 4 B.C., Galilean rebels overran a Roman garrison at Sepphoris a few miles from Nazareth. When Roman reinforcements quashed the rebellion and crucified the leaders, Mary probably tended to wounded survivors fleeing to nearby caves, Hazleton says.

It is against this tumultuous background that the angel Gabriel, in the Gospel of Luke, appears to Mary in what has come to be known as the Annunciation—a startling vision mingling alarm, illumination, and willing submission. The earliest representations of the event appeared in the Roman catacombs, and the scene was later interpreted by Matthias Grünewald, Simone Martini, Raphael, and hundreds of artists over the centuries. Although Mary is generally depicted as a woman at least 18 or 19 years old, Hazleton reasons that she was far younger. According to the Vatican, Mary was born around 13 B.C., making her about 13 years old at the time of Jesus's birth.

When Gabriel appears, Mary is betrothed to Joseph, a figure who remains even more mysterious than Mary throughout the Gospels. He is a descendant of King David, Luke says, a crucial element for fulfilling Hebrew prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the royal house of Israel. Trembling in spite of the angel's entreaty not to be afraid, Mary is incredulous when she receives the news that not only is she to give birth, but she is also to bear the Son of God.

"How can this be, since I have no husband?" she asks. "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you," replies Gabriel. With unnerving self-possession, the peasant girl gives her assent. "Let it be to me according to your word," she says.

In a stroke, Mary's obedience to the will of God absolves the disobedience of Eve, maintained second-century theologian Irenaeus. It is significant that Mary, like Eve, acts without compulsion, a sign of God's grace and a promise that human beings would exercise freedom in their destinies.

Some religious historians, like the late Raymond Brown, author of The Birth of the Messiah, argue that early Christians viewed Jesus as becoming the Son of God not at birth but at the Resurrection. The idea of the virgin birth arose later, they theorize, with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written after A.D. 60. Others, like Jane Schaberg, a feminist scholar at the University of Detroit Mercy, raise the explosive possibility that Mary was raped. She contends that this is the reason Joseph considers divorcing his pregnant bride in Matthew before an angel reveals that she will conceive the child through the Holy Spirit. Schaberg takes a piece of second-century, anti-Christian propaganda—the story that a Roman soldier called Panthera was Jesus's father—and turns it on its head. If Mary were raped, she says, the Holy Spirit transforms an illegitimate child into God's anointed son and Mary's potential disgrace becomes an exalted grace of redemption. Although some feminist theologians side with Schaberg, conservative Catholics furiously dismiss her proposition as borderline heresy.

Still other historians, like Hazleton, suggest that there was a sort of dual paternity, with Joseph the human father and the Holy Spirit the divine one, a scenario similar to birth legends about Helen of Troy or Alexander the Great, both sired by the god Zeus and human fathers. Certainly, in cults across the Middle East, goddesses like Isis, Ishtar, and Diana who were both virgin and fertile exemplified a commonly accepted paradox.

Strengthening faith. Whatever the literal or metaphysical truth surrounding the virgin birth, the mystery rests intact. The very fact that the concept goes "against nature and against proofs" invests the faith with its power, according to the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Soon after the Annunciation, Mary visits her pregnant elderly cousin Elizabeth. Her husband, Zechariah, has also had a vision of Gabriel foretelling the birth of a son, later known as John the Baptist. When Mary greets her cousin, Elizabeth feels the child leap in her belly in joyful recognition of the holy infant growing in Mary. "My soul magnifies the Lord," rejoices Mary, beginning the Magnificat. Repeating themes and language used by Hannah in the Old Testament to give thanks for the birth of her son Samuel after years of infertility, Mary prophesies the revolutionary kingdom to come. In the future, the Lord will act as he has in the past when he "put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree...filled the hungry with good things, and the rich...sent empty away." In this 27-line poem, Mary prefigures "virtually every theme in Jesus's teaching and ministry," Scot McKnight asserts in his book The Jesus Creed.

After staying with Elizabeth for three months, Mary next appears at the Nativity, a miracle of humility enacted in countless Christmas pageants and an amalgam of accounts from Luke and Matthew. Biblical historians now set Jesus's birth sometime between 6 B.C. and A.D. 6.

Summoned to Judean Bethlehem for a census, Mary gives birth in a manger because there are no more rooms at the inn. Shepherds flock to see the newborn child along with three regal wise men bearing gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In Matthew, the couple flee with their baby to Egypt to avoid the massacre of infants ordered by Herod to eliminate the future ruler of Israel foreseen by Hebrew prophets.

In a polemical interpretation, Hazleton maintains that Jesus was born in A.D. 6, not in Judean Bethlehem but in Galilean Bethlehem. Like other scholars, she thinks Judean Bethlehem was named in the Gospels because it was the birthplace of King David and the new Messiah needed to be viewed as his divine successor. Hazleton argues that the Syrian governor Quirinius mentioned in Luke as ordering the census was not appointed until A.D. 6, when, in fact, a census did take place, according to the Jewish historian Josephus. The Bible's "Herod the king" is not Herod the Great, who died in 4 B.C., but his son Herod Antipas, she asserts. According to this reckoning, Jesus was 23 years old when he was crucified and resurrected in A.D. 30, not 33 as commonly thought, and Mary was 36, not 46.

Whatever the dates for the Nativity, Mary next appears in Luke during the purification ritual for her baby. A seer named Simeon blesses Jesus and direly predicts to his mother that "a sword will pierce through your own soul also," an ambiguous foreshadowing of Mary's suffering at the Crucifixion as she watches a Roman soldier thrust a sword into her son's side.

Twelve years later, Mary and Joseph lose young Jesus in Jerusalem. After searching for him for three days, they find him at the temple and gently upbraid him for causing them anxiety. "Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?" the boy replies calmly. Mystified, Mary keeps this answer in her heart, along with the puzzling adoration of the shepherds and wise men at his birth, perhaps fearing the ultimate purpose God intends for her and her son.

From then on, Jesus maintains an "oddly uneasy, even antagonistic" relationship with his parents, says Hazleton, addressing Mary not as "mother," but as "woman." At a wedding in Cana, Mary tells Jesus there is no more wine. "O woman, what have you to do with me?" he replies testily. "My hour is not yet come." Patient as always, Mary instructs the servants to follow Jesus's orders. Despite his protest, Jesus draws attention to himself by performing a minor miracle, turning the water brought to him into wine.

Mary is also an essential presence at the Crucifixion, where she agonizes for hours, comforted by her sister (or sister-in-law), also named Mary, and Mary Magdalene (as well as Salome, says Mark) as her son dies. As Mary stands next to John, the youngest disciple, Jesus tells her: "Here is your son." These are his last words to Mary. Turning to John, he says: "Here is your mother," binding them together. After he dies, Jesus is lowered into his mother's arms in a scene depicted in Michelangelo's transcendent Piet à .

In Mark and Luke, Mary arrives at the tomb two days later with Mary Magdalene to anoint Jesus with perfumes but is greeted by an angel or angels who bid them to tell the disciples that Christ is risen. She does not actually see Jesus herself. Mary's final appearance in the Bible is anticlimactic. In the book of Acts, she is given a brief mention when she joins the apostles to pray at Pentecost (50 days after Jesus's Resurrection at Easter) in the "upper room," where the Last Supper was held.

From then on, Mary's story is taken up by various Apocryphal and Gnostic texts. Although they recount diverse opinions about where she goes, some placing her with John in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Mount Zion, or Ephesus in present-day Turkey (according to the Eastern Orthodox tradition), most sources also place her at the center of a group of female disciples continuing Jesus's message of forgiveness. The Gnostic Pistis Sophia, which means Faith Wisdom in Greek, shows Mary as one of 17 disciples: the 12 male apostles plus Mary Magdalene, Salome, Martha, and her sister Mary of Bethany.

According to the 20th Discourse of the Apocryphal New Testament, Mary, dying of old age, gathers the community of women around her, instructing them to follow Mary Magdalene when she's gone. "Behold your mother from this time onwards," she says. She dies in A.D. 46, aged somewhere between 52 and 59 years old.

On her death, says the text, Christ descends from heaven. "Her soul leaped into the bosom of her own son, and he wrapped it in a garment of light." At Jesus's instructions, the apostles remove her body to the Vale of Jehoshaphat in Jerusalem, the current site of Mary's Tomb. Three days later, Christ returns to raise her into heaven with him, accompanied by a choir of angels as Peter, John, and the other apostles lose sight of them.