The Historical Mary: Mother of Jesus

Thank you for tuning in to the History of the Papacy, an Agora Podcast Network member. If you have any questions, comments, or feedback, you can always send me an email to my email address steve at huzhistorypage.com. Now speaking of questions, a listener sent in a deceptively simple question, a listener named Franklin, and that's the genesis of this short episode. If you're listening on the podcast audio feed, you can get a more multimedia experience by watching the video, which can be found in the show notes. If you are watching this as a video and never heard of the podcast, you can find more interesting stories like this by subscribing to my podcast, which is also in the show notes. Now here is the question Franklin posed, quote, I've never heard or read anyone say it. Was Mary, as in Mary, mother of Jesus, a Christian? Did she stop being a Jew or following the Jewish tradition? Now there's an easy answer. One part could be answered as yes, or no, or yes and a no, or no and a yes, but we'll get into all that. Part two is definitely answered as a no. Well, that was easy. I'll see you next time. That was a short video. Now wait, there is a lot more to unpack in this really short but dense question. Right off the bat, we have to assume a historical Mary who gave birth to a historical Jesus. If we go by the Christ myth theory or other similar theories, we've hit a brick wall. You can't answer these questions without assuming a historical Mary and a historical Jesus. Now we have a couple of sources that help us deal with this question. We have to entirely rely on secondary sources. There's no contemporary birth or death certificates or marriage certificates for people like Mary and her time period. There was no authorized biography written during Mary's time or even afterwards. We have to patch together from sources like the four canonical gospels, the book of Acts, Revelation, and then several apocryphal sources, including a really fascinating book, the Proto-Evangelium of James. All of these sources have their issues. They were written in a certain narrative style to meet certain narrative needs. So that's why we have to use them very carefully to get to a historical question. Now really quickly, who was Mary? Mary was Jesus's mother. Mary was betrothed to a man named Joseph who was quite old, maybe as old as into his 90s and maybe not that old, but definitely well into his older age. Mary was very young, as was custom of the day. She was probably somewhere in between the ages of 11 and 13. She became pregnant before she officially was married to Joseph. Now that was controversial to say the least. She had a baby, Jesus, who was eventually accepted by Joseph and his family. By all accounts, she had a good relationship with Jesus in the early part of his career. According to some of the gospels, the relationship got a little rocky toward the middle, but by the end when Jesus was put upon the cross and during his death and execution scenes in the gospels, Mary was right there. All of the gospel accounts include some version of this basic information. A little more, a little less. The gospel of John is where things get interesting for our question. In John chapter 19, Jesus told his beloved disciple to take care of his mother. In this context, beloved disciple is generally understood to be the apostle, John. Jesus put his mother into the care of one of his top lieutenants. That's basically what he did in this situation on his deathbed. Jesus dies on the cross, according to the biblical accounts, and he rises from the dead. Now that's another one, take it or leave it. But what's interesting in the narrative sense is that Jesus visits several of his disciples, but there's no record of him visiting Mary, which is odd. Now that could be because remember we're not dealing with something that's written as a historical biographical account. The writers very well may have had a different agenda and fitting in any story that Jesus would have visited with Mary just didn't necessarily fit into that narrative frame. But take it or leave it, that's still interesting. Now we get to the question, what did Mary do after Jesus' death? The book of Acts from the canonical New Testament says, quote, these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the woman and Mary, the mother of Jesus and with his brothers. Mary is the only woman specifically mentioned to be in what's referred to as the upper room. This was the room where the leading apostles and disciples of Jesus frequently met in Jerusalem and where the first Pentecost, the first Christian Pentecost happened. This Pentecost is believed by Christians to be the beginning of the Christian church. So here we have Mary and the disciples celebrating a classic Jewish holiday, Shavuot, also known as Pentecost in Greek, the festival of weeks. But this is no ordinary Shavuot though, it was the formative event of the early Christian church. Now if the canonical New Testament is believed, Mary had her feet in both Judaism and Christianity, as all the earliest followers of Jesus did. These earliest Christians, including Mary, were Second Temple Jews who were just starting to bud off of the trunk of Second Temple Judaism. Their traditions were firmly rooted in Second Temple Judaism, but they were now doing some new things and adding some new innovations, and they weren't the only group of Jews who were doing that at this time. To move forward just a bit, Mary died sometime in the next decade or so after the death of Jesus and then this first formative meeting of the church. It's assumed she died in Ephesus, the home of the Apostle John, and early Christian writers in the 2nd or 3rd century AD felt pretty confident in this fact. Traditional Christians believe that she died and was resurrected and then raised into heaven. The Roman Catholics call this the Assumption of Mary, and the Orthodox and Eastern churches call this the Dormition or Falling Asleep of the Theotokos, Theotokos being another title granted to Mary throughout the ages by the various churches. At the point after her appearance in the Book of Acts, everything's based on tradition, either oral tradition or possibly stories that were written down that haven't survived to this time, or like I said, oral traditions that were just floating around that had percolated up through the centuries. If this traditional telling is to be believed, Mary was a Christian in the most sense of a Proto-Christian of the mid 1st century AD, but would have been almost completely indistinguishable from any other Jew living in the environs of Jerusalem and the Galilee and the Levant at that time. In the end, we can really say that yes, she was a Jew and yes, she was a Christian, and really in every sense of the word, of her time and her place. But as you can see, we had to make a lot of assumptions in this episode based on evidence that wasn't necessarily written to really help us answer this question. I hope this short episode has at least partially answered the question. There's a lot of different tangents I could have gone down on at just about any point of this episode, but I really wanted to get to the answer and provide a survey of the topic at hand. I'd be happy to explore any of these issues in more depth than I certainly have in other episodes, but if you do have particular questions about an aspect of the information that I presented in this episode, I'd be happy to talk much, much more about them. I want to thank you very much for listening, and I really do hope to talk to you about all these exciting developments in church and papal history and much, much more. And I just want to thank you very much for listening and watching, and I look forward to talking to you next time.