Mary was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph and the mother of Jesus, yet her name in the original manuscripts of the New Testament was based on her Aramaic name Miriam, transliterated as Maria. She resided in her own house in Nazareth in Galilee, possibly with her parents, during the betrothal stage of a Jewish marriage. Jewish girls were considered marriageable at the age of twelve years and six months, though the actual age of the bride varied with circumstances. The marriage was preceded by the betrothal, after which the bride legally belonged to the bridegroom, though she did not live with him till about a year later, when the marriage was celebrated. The angel Gabriel announced to her that she was to be the mother of the promised Messiah by conceiving him through the Holy Spirit, and, after initially expressing incredulity at the announcement, she responded, I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done unto me according to your word. Joseph planned to quietly divorce her, but was told her conception was by the Holy Spirit in a dream by an angel of the Lord. The angel told him to not hesitate to take her as his wife, which Joseph did, thereby formally completing the wedding rites. Since the angel Gabriel had told Mary that Elizabeth, having previously been barren, was then miraculously pregnant, Mary hurried to see Elizabeth, who was living with her husband Zechariah in the hill country, in a city of Juda. Mary arrived at the house and greeted Elizabeth who called Mary the mother of my Lord, and Mary spoke the words of praise that later became known as the Magnificat from her first word in the Latin version. After about three months, Mary returned to her own house.
The Birth And The Flight
According to the gospel of Luke, a decree of the Roman Emperor Augustus required that Joseph return to his hometown of Bethlehem to register for a Roman census. While he was there with Mary, she gave birth to Jesus, but because there was no place for them in the inn, she used a manger as a cradle. It is not told how old Mary was at the time of the Nativity, but attempts have been made to infer it from the age of a typical Jewish mother of that time. Mary Joan Winn Leith represents the view that Jewish girls typically married soon after the onset of puberty, while according to Amram Tropper, Jewish females generally married later in Palestine and the Western Diaspora than in Babylonia. Some scholars hold the view that among them it typically happened between their mid and late teen years or late teens and early twenties. After eight days, the boy was circumcised according to Jewish law and named Jesus, which means Yahweh is salvation. After Mary continued in the blood of her purifying another 33 days, for a total of 40 days, she brought her burnt offering and sin offering to the Temple in Jerusalem. They also presented Jesus as it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord. After the prophecies of Simeon and the prophetess Anna in Luke 2:25, 38, the family returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. According to the gospel of Matthew, magi coming from Eastern regions arrived at Bethlehem where Jesus and his family were living, and worshiped him. Joseph was then warned in a dream that King Herod wanted to murder the infant, and the family fled by night to Egypt and stayed there for some time. After Herod's death in 4 BC, they returned to Nazareth in Galilee, rather than Bethlehem, because Herod's son Archelaus was the ruler of Judaea. Mary is involved in the only event in Jesus' adolescent life that is recorded in the New Testament. At the age of 12, Jesus, having become separated from his parents on their return journey from the Passover celebration in Jerusalem, was found in the Temple among the religious teachers.
In Acts 1:12, 26, especially verse 14, Mary is the only one other than the eleven apostles to be mentioned by name who abode in the upper room, when they returned from Mount Olivet. Her presence with the apostles during the Pentecost is not explicit, although it has been held as a fact by Christian tradition. From this time, she disappears from the biblical accounts, although it is held by Catholics that she is again portrayed as the heavenly woman in the Book of Revelation. Her death is not recorded in the scriptures, but Orthodox tradition, tolerated also by Catholics, has her first dying a natural death, known as the Dormition of Mary, and then, soon after, her body itself also being assumed taken bodily into Heaven. Belief in the corporeal assumption of Mary is a dogma of the Catholic Church, in the Latin and Eastern Catholic Churches alike, and is believed as well by the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Church, and parts of the Anglican Communion and Continuing Anglican movement. Some apocryphal texts add further narrative elements to the story of Mary, although scholars generally consider such texts to be historically mainly unreliable. The earliest extant biographical writing on Mary is Life of the Virgin, attributed to the 7th-century saint Maximus the Confessor, which portrays her as a key element of the early Christian Church after the death of Jesus. Hyppolitus of Thebes, writing in the 7th or 8th century, says that Mary lived for 11 years after the death of her son, dying in 41 AD.
The title Mother of God for Mary was confirmed by the First
The Silence And The End
Council of Ephesus, held at the Church of Mary in 431. The Council decreed that Mary is the Mother of God because her son Jesus is one person who is both God and man, divine and human. This doctrine is widely accepted by Christians in general, and the term Mother of God had already been used within the oldest known prayer to Mary, the Sub Tuum Praesidium, which dates to around 250 AD. The Virgin birth of Jesus was an almost universally held belief among Christians from the 2nd until the 19th century. It is included in the two most widely used Christian creeds, which state that Jesus was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. The Gospel of Matthew describes Mary as a virgin who fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. The authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke consider Jesus' conception not the result of intercourse, and assert that Mary had no relations with man before Jesus' birth. This alludes to the belief that Mary conceived Jesus through the action of God the Holy Spirit, and not through intercourse with Joseph or anyone else. The doctrines of the Assumption or Dormition of Mary relate to her death and bodily assumption to heaven. Roman Catholic Church has dogmatically defined the doctrine of the Assumption, which was done in 1950 by Pope Pius XII in Munificentissimus Deus. Whether Mary died or not is not defined dogmatically, however, although a reference to the death of Mary is made in the Assumption of Mary. In the Eastern Orthodox Church,
The Mother Of God
the Assumption of the Virgin Mary is believed, and celebrated with her Dormition, where they believe she died. Catholics believe in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, as proclaimed by Pope Pius IX in 1854, namely that she was filled with grace from the very moment of her conception in her mother's womb and preserved from the stain of original sin. The Latin Church has a liturgical feast by that name, kept on the 8th of December. Orthodox Christians reject the Immaculate Conception dogma principally because their understanding of ancestral sin differs from the Augustinian interpretation and that of the Catholic Church.
Mary holds a singularly exalted place in Islam, and she is considered by the Quran to have been the greatest woman in the history of humankind. The Islamic scripture recounts the Divine Promise given to Mary as being: O Mary! Surely Allah has selected you, purified you, and chosen you over all women of the world. Mary is often referred to by Muslims by the honorific title Sayyidatuna, meaning Our Lady. She is mentioned in the Quran as the daughter of Imran. Moreover, Mary is the only woman named in the Quran and she is mentioned or referred to in the scripture a total of 50 times. Mary holds a singularly distinguished and honored position among women in the Quran. A chapter in the Quran is titled Maryam, the only in the Quran named after a woman, in which the story of Mary and Jesus is recounted according to the view of Jesus in Islam. In the Islamic tradition, Mary and Jesus were the only children who could not be touched by Satan at the moment of their birth, for God imposed a veil between them and Satan. The Druze faith holds the Virgin Mary, known as Sayyida Maryam, in high regard. Although the Druze religion is distinct from mainstream Islam and Christianity, it incorporates elements from both and honors many of their figures, including the Virgin Mary. The Druze revere Mary as a holy and pure figure, embodying virtue and piety. She is respected not only for her role as the mother of Messiah Jesus but also for her spiritual purity and dedication to God. In regions where Druze and Christians
The Faiths And The Figures
coexist, such as parts of Lebanon, Syria and Israel, the veneration of Mary often reflects a blend of traditions. Shared pilgrimage sites and mutual respect for places like the Church of Saidet et Tallé in Deir el Qamar, the Our Lady of Lebanon shrine in Harrisa, the Our Lady of Saidnaya Monastery in Saidnaya, and the Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa exemplify this.
From the early stages of Christianity, belief in the virginity of Mary and the virgin conception of Jesus, as stated in the gospels, holy and supernatural, was used by detractors, both political and religious, as a topic for discussions, debates, and writings, specifically aimed to challenge the divinity of Jesus and thus Christians and Christianity alike. In the 2nd century, as part of his anti-Christian polemic The True Word, the pagan philosopher Celsus contended that Jesus was actually the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier named Panthera. Also see: Schaberg, Jane. Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. The Church Father Origen dismissed this assertion as a complete fabrication in his apologetic treatise Against Celsus. How far Celsus sourced his view from Jewish sources remains a subject of discussion. The story about Panthera is also found in the Toledot Yeshu, the literary origins of which can not be traced with any certainty, and given that it is unlikely to go before the 4th century, the time is too late to include authentic remembrances of Jesus. The Blackwell Companion to Jesus states that the Toledot Yeshu has no historical facts and was perhaps created as a tool for warding off conversions to Christianity. The tales from the Toledot Yeshu did impart a negative picture of Mary to ordinary Jewish readers. The circulation of the Toledot Yeshu was widespread among European and Middle Eastern Jewish communities since the 9th century. The name Panthera may be a distortion of the term parthenos, meaning virgin, and Raymond E. Brown considers the story of Panthera a fanciful explanation of the birth of Jesus
The History And The Heresy
that includes very little historical evidence. Stacks of copies of the Talmud were burnt upon a court order after the 1240 Disputation for allegedly containing material defaming the character of Mary. In the 2nd century, Justin Martyr was among the first to draw a parallel between Eve and Mary. This derives from his comparison of Adam and Jesus. In his Dialogue with Trypho, written sometime between 155 and 167, he explains: It is possible that the teaching of Mary as the New Eve was part of the apostolic tradition rather than merely Justin Martyr's own creation. Irenaeus, bishop of Lyon, also takes up this parallel, in Against Heresies, written about the year 182.
During the Age of Martyrs and at the latest in the fourth century, the majority of the most essential ideas of Marian devotion already appeared in some form in the writings of the Church Fathers, apocrypha and visual arts. The lack of sources makes it unclear whether the devotion to Mary played a role in liturgical use during the first centuries of Christianity. In the 4th century, Marian devotion in a liturgical context becomes evident. The earliest known Marian prayer, the Sub Tuum Praesidium, or Beneath Thy Protection, is from the 3rd century, perhaps 270, and its text was rediscovered in 1917 on a papyrus in Egypt. The Catholic Church and some Oriental Orthodox Churches hold distinctive Marian dogmas, namely her Immaculate Conception and her bodily assumption into heaven. The four Catholic dogmas regarding Mary are: her status as Theotokos, or Mother of God; her perpetual virginity; the Immaculate Conception; and her bodily Assumption into Heaven. The Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus has a more central role in Roman Catholic teachings and beliefs than in any other major Christian group. Not only do Roman Catholics have more theological doctrines and teachings that relate to Mary, but they have more feasts, prayers, devotional and venerative practices than any other group. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states: The Church's devotion to the Blessed Virgin is intrinsic to Christian worship. For centuries, Catholics have performed acts of consecration and entrustment to Mary at personal, societal and regional levels. These acts may be directed to the Virgin herself, to the Immaculate Heart of Mary and to the Immaculate Conception. In Catholic teachings, consecration
The Devotions And The Dogmas
to Mary does not diminish or substitute the love of God, but enhances it, for all consecration is ultimately made to God. Major Marian devotions include: Seven Sorrows of Mary, Rosary and scapular, Miraculous Medal and Reparations to Mary. The months of May and October are traditionally Marian months for Roman Catholics; the daily rosary is encouraged in October and in May Marian devotions take place in many regions. Popes have issued a number of Marian encyclicals and Apostolic Letters to encourage devotions to and the veneration of the Virgin Mary. Catholics place high emphasis on Mary's roles as protector and intercessor and the Catechism refers to Mary as honored with the title Mother of God, to whose protection the faithful fly in all their dangers and needs.