to portray what paint can never portray, the inner qualities of the woman. With my Protestant sisters and brothers, I have to hold that Mary was no goddess. And the Catholic and Orthodox churches teach that she’s not, even if in some less developed parts of the world, syncretism has set in, and festivals once held for goddesses are now held for the Virgin Mary. It seems to me that we are all grasping after something, in very awkward ways that reflect our own cultures more than we’d like to admit. We are all trying to grasp the something special in this unremarkable peasant girl. It’s a puzzle.
And the biggest piece of the puzzle is that she won’t leave us alone.
But more on that point in separate chapters. In the meanwhile, what do we know or think we know about her life?
The Protevangelium of James and other biographies
Somewhere around 145 CE someone, pretending to be the James who wrote the New Testament letter, wrote the Gospel of James. It contains a story of Jesus’s youth and before that, Mary’s. Most of what it claims is hard to believe, not because I distrust the supernatural, but because it doesn’t ring true. Test the spirits. In fact, some elements are so incredible and so out of consonance with the real Gospel, that it reads like somebody’s comic satire. In this writing, Mary is born and raised exactly like Samuel in the Old Testament. She is the result of the prayers of a barren mother. She is presented at the Temple at age 3 and grows up a temple virgin. Though the united church of the first millennium condemned this book as not credible, its general pattern found its way into the writings of other mystics over the centuries on Mary. Maximus the Confessor writes a similar glowing story of a Mary who is superhuman and unnaturally pious. A visionary nun named Catherine of Emmerich did much the same in the Middle Ages. In all these stories, Mary is far beyond human. She spends all her time in meditation and prayer, unmoving, hands palm together, eyes closed, almost a perfect female Buddha. One wonders if she moved to eat, to relieve herself. Did she bother to breathe? I mean no irreverence, but I cannot believe in such a person. That is a clumsy cartoon of holiness, not holiness itself.
One version has her not only a Temple virgin, but living in the Holy of Holies, that place in the Temple where only the High Priest went, and him only once a year. I understand the symbolism in this: God was extremely present in the Holy of Holies and in the womb of Mary. I still don’t think Jewish priests are going to let a small girl into the Holy of Holies, far beyond the Court of Women, never mind that she’s not even a priest, but of the family of David, and therefore of the tribe of Judah, and not Levi, as priests were.
For anyone who is a skeptic, these tales are not helpful, for it would be easy to conclude by looking at these that the Gospel itself was the fabrication of pious fantasy and extremism. Even the most basic research shows it up. One internet site I easily found cast some interesting light on the whole idea of Mary being raised in the Temple:
Did the Herodian Temple have virgins? The answer is almost certainly no. The only real support for Jewish temple virgins is found in Roman Catholic writings in support of the Catholic doctrine of the perpetual virginity of Mary. This doctrine has no basis in the canonical scriptures, but only in non-canonical early writings, most of which were influenced or produced by the Essenes and similar mystical and ascetic quasi-Christians sects that existed in the first few centuries of the Christian era. Jewish scholars and historians, by contrast, give a definitive “no” to the question of whether there were Jewish temple virgins.
But included in this was something I thought far more important.
Unlike in Catholicism, in Judaism marriage is considered the most holy state, pursuant to the first commandment of God given in the Hebrew Bible: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). In Judaism[,] celibacy is frowned upon and even considered sinful. To have consecrated virgins at the Temple would violate Jewish sacred law and custom. No Jewish writings, ancient or modern, provide any support for the idea that there were temple virgins at the Temple in Jerusalem. (StackExchange: Christianity)
And here I am going to step squarely into the minefield. Both the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have come down believing that Mary was ever-virgin, and between them they constitute the vast majority of the world’s Christians. Protestants doubt this, probably because part of the Protestant revolution was a rejection of the perpetual celibacy of priests and monastics, modeled in part on this idea that the Mother of God in her excessive purity, was ever-virgin.
And this goes back to my first question: why do we need Mary to be superhuman?
The answer, I submit, is both simple and intrinsically confused. We deck Mary with gold and diamonds, and also we contemplate theological formulas like immaculately conceived, and ever-virgin, for the same reason. We know no other way to paint a quality we cannot easily grasp in words.
Holiness.
Wait, says the reader. Are you telling me she was sinless all her life? Are you coming down on the side of immaculate conception and ever-virginity? Are you, O writer, siding with the Catholics and the Orthodox against the Protestants? Minefield again.
No, I’m not. I have left my jury out on those questions, mainly because though I point out the words and images we wrap around Mary, and their weakness, I doubt I’m any better or wiser, that I can substitute any better. I want to clarify, not just replace the images. What I do hold is that something—holy—I’m sorry, but there just isn’t any other word that will do; something holy hangs about her both in the past and the present. And I think she had this quality, though I doubt the formulas of immaculate conception and ever-virginity. I have to wonder if the belief in perpetual virginity isn’t theologically not too different from the work of those Italian Renaissance painters who in their quest for portraying beauty and spiritual depth, ended up making Mary look northern-Italian, blond, and a bit gassy. We exaggerate, as the artists did, to portray something we can’t quite name. For some people, understanding how Mary is so pro-active in our lives needs her to be rather unique. After all, as a feminist might point out, a woman who is celibate is a woman who is not ruled by a man. Even our feminine super-heroes, like Wonder Woman, stay unattached. And those first century Christians were often Greeks who were used to very moral and self-possessed goddesses, like Artemis and Athene, being virgins. Virginity was a symbol of feminine strength and independence.
I hope to avoid the trap of taking the Protestant or the Catholic/Orthodox point of view myself, and the only way I can do that is to only claim to know what I can extrapolate from what we do know, or to talk of what others have witnessed.
Going back to the Gospel of James that I mentioned above, it is rife with absurdities that smack of Manichaee and Gnostic thought: Ana and Joachim conceive Mary at a distance of many miles, as Joachim has gone out into the desert for 40 days to pray about his childlessness. (Some later accounts have the conception as a result of the couple kissing). When Mary finally does give birth to the Lord Jesus, Joseph is away looking for a midwife, and when he returns the baby Jesus is lying there, clean as a whistle, no blood or amniotic fluid around, and Mary has birthed him without pain and miraculously teleported him out of her womb. Perhaps she called up to the Enterprise and had Scotty beam Jesus out of the womb. I know that sounds absurd, but no more absurd than the Gospel of James itself. It reads on one hand as if it were a ribald satire written by Monty Python, and on the other hand like the tale of a goddess who hovers above human suffering, untouched. And the reason for all this absurdity is the silly conviction that Mary must remain a virgin at all costs. The Manichaee/Gnostic sentiment is so strong in this ancient document that we are told that after the birth, Mary was “intact.” In plain language, the birth of her son had not split her hymen and it is implied that nothing ever, ever did.
None of this makes any sense at all except for the Manichaee and Gnostic concept, the primitive human concept that sex and spiritual power are mutually exclusive. The Apostle Paul didn’t believe it.6
That’s a human idea.
It’s not God’s idea.
Which is why I don’t see why Mary cannot have been sexually active with her husband after Jesus’ birth and still have an aura of holiness about her. Why does she need