two sources. First, we know much about the personality of Mary’s son, the Son of God. And since all his human DNA came from Mary, I think we can assume much of his behavior came from her as well. As a father myself, I have seen proof in my daughter that some behavior is genetic. So I am assuming that Jesus acted a whole lot like his mother. The second thing that makes this odd is that I am not trying to portray too many day-to-day events. Sholem Asch has written a biographical novel, titled Mary, but neither is that what I’m trying to do here. I am taking points from what we know of history and archaeology, and what we know of Jesus, and the “mere Christianity” as Lewis called it, the common beliefs of all the branches of the church, and trying to find the real woman there, who lives now in Heaven and seems so very active in our world. Throw the “feminist” word at me if you like, but women are equal to men, (on the occasions when they’re not superior) in spite of the convictions of our ancestors that they were not, and Mary has shown herself to be an incredible and triumphant woman. Got that? Woman. Not a glowing female Buddha or a subservient and silent kitchen-worker-good-girl. Not Northern-Italian nor Amish. Jewish. Woman. Dark-skinned. Poor. Incredible. Woman.
I want to write about Mary from a vantage point of faith, without the symbolic hyperbole that makes her less a real woman and more a glowing, feminine Buddha. If Mary is first among women, first, she was and is, a woman.
2. Matthew 12:38,39
3. Acts 9:3-9
4. Luke 2:19
5. Luke 9:51
6. 1 Corinthians 7:5
7. Hebrews 5:8
Meditation Three: A Beginning
So Mary was and is a woman, born poor, in an agricultural village far from the heart of a Judaism centered around Jerusalem. Recent archaeological digs in Nazareth indicate that during the first century the population was a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish people, so Mary grew up not only amongst her own people, but among Gentiles. We don’t know her father’s profession, if he was named Joachim. There is good reason to believe his name was actually “Heli” and he was descended from David, if we believe that the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke is actually Mary’s. I’m going to go with that assumption for the purposes of this meditation. There’s a good chance that Heli’s profession was farming and that the first home she knew was a farmhouse on the edge of town. The Bible tells us that she was of the line of David, the tribe of Judah, even though Galilee was the territory of the tribe of Naphtali. But most of those northern tribes had been deported by the Assyrians centuries back and even during the time of the Maccabees, those Jews still in Galilee were pulled out. Apparently, they didn’t all pull out. And perhaps, searching for affordable land to farm, other Jews from the surviving tribe of Judah in the south had wandered north and moved into towns around the Sea of Galilee, and further inland as well. The fact that both Joseph and Mary claimed descent from David indicates that Jews from the south, of the principle surviving tribe of Judah, were populating Galilee. Certainly, there were other survivors, and Hazleton makes an error here when she presents Mary’s family as northerners who didn’t trust those southern Jews. Certainly, there was a small distinction in customs and language. We know from the Gospel, when Peter is denying Christ, that he had a Galilean accent that gave him away. But Jesus and Peter, though Galileans, were still Jews, and mostly likely, Jesus, Peter and the rest of the Galilean disciples were from southern stock originally.
But Hazleton confuses Mary’s people with the Samaritans, who were survivors of the destroyed northern tribes, mixed in with Gentile stock. The Samaritans still exist today, a small group in the State of Israel, insisting on their worship away from Jerusalem and seeing themselves as much part of ancient Israel as their more populous relatives who are descended from the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and to some degree, Levi, and Simeon. Now, as then, Israeli Jews consider Samaritans as half-breeds. The DNA evidence supports their claim to being purer blood Jewish, as they’ve always claimed. But the dwindling numbers of the Samaritans today make the sort of antagonism known in Jesus’ time irrelevant. Mary’s family was up from the south. They were no Samaritans—though it is interesting that Mary’s son had no problem talking freely to Samaritans.
Let’s be like Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas, and invisibly visit Mary’s home. Heli—if that is his name—is there, wringing his hands in the dark of the sleeping room he shares with Ana, for other than the light from the fire and the light through the door, the windows are narrow and high up on the wall beneath the eaves to keep in heat or cool and keep out smells in this mud-and-stone house, which would look to American eyes like a primitive adobe house. The rooms are gathered around a central courtyard, fenced off by a mud-and-stone wall around the perimeter. The roof is mud, sticks, and rushes. The floor is dirt. Ana, Heli’s wife, is on a pallet bed in the corner attended by two midwives, women of the village of Nazareth. They tell Heli to go outside, which he does. This is woman’s work. Men are worse than useless at a birthing.
And I’m reminded of all the Christmas cards I’ve seen picturing Mary having just given birth to Jesus in clean, blue robes, looking peaceful. This is an echo of the Manichaee and Gnostic concept that Jesus was cleanly teleported out of Mary’s womb and left her hymen intact. I cannot say just how much I find that unbelievable. I believe that just as her son experienced the pain and dirt and hard aches of human life, so was Mary exposed to these things. If pain and dirt and frustration were allowed to visit the Son of God, surely his mother wasn’t spared them.
So years later, Mary gave birth like any other woman—in incredible pain that no male has the ability to stand. Tests have been done recently on men with technology which allows them to experience the pain of childbirth. And the men were given a kill switch when they couldn’t stand it anymore. So far, no man has made it all the way through the test. Women are provably far better at taking pain than men.
Childbirth, even today, in the 21st century, with modern medicine, is noisy, painful, and very sloppy, with blood and amniotic fluid flowing everywhere. In the first century it was done in sanitary conditions that were appalling. Women often did not survive it, either because the birth was too difficult, or they contracted infection in the process, what used to be called “puerperal fever”, and died shortly after giving birth. Caesarian section was an option, but it invariably killed the woman. To be a wife was to be in constant risk of pregnancy, and risking death with every childbirth. Women of this era were saddened and shamed if they were infertile and couldn’t give birth—at least that’s what the stories tell. With disease and hunger and war bringing death so frequently, the insurance that the family would continue was to have as many children as needed to help on the farm, and maybe a couple of spares. This was done in hope that enough of them would survive to adulthood and become the caregivers for one’s final years. But I often wonder how many infertile women of the time secretly rejoiced in the realization that they would not risk childbirth and death.
There is a tradition amongst the Orthodox that the reason Jesus had brothers and sisters was that Mary was Joseph’s second wife. Given how often women died in childbirth, this is fully believable. Men often went through three wives in a lifetime and never divorced.
But Ana pulls through the birth, with only the usual amount of screaming, while Heli paces outside in his courtyard and is comforted by other men of the village standing about to offer support. It would have been a long vigil; if Ana took the average time, she was in agony for eighteen hours. Yet, the midwives know their job and the baby wails into the afternoon air. The umbilical is cut. The afterbirth is evacuated. Hopefully, the midwives didn’t accidentally infect Ana’s womb. We won’t know for possibly a few weeks, which is the amount of time that Puerperal Fever needs to take hold and kill a woman. Ana is cleaned up and the soiled and soggy, bloody woolen sheets that were under Ana are