Simply Mary. James Prothero

possible were Jesus the eldest, son of a dead father and therefore head of household. Such behavior is more in line with James, the eldest, having a serious talk with his little step-brother. Of course, this is nowhere near conclusive. If Joseph has existing family, sons and daughters, and married Mary as a second wife after the death of his first, where were they when Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem and Jesus was born? And where were they when the family fled to Egypt? It’s entirely possible that the Protestant view is correct and that Mary had eight children, Jesus being but the first. But that raises other questions. If James were the next-oldest brother, and we know he was around after the crucifixion, because he is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, as a leader in the Christian movement at Jerusalem, why does Jesus give his mother, Mary, to John, son of Zebedee, at the cross? And even if James were son of Joseph and a first wife, why wouldn’t he step up and take care of his father’s second wife? Families did things like that. The rampant individualism which is so American, where we cut ties with all but our nuclear family (and sometimes with them as well) is not known in first-century Palestine. As if this were not enough to stir controversy, the Greek word for cousin is ξαδερφος, or in English spelling, xaderfos,.When the word used in Matthew 12:47 and Luke 8:20, it is αδελφός, or adelphos, that is, “brother.” Catholic and Orthodox writers since the time of St Jerome have been telling us that adelphos could just as easily translate as “cousin.” But if so, why is there another Greek word for cousin?

      The controversy is hopeless. So I will just go with the second option for the sake of this meditation, admitting that I may well be wrong. And sadly the main reason the controversy exists at all is because so many Christians need Mary to be ever-virgin in order to satisfy their unconscious Manichaee and Gnostic tendency to equate celibacy with holiness.

      Yet, despite the fact that this issue is loudly controversial, this is not really nearly as important as the other point I was trying to make above. And that is, Mary is like Jesus, because Jesus is like Mary. It’s DNA. It’s the raising Jesus had. Chances are they looked like fraternal twins but for their ages. Certainly the Lord got all his human DNA from his mother, the Holy Spirit being his father. This leads to a rather tenuous but interesting idea. We have the face from the Shroud of Turin, which has stumped most of the scientific attempts to declare it a fraud, but is, of course, unprovable as true. In it, Christ has a long oval face, deep-set, slightly wide eyes, a long, thin, straight nose, and high cheek bones. The beard obscures his jaw line, though he seems to have a pointed chin. If this is the face of Jesus Christ, it is also, by the DNA which he solely inherits from her, the face of Maryam of Nazareth. She is no Northern-Italian beauty, nor Amish white girl with brown hair, pretty eyes (by the standards of the American make-up industry), round-cheeked girl with a button nose, looking like she was on sedatives.

      She had, if this is accurate, a long oval face, deep-set, slightly wide eyes, a long, thin, straight nose, and high cheek bones. Recently, I had a Mexican-American student, a young woman, who exactly fit this description. So, this is why I believe the Mary of Tepeyac Hill probably looked like the real Maryam of Nazareth more than any other appearance.

      But this connection on the physical and the personality level between Maryam and her son, I will continue to follow. But for now, since she was seven, Maryam has been the woman of the house. Certainly, after the death of her mother, her aunts and older cousins came in to help, but Maryam has slowly absorbed all the domestic chores, plus any farm-work around the house she can find time to do.

      The question comes up here about all those years. Most biographies are full of change and events. Even if I could actually hop into Dr Who’s tardis and observe Maryam, I doubt I could produce that. She has had the daily life of a pre-industrial peasant woman, with no interest and no dynamic events. She has never traveled up to this point, farther than a couple of miles from Nazareth. She has met no famous authors or actors or not been encouraged in her creativity or to seek education. She cooks, she cleans, she washes. She feeds the animals. She sleeps and she does it again. The only break for her is Shabbat, when all work stops and meals are what we’d now call left-overs. She listens to her father read from the Torah and the prophets. She listens to him read the Psalms.

      Romanticism and the seeing of divinity in nature is still centuries away, but she likes Psalm 24 about the earth being the handiwork of the God of her people, the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Moses, known as Yahweh, or sometimes El. Yahweh’s name is rarely spoken aloud, being too sacred. Heli and the men refer to him as “Adonai”, the Lord. Yet, their very names as a family are full of the unspoken name. Her brother, “yirmiya”, or Jeremiah in the Greek, means “exalted by Ya(weh)”. Her cousin Elisheva’s name means “El is my oath.” Yahweh is all around them. She feels his presence both in her heart and in the ritual baths they take, the Law they follow, which means she will never taste pork, and he is in their very names that mean who they are, and their common name as a people, Isra-EL” On her few breaks from an endless cycle of work, she walks outside and takes in the beauty of the sky and the fields. It is but a moment, and she has not the freedom to launch into a movie version of the hills being alive with the sound of music. Chores await her. But her heart is moved nevertheless.