Who was the real Virgin Mary? Helen Bond looks at the various transformations her legend has gone through over the centuries.
As both perpetual virgin and perfect mother, Mary represents an impossible ideal. Centuries of Christian tradition have transformed the poor peasant girl from Nazareth into the embodiment of feminine obedience and purity, the Queen of Heaven, even the Mother of God.
But what do we know about the real Mary, the young Jewish woman who gave birth to Jesus so many years ago? There can be little doubt that Mary existed: her son is referred to by several disinterested pagan writers, and few today would doubt that he, too, existed. We can also be fairly sure of her name: the gospels give her name in Greek as Maria, but she would have been known at home by the Jewish name Miriam, or Mariamme.
Like other women of her day, Mary would have been married around the age of 12, the onset of puberty. The marriage would have been arranged by her parents, normally to an older man. A year or so after betrothal, they would have been married. At that point we believe Mary left her family home to move in with Joseph.
The gospels of Matthew and Luke maintain that Mary was pregnant before she moved into Joseph's house. In all probability, neither evangelist had any reliable historical sources here, still less the personal reminiscences of Mary. The point at stake is a theological one: both writers use the virginal conception as a metaphor to express their deep conviction that the father of Jesus was none other than God himself. But by the second century, the virginal conception had been expanded in some circles into a belief in Mary's perpetual virginity and her own immaculate conception.
Early Jewish opponents of Christianity saw things very differently. One second-century tradition cast Mary as a hairdresser who had an affair with a Roman soldier named Panthe; another imagined her as a prostitute; while a medieval legend suggested that she had been raped. What all these traditions have in common is their stress on Jesus's illegitimacy.
This raises an intriguing question: are these stories counter-claims to Christian traditions, or do they preserve an even older tradition in which Jesus was illegitimate, a tradition which was taken up and transformed by the gospel writers into the story of the virginal conception?
Our best historical guess is that Mary gave birth to him in a perfectly ordinary way in the family home in Nazareth. Significant strands of the New Testament - Paul's letters, for example, and the gospels of Mark and John - know nothing of either the virginal conception, any need for a room at an inn, or any trip to Bethlehem. In this case, Mary would have had little idea of her son's destiny.
Young men in the ancient world tended to have very close relationships with their mothers, and we should not underestimate the contribution that Mary is bound to have made to her son's upbringing. Perhaps it was from Mary that Jesus inherited his gift for storytelling; perhaps she passed on to her son a powerful sense of god's presence; and perhaps it was from this young peasant that Jesus inherited his powerful social critique.
What Mary thought of Jesus's mission is open to debate. Mark's gospel suggests that, at the start of Jesus's ministry, while he was stirring up trouble with the local pharisees, she and her family thought that Jesus had gone mad and came to take him home before he embarrassed himself any further. John, on the other hand, includes her both at the beginning of Jesus's public ministry (at the wedding at Cana) and at its end (the cross); while Luke mentions her presence with other Christians in Jerusalem after the resurrection.
As Jesus's ministry progressed, Mary must have realised that her son's life was in danger. When he made his way to Jerusalem, surrounded by cheering crowds, that last fateful Passover, it was clear that something had to give. And when he entered the temple and cast out the traders, his fate was sealed.
Did Mary try to warn her son, to take him back to Nazareth? Did she celebrate one last Passover meal with him the night of his betrayal? And did she stand at the cross, watching her beloved son dying in agony? Could any mother bear to watch her son die in such abject humiliation? Could any mother bear to stay away?
For many modern women, the Mary of Christian tradition is at best an irrelevance, at worst one more reminder of the way in which no woman can live up to the image of perfection - perpetual virgin/perfect mother - created by centuries of male theologians. What can speak to us, though, is her humanity. Mary shares many women's experiences: her early arranged marriage, her struggle to keep the family together after the death of her husband, her love for her son, and her grief at his death.
It is the human Mary who reaches across the centuries to women in every age and every culture.
Dr Helen K Bond is lecturer in the New Testament at the University of Edinburgh. The Virgin Mary a depiction of the real Mary, will be shown on BBC1 tomorrow night at 8p.m.
- Guardian service