Justified True Belief

(●) A girl from a village nobody had heard of said yes to God, and she is the one person on record both at the manger and in the room where the church began. + Nazareth is not named once in the Old Testament. The Jewish historian Josephus, who lists dozens of Galilean towns and fortified villages in his account of the war with Rome, never mentions it either. Archaeologists working the site put its first-century population in the hundreds rather than the thousands, with published estimates running from about two hundred at the low end to something under a thousand at the high. That is where the story starts: not in Jerusalem, not in a priestly family, not anywhere a first-century reader would have looked for the hinge of history, but in a hill village of a few hundred people, with a young woman who had no standing of any kind. She matters to a Christian apologetics site for a reason that has nothing to do with devotion and everything to do with history. The claim at the center of the faith is not that God appeared, or seemed to appear, or was felt to be near. It is that God was born, to a named woman, in a named village, under a named king, and Paul puts it in one ordinary clause: "born of woman, born under the law" (Galatians 4:4). Mary is where that claim touches the ground. Luke also seems to know things only she could have known, and twice he pauses his narrative to say that she kept these events and turned them over in her mind (Luke 2:19; Luke 2:51), which many readers have taken as a quiet hint about where the first two chapters came from. That is an inference, not a statement Luke makes. Here is the fact that surprises people. Everything Mary says in the whole New Testament comes to under two hundred words in English, and most of those words are a single song. Her birth and her death are nowhere recorded, by anyone, so she has to be dated the way historians date people whose birth and death years are lost: by floruit, Latin for "he or she flourished," abbreviated fl., meaning the stretch of years in which the person can actually be seen doing something. For Mary that stretch runs from the announcement at Nazareth to the upper room in Jerusalem. Even those years are the conventional reckoning, tied to the death of Herod the Great, rather than a record anyone wrote down at the time.

(●) c. 6 BC: An angel told her in Nazareth that she would conceive a son by the Holy Spirit, and she consented. + Luke sets the scene with almost no scenery. In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy the angel Gabriel was sent to Nazareth, to a young woman betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David (Luke 1:26–27). Betrothal in first-century Judea was not an engagement in the modern sense. It was legally binding from the day it was made, the couple were already called husband and wife, and getting out of it took a divorce, which is exactly the word Matthew uses when Joseph considers his options (Matthew 1:19). Gabriel’s greeting frightened her, and his message would have frightened anyone: a son, and a throne, and a kingdom without an end (Luke 1:30–33). What she said back is worth noticing, because it is not what a made-up heroine says. She did not ask why God had chosen her, and she did not ask whether the offer could be refused. She asked, of all things, how the thing was supposed to work: "How will this be, since I am a virgin?" (Luke 1:34). It is the question of a practical person who has understood exactly what was said to her. The angel’s answer names the Holy Spirit, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you" (Luke 1:35), and adds that her elderly relative Elizabeth is already six months along, because nothing is impossible with God. Then she consented, and the cost of consenting was not hidden from her. An unexplained pregnancy in a village of a few hundred people is not a private matter, and the betrothal that made her respectable was the very thing it now put at risk. Joseph’s first plan was to end the marriage quietly, and only a dream changed his mind (Matthew 1:19–24). How old she was, nobody says. Jewish custom of the period suggests a girl in her early or middle teens, and that is an inference from what we know of betrothal ages, not a figure Luke gives.

(●) c. 6 BC: She travelled south to Elizabeth, and answered her greeting with a song made almost entirely of Scripture. + "In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a town in Judah" (Luke 1:39). Luke never names the town, but the hill country of Judah lies south of Jerusalem, somewhere between eighty and a hundred miles from Nazareth on foot. That is four or five days of walking, at least, for a pregnant girl who had every reason to want to be somewhere other than home. Elizabeth met her at the door with a shout and a blessing, and with the one line in the passage that reads like the key to the whole of Mary’s life: "And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her from the Lord" (Luke 1:45). Blessed, that is, for believing, which is a thing anyone can do and which costs everyone something. What Mary said in reply the church has called the Magnificat ever since, from the first word of the old Latin version, magnificat, "magnifies" (Luke 1:46–55). It is not a spontaneous outburst of private feeling. It is stitched together out of the Psalms, the prophets, and above all the song Hannah sang when she handed her son over to the priest at Shiloh (1 Samuel 2:1–10). A village girl with no formal education is quoting her Bible from memory, in long paragraphs, and rearranging it into something new. She stayed with Elizabeth about three months and then went home (Luke 1:56).

(●) c. 5 BC: She gave birth in Bethlehem, and weeks later a stranger in the temple told her that a sword would go through her too. + The birth itself gets one sentence. "And she gave birth to her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling cloths and laid him in a manger, because there was no place for them in the inn" (Luke 2:7). Then shepherds arrive from the fields, men coming off a night shift, with a story about angels. Everyone who hears it is astonished, and Luke adds the line he will repeat later: she kept it all and turned it over in her mind (Luke 2:16–19). Forty days after the birth the family went up to Jerusalem for the purification the law required of a mother after childbirth, and what they carried up with them tells you their income. The offering Leviticus sets for a new mother is a lamb and a bird (Leviticus 12:6), with this provision attached for anyone who cannot manage it: "And if she cannot afford a lamb, then she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons" (Leviticus 12:8). Mary and Joseph brought the birds (Luke 2:24). Whatever else the mother of the Messiah was, she was poor enough to qualify for the concession written into the law for the poor. In the temple courts an old man named Simeon took the baby, blessed God, and then turned to the mother with something that was not a congratulation. This child, he said, is appointed for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is opposed, "(and a sword will pierce through your own soul also)" (Luke 2:34–35). It is the first hint anyone gives her that the thing she agreed to is going to cost her, and Luke sets it down in the middle of the happiest scene in his Gospel.

(●) c. 5 BC to c. 8 AD: She raised him first as a refugee and then as a village child, and learned early that she would not always understand him. + Matthew tells the part that reads like the evening news. Warned in a dream, Joseph "rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed to Egypt" (Matthew 2:14), and they stayed until Herod was dead. When they came back, the new ruler of Judea was Herod’s son Archelaus, whose reputation for violence was bad enough that the family went north instead and settled in Nazareth (Matthew 2:19–23). So Mary’s first stretch of motherhood, whatever her age was, was spent as a displaced person in a foreign country with a price on her child’s head. After that, silence, and an ordinary house full of people. Her neighbors later rattled off the family in one breath: James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and sisters too (Mark 6:3). Joseph is last seen alive on the Passover journey to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve, and after that he is never mentioned again as living, which is the usual reason for thinking Mary was widowed before her son began to preach. Nobody says so outright, and an argument from what a text never mentions is always a soft one, so it stays a likelihood rather than a fact. The one scene Luke saves from those years is a parent’s nightmare. The family went up to Jerusalem for Passover when Jesus was twelve; on the way home, in a travelling group large enough that nobody noticed, he was missing. They turned back to Jerusalem, and after three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers. Mary’s first words to him are the first words of every parent who has ever found a lost child: relief with an edge on it (Luke 2:48). And when he answered her, Luke says plainly that neither of them understood what he meant (Luke 2:50). She took him home, and she kept that too.

(●) c. 30 AD: She asked him for help at a wedding in Cana, and later came with his brothers to take him home. + Once his public life begins she appears twice, and the two scenes could hardly be less alike. The first is a village wedding at Cana, and it is the warmest scene she has. The wine ran out, which in that culture was a real humiliation for the family hosting, and she went to her son with four words: "They have no wine" (John 2:3). His reply reads oddly in English, "Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come" (John 2:4), and she does not argue with it. She simply turns to the servants and says the sentence that is the whole of her counsel to anybody: "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5). The second appearance is one the church has never found comfortable, and the Gospels keep it anyway. Mark says the crowds around Jesus had grown so thick that the household could not even eat, "And when his family heard it, they went out to seize him, for they were saying, He is out of his mind" (Mark 3:21). A few verses later his mother and his brothers are standing outside, sending word in (Mark 3:31–32). Whether Mary shared the verdict or came along to protect her son from the people who did, Mark does not say. What he does record is the answer that came back out to her: "Who are my mother and my brothers?", and then, looking around at the people sitting at his feet, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother" (Mark 3:33–35). Read it as a snub and it will not fit the rest of the story, because she is there at the end and his brothers become leaders of the church. Read it as what it says and it fits exactly: the family of God is not entered by blood, not even by that blood. His mother, of all people, had to come in the same door as everyone else.

(●) c. 30/33 AD: She stood at the execution, and her son used some of his last breath to arrange for her care. + John names the women who stayed: "his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene" (John 19:25). Crucifixion was designed to be watched. The Romans put it beside roads for that reason, and being the mother of the man on the cross was not a safe thing to be in public. She stayed anyway, close enough to be spoken to. What he said to her from the cross was not a farewell and not a theological statement. It was a practical arrangement, of the kind an oldest son makes when he knows he is dying and there is nobody else. "Woman, behold, your son!" to her, and "Behold, your mother!" to the disciple standing beside her, "And from that hour the disciple took her to his own home" (John 19:26–27). Simeon’s sentence in the temple, thirty years earlier, turns out to have been an accurate forecast rather than a piece of dark poetry. She had said yes to a message about a throne, and it brought her here.

(●) c. 33 AD: She was praying with the disciples when the church began, and after that the record simply stops. + Luke’s last sight of her is a list of names in an upstairs room in Jerusalem, waiting for something they had been told to wait for: the eleven, "together with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers" (Acts 1:14). Notice who is in that sentence. His brothers, of whom John had written that not even they believed in him (John 7:5), are now praying with the men who followed him. Something happened between the cross and this room that changed their minds, and one of them, James, would lead the Jerusalem church and die for it. Mary is among them, not above them, one of the people waiting. And then nothing. Not a death notice, not a burial, not a mention in any letter of the New Testament. For a woman the church would later honor more than any other, the apostolic record closes without a word about her end, and the silence is worth respecting. Later traditions filled the gap in two directions, and it is worth knowing how old each one actually is. The older places her death and tomb in Jerusalem, at Gethsemane, where the rock-cut tomb was enclosed by a church that the excavators date to the fifth century. The narrative texts behind that tradition, the various Transitus or "passing" accounts, survive from the later fifth century onward, and they are legendary in form rather than documentary. The Ephesus tradition is far younger than most visitors to the site are told. It rests on the visions of a German nun, Anne Catherine Emmerich, published in the mid-nineteenth century, which two missionaries used as a map in 1891 to identify a ruined house on a hillside above the city. Both are traditions. Neither is apostolic testimony, and the New Testament knows nothing of either.

What Her Words Teach

(T1) The right answer to God is consent, and it can be given by someone with no qualifications at all. + Think of the last time somebody asked you for something that would cost you your reputation before it paid you anything back. The usual human move is to negotiate: to ask for terms, or a guarantee, or a little time. Mary asked one clarifying question about mechanics and then agreed, and the agreement was not to a plan she had been shown but to a sentence she had been given. The word she uses for herself is worth teaching, because English softens it. She calls herself the Lord’s doule, the feminine of the ordinary Greek word for a slave, which most English Bibles render "servant" or "handmaid." It is the word for a person whose day is not their own. She is not volunteering as a partner. She is reporting whose she is. Christian readers across every branch of the church have heard the same thing in the line, and it is the opposite of what people assume Marian piety is for. What is honored here is not a quality she brought to the transaction. She had nothing to bring: no rank, no wealth, no education anyone recorded, no husband yet. Elizabeth pronounces her blessed for one thing only, that she believed (Luke 1:45), and belief is the one currency that is not rationed by birth.

(Q) "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." + Source: Luke 1:38 (ESV). Her answer to Gabriel, and the last thing said in the scene before the angel leaves. Everything in her life afterward, including Simeon’s sword and the hill outside Jerusalem, is downstream of this sentence (T4).

(T2) God’s mercy turns the world’s order upside down, and she sang it before her son preached it. + People expect the Magnificat to be sweet, and then they read it. A pregnant teenager in an occupied province sings that God has scattered the proud, pulled rulers off their thrones, lifted up the people at the bottom, filled the hungry, and sent the rich away with empty hands (Luke 1:51–53). It is the Sermon on the Mount in advance, sung by the woman who would raise the man who preached it, and it is nobody’s lullaby. Two things about it are easy to miss. The first is that almost every line comes out of Israel’s Scriptures. The closest model is the song Hannah sang at Shiloh after she gave up the son she had prayed for: "The bows of the mighty are broken, but the feeble bind on strength" (1 Samuel 2:4). Mary is not inventing a theme. She is picking up a tune Israel had been singing for a thousand years and saying that the day has come. The second is the tense. She sings in the past tense, as though the overturning has already happened, and at that moment the only evidence for it is a pregnancy nobody else can see. That is what faith looks like from the inside: the thing is settled because God said it, and the arithmetic can catch up later.

(Q) "he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty." + Source: Luke 1:52–53 (ESV). The middle of the Magnificat, sung in the house of Zechariah in the hill country of Judah. The song runs from Luke 1:46 to Luke 1:55 and ends where Israel’s hope always ended, with the promise made to Abraham.

(T3) Obedience does not come with understanding attached. + Here is the thing a sentimental account of Mary has to leave out, and the Gospels put in. She was told by an angel who her son was. She had the shepherds’ story, and Simeon’s, and Anna’s. And when the boy was twelve and gave her a one-sentence explanation of where he had been, Luke writes without any softening: "And they did not understand the saying that he spoke to them" (Luke 2:50). That is an odd thing for an author to include if he is building a legend, and it is a reassuring thing for an ordinary reader to find. Knowing that God is doing something and knowing what God is doing are two different possessions, and she had the first without the second for most of her life. What Luke says she did instead is the verb he uses twice, once at the manger and once after Jerusalem: she kept these things and turned them over in her heart (Luke 2:19; Luke 2:51). She filed away what she could not yet explain rather than discarding it. You might think, well, that is faith running on empty. It is closer to the opposite. Trust that waits for comprehension is not trust; it is a delayed verdict. Mary kept walking with a son she did not follow, and she was still walking with him at the cross, when everyone who had understood him had run.

(Q) "Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress." + Source: Luke 2:48 (ESV). Spoken in the temple courts after three days of searching Jerusalem, and the only glimpse the Gospels give of Mary at home with her son between his infancy and his ministry. It is not a serene sentence, and Luke did not tidy it.

(T4) Her whole counsel to anyone is to do what Jesus says. + At the wedding in Cana she is the only person in the room who expects her son to be able to do something about the wine. He answers her in a way that puts distance between them, calling her "Woman" and telling her his hour has not yet come (John 2:4), and the striking thing is what she does next. She does not press the case, and she does not withdraw the request. She turns to the waiters and hands the whole matter over: "Do whatever he tells you" (John 2:5). Those are the last words of hers that anyone wrote down. Out of a life of perhaps sixty or seventy years, the final entry in the record is a woman pointing away from herself at her son and telling other people to obey him. It is worth sitting with that, because the disputes among Christians about how much honor she should receive are old and real, and every side of them has to reckon with the fact that the only instruction she ever gave was to listen to somebody else. Cana also shows how her son handled a request from her, and it is worth watching closely. He did not refuse her, and he did not comply on demand either. He acted in his own time, which is the pattern the Gospels keep everywhere he is asked for anything. She asked, and then she left the matter with him and told the waiters to do the same. She had no authority over the water, and she knew it.

(Q) "Do whatever he tells you." + Source: John 2:5 (ESV). Said to the servants at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, just before the water became wine. Five words in English, and the last recorded sentence of her life.

(Q) "for he has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed;" + Source: Luke 1:48 (ESV). The one prediction Mary makes about herself, spoken in a farmhouse in the hill country with an audience of one pregnant relative. Twenty centuries later it is the most demonstrably fulfilled sentence in her mouth, and the church did exactly what she said it would, in ways that have united Christians and divided them.

What the Church Made of Her

(†) The second-century church read her as the new Eve: one woman’s unbelief undone by another woman’s faith. + The earliest Christian writing about Mary is not devotion. It is an argument about Genesis, and it starts with a symmetry the early teachers could not stop noticing. In the garden a woman listened to a message and believed it, and death followed. In Nazareth a woman listened to a message and believed it, and life followed. Justin Martyr, a philosopher who was executed in Rome around 165, puts it first: "For Eve, who was a virgin and undefiled, having conceived the word of the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death. But the Virgin Mary received faith and joy, when the angel Gabriel announced the good tidings to her that the Spirit of the Lord would come upon her" (Dialogue with Trypho 100, Roberts and Donaldson translation). A generation later Irenaeus of Lyons, arguing against the Gnostics who wanted a Christ who only seemed to have a body, sharpened it into the image everyone remembers: "And thus also it was that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith" (Against Heresies III.22.4, Roberts and Donaldson translation). Notice what the comparison is for. Irenaeus is not building a cult; he is defending the reality of the incarnation against people who thought matter was beneath God. The incarnation is simply the claim that God the Son took on a real human body and a real human life, skin and hunger and a mother, rather than putting on the appearance of one. If salvation runs back through an actual woman’s actual obedience, then the Word actually took flesh, and human history is actually where God chose to work. The new Eve reading has stayed in Christian teaching ever since, and the shape of it is the same in every branch: what was lost through a refusal was recovered through a consent (T1).

(†) When a council called her Theotokos in 431, the word was a ruling about her son. + A title given to a mother is usually a statement about her child. Call a woman the queen mother and you have said who her son is; nothing has been claimed about her at all. That is the whole of the quarrel that broke out in Constantinople in 428. The Greek word is Theotokos, "God-bearer," usually Englished as "Mother of God." It was already in Christian use well before it became famous, and then in 428 Nestorius, newly made bishop of Constantinople, objected to it. He thought it dangerous, as though it made Mary the origin of the divine nature, and proposed Christotokos, "Christ-bearer," instead. Cyril of Alexandria saw at once that the argument was not about Mary. If you cannot say that the one Mary bore is God the Son, you have started to talk about two persons in Christ rather than one, a divine one and a human one loosely joined, and a Christ split in half cannot save anyone, because it is only the human half that dies. The Council of Ephesus in 431 sided with Cyril and deposed Nestorius, and the title stuck. Gregory of Nazianzus had already put the stakes bluntly some fifty years earlier, writing to a priest named Cledonius: "If anyone does not believe that Holy Mary is the Mother of God, he is severed from the Godhead" (Letter 101, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers translation). So the most exalted title Mary ever received is, read correctly, a sentence about her son, and that is how every branch of the church has understood it since: Catholic, Orthodox, and the Reformers alike kept the word. It says that the baby in the manger was not a man whom God later occupied. He was God, born.

(†) Christians honor her in different measures, and the differences turn on what Scripture says and what it leaves unsaid. + Four questions separate Christians here, and each deserves stating at its own strength rather than as a caricature. - Did she have other children? The Gospels name four brothers and mention sisters (Mark 6:3), and Matthew says Joseph "knew her not until she had given birth to a son" (Matthew 1:25). Read plainly, that is a normal marriage after the birth, which is how most Protestants read it. The ancient church offered two other readings: that the brothers were Joseph’s children by an earlier marriage, the view of the eastern fathers and of the second-century Protevangelium of James, or that they were cousins, the view Jerome argued in 383 against a writer named Helvidius. Perpetual virginity, the belief that she remained a virgin for the whole of her life, was the common view of the church for centuries, and Luther and Zwingli both kept it. - Was she conceived without original sin? Original sin is the damage Christians say the human race inherited from Adam’s fall, so that a person arrives already bent toward wrong rather than starting from neutral. The Immaculate Conception, defined in 1854 by Pius IX as dogma for Roman Catholics, which means a teaching they are bound to hold, is the belief that God preserved Mary from the stain of original sin from the first moment of her existence, as a grace won by Christ and applied in advance. The Orthodox churches honor her as all-holy but decline the definition, partly because they describe inherited sin differently. Protestants decline it because Scripture never says it, and because Mary calls God "my Savior" (Luke 1:47). - What happened at the end of her life? The Orthodox keep the feast of the Dormition, her "falling asleep," and Pius XII defined the Assumption for Roman Catholics in 1950: that she was taken up body and soul at the end of her earthly life. Protestants note that the New Testament says nothing whatever about her death, and that the narratives behind the belief appear only from the fifth century onward. - Should Christians ask her to pray for them? Catholic and Orthodox Christians do, understanding it as asking a living member of the church to pray, the way you might ask a friend. Protestants generally do not, holding that "there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5) and that prayer directed anywhere else risks becoming worship in practice whatever it is in theory. What the whole church holds in common is larger than the list of differences, and it is worth saying out loud: that she was a real woman, that she conceived by the Holy Spirit, that the child was God the Son, and that she is rightly called blessed. Luther, no friend of the abuses he saw around him, wrote a commentary on the Magnificat, begun for the young Duke John Frederick before the Diet of Worms and finished in 1521 while he was in hiding at the Wartburg, and he thought her song was above all a lesson about the grace of God reaching the lowly.

(†) Her own record includes a day she went to bring her son home, and the Gospels did not edit it out. + The ledger for Mary is short, because she left no writings and no rulings, and it has to be read off the four Gospels. What it contains is not scandal. It is something better: a believer who got things wrong. She did not understand her son at twelve (Luke 2:50). Years later, when the crowds around him had grown alarming, his family went out to take charge of him because people were saying he was out of his mind, and when his mother and brothers arrived and sent word in, the answer that came back moved the word "mother" from the family tree to the list of those who do God’s will (Mark 3:21; Mark 3:31–35). Mark does not tell us what she thought on the walk home. He simply declines to protect her. Her son said the same thing once more, and it is the closest the New Testament comes to a caution about honoring her. A woman in a crowd called out a blessing on the womb that bore him, and he answered: "Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!" (Luke 11:28). That is not a denial that she is blessed. Luke has already recorded her saying that every generation would call her so (Luke 1:48). It is a relocation of where blessedness lives, from a relationship nobody else could have to an obedience anybody can offer, which is exactly what she herself had offered in the first place (T1). Which is why the last glimpse of her is the right one. Not enthroned, not instructing, but upstairs in Jerusalem with the rest of them, praying and waiting for the Spirit like everybody else in the room (Acts 1:14).