Mary

The Mary of the New Testament is a much smaller figure than the Mary of Christian devotion, and the gap opened early.

Mark, the earliest Gospel, names her once and puts her in a scene where Jesus' family come to take charge of him because people are saying he is out of his mind. Matthew and Luke both give infancy narratives in which she conceives without a human father, and the two narratives are otherwise almost entirely different, different genealogies, different visitors, different route in and out of Bethlehem. Luke gives her the Magnificat, the longest speech by any woman in the New Testament and a text of sharp social reversal, casting down the mighty and sending the rich away empty. John never names her: she is the mother of Jesus, present at the wedding at Cana and at the cross. Paul, writing earliest of all, says only that Jesus was born of a woman.

The virginal conception rests on Matthew and Luke. Matthew quotes Isaiah 7:14 as fulfilled, using the Greek Septuagint's parthenos, virgin, where the Hebrew has almah, a young woman, for whom Hebrew has a different and specific word if virginity is meant. Whether Matthew's argument depends on the Greek reading is a long-running question in New Testament scholarship, and it is a real one, not an attack from outside.

The New Testament also refers plainly to brothers and sisters of Jesus, naming James, Joses, Judas and Simon. What that means for Mary is the oldest of the arguments about her.

Almost everything Christians believe about Mary beyond the Gospels was defined centuries later, and the dates are worth having straight because they are routinely collapsed.

Theotokos, God-bearer, was affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The dispute was not really about her: it was about whether the one born of her was a single person who is God, and Nestorius' preferred title, Christ-bearer, was rejected because it seemed to split him in two. The Marian title was settled as a christological instrument.

Perpetual virginity, that she remained a virgin after the birth, is not stated in the New Testament and is first argued at length in the second-century Protoevangelium of James, which supplies her parents' names, Joachim and Anne, and makes the brothers of Jesus children of Joseph by an earlier marriage. Jerome offered a different solution, making them cousins. The doctrine is held by Catholics and Orthodox and by Luther, Calvin and Zwingli; most later Protestants do not hold it.

The Immaculate Conception, that Mary herself was conceived free of original sin, was defined by Pius IX in 1854, and is very often confused with the virginal conception of Jesus, which is a different thing entirely. Thomas Aquinas argued against it. It is not held by the Orthodox, who frame the question differently.

The Assumption was defined by Pius XII in 1950, the only exercise of papal infallibility since the doctrine was itself defined in 1870. The Orthodox keep a related feast, the Dormition, without the Roman definition.

Nineteen centuries separate the earliest of these from the latest.

Mary is venerated in Islam as well as in Christianity, and the honour the Quran pays her is easy to underestimate: she is the only woman named in it, called simply Maryam some thirty times, and a whole sura, the nineteenth, carries her name.

The Quranic account affirms the virginal conception: an angel announces that she will bear a son though no man has touched her, and she conceives by God's word, so that Islam holds the virgin birth of Isa (Jesus) as firmly as Christianity does, while denying that it makes him divine. The details differ from the Gospels. In Sura 19 she withdraws to a distant place and gives birth in pain beneath a palm tree, which drops ripe dates to her, and returns to her people carrying the infant, who speaks from the cradle to defend her against the charge of unchastity. Sura 3 has her raised in the sanctuary under the care of Zechariah and says that God chose her and purified her and chose her above the women of the worlds.

Her chastity and obedience make her, in the Quran, a model believer, and she is held in high honour across Sunni and Shia Islam; some Muslims visit Marian shrines. Whether she should be counted a prophet was debated by classical scholars, a mark of the seriousness with which the tradition takes her.

That the mother of Jesus is a revered figure in the scripture of a tradition often assumed to have nothing to say about her is one of the quieter facts of comparative religion.

The Mary of popular Catholic and Orthodox devotion is met less through doctrine than through apparition, image and title, and the scale of that devotion far exceeds what is formally defined.

Reports of Marian apparitions run through the whole history of the church, but a handful anchor the modern forms: Guadalupe in Mexico (1531), whose image made her patroness of the Americas and a national symbol; Lourdes in France (1858), now a vast pilgrimage of the sick; and Fatima in Portugal (1917), which gathered a following and a set of associated prophecies. Their status is worth stating precisely: the Catholic Church investigates such events and may declare one "worthy of belief", which permits devotion but binds no one to it, apparitions are private revelation, not articles of faith.

The countless titles, Our Lady of Sorrows, Star of the Sea, Queen of Heaven, and hundreds of local Madonnas, attach devotion to particular places and needs, and the rosary structures much of it. Behind all of it lies a distinction the tradition insists on and outsiders often miss: Mary is venerated, not worshipped. Catholic theology reserves adoration (latria) for God alone, calls the honour due the saints dulia, and gives Mary a higher veneration, hyperdulia, as the greatest of them, but not worship. The Second Vatican Council's Lumen Gentium set her firmly within the church rather than above it.

Most Protestant traditions, holding that such devotion obscures Christ, keep their distance, which is why the figure so central to some Christians is nearly absent from others.