Virgin

Mary, known throughout Christian tradition as the Blessed Virgin Mary or simply the Virgin, is identified in the New Testament as the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke describe her as a Jewish woman of Galilee, betrothed to Joseph, who conceived Jesus before they lived together as husband and wife. Luke places the Annunciation in Nazareth; Matthew's account includes Bethlehem, a sojourn in Egypt, and a later residence at Nazareth. The apostle Paul refers to Jesus as born of a woman without naming Mary. No contemporary non-Christian source records her life. Later Christian writings, notably the second-century Protoevangelium of James, name her parents Joachim and Anne and locate her birth in Jerusalem, but these claims are not corroborated by independent historical evidence and belong to developing pious legend rather than verified biography. Her year of birth is unknown; conventional estimates placing it in the late first century BC are inferences from the approximate chronology of Jesus and are not documented.

New Testament scenes involving Mary include the Visitation to Elizabeth, the birth and presentation of Jesus, the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, the wedding at Cana, her presence at the crucifixion in the Fourth Gospel, and her association with the disciples in Jerusalem after the Ascension as recorded in Acts. The designation Virgin rests on the infancy narratives' assertion of conception without a human father, which Matthew relates to Isaiah 7:14 as read in the Greek Septuagint (parthenos). Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and some Protestant traditions teach her perpetual virginity before, during, and after the birth of Jesus. Other Christians take Gospel references to the brothers and sisters of Jesus as evidence that Mary and Joseph had further children. Ancient historical sources do not resolve the question. She is not known to have belonged to any later religious order, and she held no episcopal or papal office.

Devotion to Mary grew in the first Christian centuries. By the Council of Ephesus in 431 she was confessed as Theotokos, God-bearer, against those who would restrict her title. Feasts of the Annunciation, her nativity, her presentation in the Temple, and her Dormition or Assumption became established in Eastern and Western calendars. The Catholic Church defined the Immaculate Conception as dogma in 1854 and the Assumption in 1950; the Orthodox Church commemorates the Dormition without an identical dogmatic definition. Neither the date nor the place of her death is historically attested. Medieval and later traditions locate her last years in Jerusalem or at Ephesus; a tomb in the Kidron Valley at Jerusalem is shown as hers, though the doctrine of the Assumption holds that her body did not remain in the grave. She was never canonized by a formal papal process of the kind used in later centuries; her veneration is older than that juridical system.

Christian tradition, following the Gospels, holds that she was married to Joseph. Jesus is the only child whose relationship to her is historically and scripturally certain. She is invoked as patroness of mothers, virgins, and families, as Mother of the Church, and as patron of many nations, including Mexico under the title of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Poland, Portugal, France, the Philippines, the United States under the Immaculate Conception, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Italy, Ireland, and others. Principal liturgical commemorations include 1 January (Mary, Mother of God, in the Roman Rite), 25 March (Annunciation), 15 August (Assumption or Dormition), 8 September (Nativity of Mary), and 8 December (Immaculate Conception in the Catholic Church).