Virgin

Mary, commonly called the Virgin Mary or the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the mother of Jesus of Nazareth as presented in the New Testament. The canonical Gospels portray her as a Jewish woman of Galilee living at Nazareth and betrothed to Joseph, a man described as of the house of David. In the Gospel of Luke an angel named Gabriel announces that she will conceive a son by the Holy Spirit; the Gospel of Matthew likewise presents the conception of Jesus as taking place while she was still a virgin, which the evangelist relates to Isaiah 7:14. She appears at several points in the Gospel narratives: the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem, the presentation in the Temple, the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, the wedding at Cana in the Gospel of John, the crucifixion (where, in John, Jesus commends her to the beloved disciple), and among the disciples in Jerusalem after the Ascension, as noted in Acts. These notices are the only first-century Christian sources that can be treated as primary for her life; they do not record a birth year, a death year, or a place of birth distinct from her later residence at Nazareth.

Almost nothing about Mary outside those New Testament passages can be verified from contemporary non-Christian evidence. Second-century and later Christian writings, especially the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, supplied a much fuller legendary biography: parents named Joachim and Anne, a birth often localized at Jerusalem, a childhood associated with the Temple, and other episodes that entered liturgy, homiletics, and art. Those details became traditional in Catholic and Orthodox piety but are not historically demonstrable. Competing later traditions placed her last years and death (or Dormition) at Jerusalem or at Ephesus; a tomb at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem is venerated as hers, while the doctrine of the Assumption holds that she was taken into heaven and that no bodily remains remain on earth. Neither localization nor a date of death can be established from reliable historical sources.

The title Virgin refers in the first instance to the New Testament claim of a virginal conception of Jesus. In Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and some other Christian traditions it was extended to a doctrine of perpetual virginity. The Council of Ephesus in 431 affirmed her as Theotokos (God-bearer), a Christological title that also secured her unique place in subsequent devotion. Later Latin dogmas include the Immaculate Conception, defined in 1854, and the Assumption, defined in 1950; these are not shared by all Christian communions. She was never canonized by a later juridical process of the kind used for most saints, because her cult is of apostolic antiquity rather than a medieval or modern cause.

From late antiquity onward she became the most widely venerated figure in Christian sainthood after Jesus himself. Her feasts multiplied across the calendar; major ones include the Annunciation (25 March), the Nativity of Mary (8 September), the Dormition or Assumption (15 August), the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (1 January in the present Roman calendar), and, in the Latin Church, the Immaculate Conception (8 December). Local titles and apparitions—among them Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Częstochowa, and many others—generated further feasts and made her patron of numerous nations, cities, and causes. Protestant traditions generally honor her as the mother of Jesus while rejecting later Marian dogmas and much of the later cult. Historically she remains a first-century Galilean Jewish woman whose verifiable biography is confined to the sparse New Testament portrait; the vast subsequent hagiography is a history of Christian belief and devotion rather than of independently documented events.