Virgin

The figure known in Christian tradition simply as the Virgin, or more fully as the Blessed Virgin Mary, is identified in the New Testament as the mother of Jesus of Nazareth. She is the most widely venerated woman in the history of Christianity and is honored under a great many titles in the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches, the Church of the East, and in varying degrees among Protestants. The principal sources for her life are the infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, together with briefer notices in Mark, John, and the Acts of the Apostles. Those texts present her as a young Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee, betrothed to Joseph, a man of Davidic descent. Luke recounts the Annunciation, the Visitation to her kinswoman Elizabeth, the Magnificat, the birth of Jesus, the presentation in the Temple, and the finding of the twelve-year-old Jesus among the teachers. Matthew emphasizes Joseph’s role, the visit of the Magi, and the flight into Egypt. John’s Gospel places her at the wedding at Cana and at the foot of the cross. Acts lists her among those gathered in prayer in Jerusalem after the Ascension. No other first-century source independent of the Christian movement supplies a biography.

A cautious historical account must underline how little can be verified outside this Gospel portrait. The New Testament does not record the year of Mary’s birth or death, the names of her parents, or a place of birth distinct from the Galilean setting of the Annunciation. Later Christian literature, beginning with the second-century Protoevangelium of James, named her parents Joachim and Anne, described a childhood associated with the Temple, and thereby furnished the basis for much medieval legend and for the liturgical feasts of her Nativity and Presentation. Eastern tradition developed the Dormition of the Theotokos; Western Catholicism defined the Assumption as dogma in 1950 and the Immaculate Conception in 1854. Proposed death or dormition sites include Jerusalem and, in a minority tradition associated with later piety, Ephesus. A tomb in the Kidron Valley has been venerated as hers since late antiquity. None of these later localizations or dates can be confirmed by contemporary evidence. She is uniformly attested as female. She belonged to no later religious order, and she held neither the papacy nor a patriarchate.

The Gospels describe Mary as betrothed and then taken as wife by Joseph. Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and some other Christian traditions maintain her perpetual virginity, reading the brothers and sisters of Jesus mentioned in the New Testament as cousins or as children of Joseph from an earlier marriage. Other interpreters have understood those siblings as later children of Mary and Joseph. That Jesus is presented as her son is common ground in the Christian sources. The title Theotokos, God-bearer, was solemnly affirmed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and became central to Eastern liturgy and to Western devotion alike. From late antiquity onward, churches, icons, hymns such as the Akathist, and eventually the rosary and apparition cults (among them Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fatima) made Mary a focal point of popular religion. She was never canonized by a formal papal process of the kind used for later saints; veneration of her is among the earliest strata of Christian cult.

Mary’s patronages are exceptionally numerous. Entire nations have been consecrated to her or have long claimed her as principal patron, including France, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Ireland, Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, Argentina, and the United States, as well as the Americas more broadly. She is invoked as patron of mothers and of virgins, of the Catholic Church itself, and, under particular titles, of the sick, of seafarers, of many dioceses and religious congregations, and of innumerable towns. In the Roman calendar the principal Marian celebrations include 1 January (the Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God), 25 March (the Annunciation), 31 May (the Visitation), 15 August (the Assumption), 8 September (the Nativity of Mary), and 8 December (the Immaculate Conception). The Byzantine rite keeps the Dormition on 15 August and her Nativity on 8 September, together with the Presentation on 21 November and other commemorations. Because the later Marian dossier is largely the product of liturgy, theology, and local piety rather than of first-century documentation, any historical sketch must keep the Galilean Jewish woman of the Gospels distinct from the vast subsequent development of doctrine and devotion that grew up around her name.