Virgin

Mary, commonly called the Virgin Mary or the Blessed Virgin Mary, is the mother of Jesus of Nazareth according to the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke and is the most widely venerated woman in Christian history. The canonical Gospels present her as a young woman of Galilee, living at Nazareth and betrothed to Joseph, a craftsman described as being of the house of David. Luke’s Gospel recounts the Annunciation, in which the angel Gabriel announces that she will conceive by the Holy Spirit and bear a son to be named Jesus. Matthew’s Gospel likewise affirms a virginal conception and places her with Joseph in Bethlehem at the birth of Jesus, then in Egypt, and afterward again in Nazareth. Extra-biblical writings from the second century, especially the Protoevangelium of James, name her parents as Joachim and Anne and locate her childhood in Jerusalem, but those details are not confirmed by first-century evidence and are treated as pious tradition rather than established history. No contemporary non-Christian source records her life, and no verified year of birth survives.

In the New Testament she visits her relative Elizabeth, presents the infant Jesus in the Temple at Jerusalem, and later appears at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, at the crucifixion, and among the disciples in Jerusalem after the resurrection, including in the gathering associated with Pentecost. The Gospels mention brothers and sisters of Jesus. Catholic, Orthodox, and some other Christian traditions interpret those figures as cousins or as children of Joseph by an earlier marriage, in keeping with the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity, which was widely taught by the late fourth century; other readers have taken the references more literally. She is not recorded as belonging to any later religious order or as holding ecclesiastical office. Historical documentation of her later years and of her death is lacking. Christian tradition from late antiquity generally places her Dormition, or falling asleep, in Jerusalem, where a tomb in the Kidron Valley has long been venerated; a minority tradition associated her with Ephesus. Because the sources are liturgical and hagiographical rather than documentary, neither the city nor the year of death can be verified.

Belief that she was taken body and soul into heaven developed in both East and West. In the Roman Catholic Church the Assumption was defined as dogma in 1950; Eastern Orthodoxy commemorates the Dormition as a major feast without an equivalent modern dogmatic definition. Devotion to Mary is attested from the early centuries of Christianity. She was proclaimed Theotokos (God-bearer, Mother of God) at the Council of Ephesus in 431, a title that became central to Orthodox and Catholic piety and was bound up with debates on the identity of Christ. Feasts of her nativity, presentation in the Temple, annunciation, and dormition were established in the Byzantine liturgical calendar during the first millennium and were adopted or paralleled in the Latin West. Later Western developments include the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, defined for the Roman Catholic Church in 1854, together with a large body of titles, local cults, and reported apparitions whose historical status varies and is often not independently verifiable.

Because almost all information about her life outside the New Testament is legendary, liturgical, or theological rather than documentary, precise years of birth and death, and even the exact places of birth, death, and burial, cannot be established from contemporary historical sources. Traditional calculations sometimes place her birth in the late first century BC and her death in the mid-first century AD, but those figures remain conjectural and should not be treated as verified chronology. She was never the subject of a formal canonization process of the kind used in later centuries, because public veneration of her predates that process. She is commemorated on numerous feast days across Christian calendars. Her patronage, in popular and official devotion, extends to the Church as a whole, to mothers, virgins, and families, and to a very large number of nations, dioceses, and causes; the list of places and groups that invoke her as patron is too extensive to be complete and has grown continuously since late antiquity.