Virgin

In Christian hagiography the title “the Virgin” customarily denotes Mary, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth, rather than a separately identifiable historical person of that name. What can be said of her from sources close to her own time is limited. She appears in the New Testament Gospels and in Acts as a Jewish woman of Nazareth in Galilee, betrothed to Joseph, who according to Christian belief conceived Jesus by the Holy Spirit. The narratives place her at the Annunciation, the birth of Jesus, the presentation in the Temple, the finding of the child among the teachers in Jerusalem, the wedding at Cana, the crucifixion, and among the disciples in Jerusalem after the resurrection. No contemporary non-Christian source gives an independent biography. Later narrative color—parents named Joachim and Anne, a childhood in the Temple, and similar episodes—comes chiefly from the second-century Protoevangelium of James and from subsequent liturgical tradition, not from first-century documentation.

Exact years of birth and death are not recorded. Christian tradition situates her life in the late first century BC and the first century AD in Roman Palestine; assigned feast dates such as 8 September for her nativity are liturgical, not historical. Place of birth is likewise unattested in the canonical Gospels. Nazareth is her home in Matthew and Luke; some extra-canonical and later writers associate her early life with Jerusalem. Traditions of her last years divide between Jerusalem and Ephesus, and traditions of her end divide between a tomb in the Kidron Valley (the site of the Church of the Sepulchre of Saint Mary) and the doctrine of the Dormition or Assumption, according to which her body was not left in the grave. None of these localizations can be verified by ordinary historical method.

The Gospels present her as betrothed and as Joseph’s wife. That she was the mother of Jesus is the one biographical fact on which the Christian sources agree and the basis of the title Theotokos (God-bearer), defined at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Churches differ on whether she remained a virgin after Jesus’ birth and on how to interpret the “brothers” of Jesus named in the New Testament—as cousins, as Joseph’s children from an earlier marriage, or as her later children. Catholic and Orthodox tradition affirm perpetual virginity; many Protestant interpreters do not. She belonged to no religious order, held no ecclesiastical office, and was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type. Her cult is apostolic and patristic in origin: by the late second or third century she was already invoked in prayer, as in the Greek text of the Sub tuum praesidium.

Feasts of her nativity, annunciation, and dormition or assumption took shape in the Christian East in late antiquity and were received, with differences of emphasis, in the medieval West. No single day exhausts her liturgical presence. She is invoked as patron of the Church, of mothers, virgins, families, and innumerable nations and places, often under particular titles and apparitions (among them Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima, Częstochowa, and Aparecida). Because the subject given is only “Virgin,” not a named individual with a distinct career, the foregoing is the only figure for whom a cautious hagiographical account can be offered; countless other saints are commemorated as virgins, but they are identified by their own names.