Christian History Magazine Collection

Her moment of obedience triggered two millennia of reverence.

David Lyle Jeffrey from Christian History magazine no. 83

In the sixth month of her elderly cousin Elizabeth’s pregnancy, a young, betrothed Jewish girl was astonished by a visit from an angel. It was the angel Gabriel, and he greeted the girl Mary with a reverential “Hail” and announced that she had “found favor” with God and was to conceive and bear a child to be called Jesus. Shocking enough; but there was more: the conception would occur not by natural means, but by the agency of the Holy Spirit (Luke 1:35-37).

Mary responded in obedience. She called herself the Lord’s “handmaiden” (Luke 1:38)—a humble title that set the tone for the rest of the New Testament accounts and became the foundation for centuries of Marian devotion.

Mary recognized that she had become, like Enoch (Gen. 5:22) and Noah (who “found grace in the eyes of the LORD” [Gen. 6:8]), one “highly favored” by God (Luke 1:28). She saw that she would forever after be recognized as one “blessed among women” (28, 42). This blessing was not for her alone, as she sang in her Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55), but for all God’s children. She was the one woman, out of all women, through whom God would fulfill his covenant love and promise.

How improbable! This obscure Jewish girl became, through the work of the Holy Spirit and her willing obedience, the instrument of divine grace. Through her, the majesty and unapproachable holiness of God joined the frail impermanence of fallen humanity. She was the chosen vessel of the Incarnation, at the pivot point of God’s saving plan. How could Mary not loom in the imagination of the church?

The Woman and the Word

Although Mary the mother of Jesus is of almost unrivaled importance in historic Christianity, and although her role in salvation history is central, she has a comparatively modest role in the Bible itself. Even where Mary does appear in the Gospels, she often has only a cameo, and in several instances, she does not even get a speaking part.

The gaps and silences in the biblical texts have invited speculation, and writers of a number of apocryphal books (p. 18) purport to reveal details of her biography not found in the canon, inspiring much art and even some doctrine.

The central importance of Mary in Christian tradition, however, is rooted in the Bible. It is in her role as the “mother of Jesus”—or, in Elizabeth’s words, “mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43)—that we meet her in the Gospels’ pages.

Luke, of course, tells her story most fully (1:26ff; cf. Matthew 1:18ff). There we find not only Gabriel’s Annunciation to Mary, but also her poetic response, the prayer-song known as the Magnificat (because it begins “Magnificat anima mea Dominum” or “My soul magnifies the Lord”).

The Magnificat reveals Mary as, like Miriam and Hannah before her, a divinely inspired poet. This trait she also shares with her ancestor David. Indeed, her spontaneous poem recalls the Psalms (especially Psa. 111:9), just as Elizabeth’s words of greeting to her, “Blessed are you among women,” echo : “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly.”

The Magnificat soon entered the liturgy of the church. Among Anglicans it continues to be recited daily at evensong, and Catholics use it in worship, where it is often sung rather than spoken, as in the beautiful version of the Franciscan singer and liturgist John Michael Talbot. In this context all of the congregation joins Mary in praise: “Holy is his name.”

Mary’s Visitation to Elizabeth, whose fetal child John the Baptist “leaps for joy” in her womb at Mary’s approach (1:39-56), completes the story of the Annunciation. Along with Gabriel’s Ave Maria and Mary’s Magnificat, the Visitation confirms that the events Mary is caught up in are indeed God’s fulfillment of “all that the prophets had spoken.” Not surprisingly, along with the plethora of artworks dedicated to the Annunciation, Christian artists have created many images depicting this portentous visit.

Because of the doctrine of the Incarnation, Mary is associated with the fulfillment of the Word of God and thus with Scripture. In many Renaissance paintings the Angel Gabriel finds her reading the Bible. It is historically unlikely that Mary would have had access to a scroll of Torah. Yet artists seeking to symbolize her faithfulness pictured her as a careful student of the Word of God. This attentiveness to God’s written Word was not only a sign of her obedience, pious artists thought, but also a preparation for her coming role as the receptacle for his Word made flesh in Jesus.

Moreover, Mary’s supposed study of Scripture would make her a model for all those who would seek to harbor Christ in themselves. So, in Roger van der Weyden’s (ca. 1400-1464) Annunciation, Mary’s bedroom is imagined as a church sanctuary, and her hand is shown raised over the Bible. This makes visual her verbal words of faith and obedience: “Be it unto me according to thy Word” (Luke 1:38). Following this line of thought, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), among others, spoke of Mary as the model and patron saint of all those called to study Scripture.

No painting of the Annunciation captures this theme so well, perhaps, as that of Robert Campin (1375/80-1444), sometimes called “The Master of Flemaille”. We see Mary seated on the floor rather than on the bench, absorbed in reading Scripture. Another book, perhaps a commentary, lies on the table beside a kind of book bag and some notes. Behind her hangs the talit, or prayer shawl— presumably of her father Joachim. The vase on the table holds a lily; on it are visible Hebrew letters; the vase symbolizes Mary’s virgin womb. The angel Gabriel has just entered the room; the beating of his wings has snuffed out the candle, and Mary is captured, by the painter’s brilliance, just as she is beginning to shift her eyes toward Gabriel. Intent upon the Law, she is about to be surprised by Grace. The Scripture cradled in her arms has its binding protected by a cloth, an allusion to the swaddling cloths in which she will wrap the newborn Jesus: this touch renders powerfully transparent the link between the Word and the Word-made-flesh.

She Who Was Foretold

Christians seeking links between Jesus’ birth and Old Testament prophecies focused early and often on Mary’s unprecedented virgin conception (cf. Luke 1:34). In this, they followed the New Testament sources. Matthew, in his telling of Jesus’ birth (1:22-23), brings the promise in Isaiah to bear on Jesus —”Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel” (7:14). The virginity of Mary became one of the crucial tokens for early believers that Jesus was “the Christ” long expected.

Christian readers of the 1st century would have expected Mary herself to be about 12 years of age—the age ascribed to her by two apocryphal gospels and the common age of betrothal. Mary’s youthful virginity was nonetheless theologically important, as was her lineage as a scion of the root of Jesse, the house of David. These matters, along with the spare canonical narratives, gave rise to apocryphal accounts of her childhood and parentage.

References to Mary are in other respects slight in the first centuries of the Church. From the time of Irenaeus (d. A.D. 200), Christian apologists combated gnostic heretics by pointing out Mary’s significant place in salvation history. This allowed them to clarify the biblical case for Christ’s human as well as divine nature, over against the gnostics’ spiritualizing of Christ. The formula offered by Irenaeus, that Mary is a “second Eve,” becomes standard in Marian literary typology.

In 2nd-century frescoes from Roman catacombs, we see Mary represented as the fulfillment of the “virgin” in Isaiah 7:14. Such representations amount to a statement about the two natures of Christ and the purity of his birth—a statement verbalized and made binding in the Apostles’ Creed, the Chalcedonian Council, the Old Roman Baptismal Creed (Hippolytus), and the Niceno-Constantino-politan Creed (A.D. 381).