[First posted in December 2014, time for a revisit. If God-the-Son was supposedly born on December 25 coincidental with the birth of the worshipped sun-god Mithra, then his virgin mother would have conceived nine-months before which would be timed about April of that year on the Gregorian calendar which would be . . . well . . . year 0? When we were Christians, we taught that it wasn’t the birth that was unusual; the baby God-Son was born the normal way just like all other human babies work their way out of the womb; what was miraculous was the supposed impregnation of Mother Mary by the 3rd Person of the Christian Trinitarian Godhead, as the Apostle’s Creed succinctly says: “who was conceived by the Holy Ghost.” ‘Tis the season of revisits and reposts and since we are into the Christian celebration of the birth of the Christian Divine Messiah, this was first posted May 16, 2012 ; it is thought-provoking if not controversial.—Admin1]
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Image from demo.smartaddons.com
The hand that rocked the infant Jesus’ cradle belonged to a young virgin mother. Virgin motherhood might have been impossible in the first century but it certainly is possible today when artificial insemination is an available option for women, virgins included, who wish to have children through a medical procedure rather than the natural way. [In fact there is now a popular television series titled “The Virgin” and it’s not about Mama Mary.]
That said, when you google “virgin mother,” what pops up is a wide range of articles, from Catholic Christianity’s Virgin Mother cult to paganism’s virgin mother cults. Instead of using internet sources like wikipedia, featured here are excerpts from an authoritative scholarly source—historian Charles Freeman—who wrote a well-researched book with an intriguing title: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason.
This particular excerpt is from Chapter 16 entitled “The Ascetic Odyssey” which explores the complex phenomenon known as asceticism which encouraged the celibate life among monks and priests, and which encouraged virginity among women of the faith.
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Hand in hand with the elevation of virginity in these years came the development of the cult of the Virgin Mary. She was now placed on a pedestal as the ideal of virgin womanhood, “alone of all her sex she pleased the Lord,” as Caelius Sedulius put it.
The references to Mary in the Gospels are relatively few; John does not even mention her by name.
A particular emphasis on her virginity first arose when a verse in Isaiah, “Behold a virgin will conceive,” was interpreted as prophesying the birth of Christ and hence inspired or corroborated the Gospel accounts of the virgin birth. This interpretation, however, was drawn from the Septuagint (Greek) version, which had used the word parthenos to render the Hebrew for almah, which meant no more than a young girl, so the scriptural base of Mary’s virginity was shaky, especially as the Gospels specifically mention that Jesus had brothers and sisters–this was a point made by Julian in his Contra Galilaeos.
The earliest references by the Church Fathers (Tertullian and Irenaeus, for instance) concentrate on contrasting Mary with the fallen Eve, and it is only the fourth century that sees the development of a cult of Mary as perpetually virgin—Athanasius was among the first to use the term “ever virgin.” The cult took its strength from the need for a symbol of female virginity, and its power is evident in the way the interpretation of the scriptures was distorted to support it. Jerome, in his commentary on Isaiah, even went so far as to argue that here if nowhere else the Septuagint version was superior to the original Hebrew, and Jesus’ brothers and sisters were now recast as “cousins,” “brethren,” or even children of Joseph by an earlier marriage.
Once the doctrine of Mary’s perpetual virginity was accepted as unassailable, it was possible for Augustine, for instance, to develop the argument that Jesus had been born of a virgin so as to escape the taint of sin which would have been absorbed if the sexual act was involved—an approach which only served to reinforce Augustine’s view that those conceived in the normal way were corrupted by sin. This concern with the physical elements of Mary’s virginity became so intense that it was even argued that she gave birth without losing her virginity.
Once again Jerome produced an appropriate verse in support, in the prophet Ezekiel:
“This gate will be kept shut. No one will open it to go through it, since Yahweh, the God of Israel has been through it, and so it must be kept shut” (44:2).
Doctrinally, the cult reached its climax with the declaration that Mary was Theotokos, Mother of God (still her preferred title in the eastern church), which was proclaimed at the Council of Ephesus in 431.
The cult of Mary was not confined to ascetic intellectuals. The need for a goddess figure was profound in a religion founded by Jesus and shaped by Paul, two unmarried men, and at the popular level there are numerous apocryphal stories about Mary’s parents, childhood and upbringing and her assumption into heaven. The idea that she might have died and her body become corrupted became unimaginable, hence her “assumption” into heaven, noted in apocryphal sources for the first time in the late fourth century. In the east the emphasis was on “a dormition” (a falling asleep).
Mary came to absorb the attributes of pagan goddesses. Vasiliki Limberis shows how the goddesses Rhea and Tyche, to whom temples had been built by Constantine in Constantinople, gradually became transformed into Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, as Christianity ousted the remnants of paganism in the city in the fourth century. It helped that Rhea, like many other goddesses, was herself associated with “virgin birth” stories.
Image from www.eyeofhorus.biz
A particularly fruitful source was the Egyptian goddess Isis, who had become a universal mother goddess in her own right. Isis had developed the role of protector of sailors just at the time when her cult was transferred from Egypt to the Aegean by merchants. Mary too becomes a protector of sailors, the “star of the sea.” Isis’ emblem was the rose, and this too is appropriated by Mary, while representations of Isis with her baby son Horus on her knee seem to provide the iconic background for those of Mary and the baby Jesus. These representations, richly developed in Christian art, suggest a yearning for tenderness that had not previously satisfied.
So the cult of the Virgin Mary developed much deeper populist roots than many others and was strengthened by support at the highest levels of the church (as it still is in Roman Catholic Christianity). A good example of how the apocryphal stories about Mary were adopted by the church hierarchy can be seen in the fifth-century mosaics of S. Maria Maggiore in Rome. The basilica was built by Sixtus III in the 430s in celebration of the declaration of the Council of Ephesus that Mary was the Mother of God. In the Annunciation scene, which presents Mary in great splendour arrayed as a Byzantine princess, she is shown to have been spinning–drawing on an apocryphal story that she was in service in the Temple where she wove a veil for the Holy of Holies. Here Sixtus has appropriated a story with no scriptural support at all in order to make contact with popular devotion.
One of the results of the elevation of virginity was to transform women who did not espouse it into temptresses, the “dancing girls” of Jerome’s vision. While Mary was contrasted with Eve, women as a whole were equated with Eve, perpetuating her guilt through the temptation they offer to men. “Do you not realise that Eve is you?” inveighed the tempestuous Tertullian. “The curse God pronounced on your sex weighs still on the world . . . You are the devil’s gateway, you desecrated the fatal tree, you first betrayed the law of God, you who softened up with your cajoling words the man against whom the devil could not prevail by force . . .” So arises the dichotomy between virgin and whore, allowing no acceptable expression of female sexuality in between.
Excerpt from Chapter 17: Eastern Christianity and the Emergence of the Byzantine Empire, 395-600
[Note: The reference to Mary in this chapter came about in the context of the debate about the dual nature of Jesus as human and divine. Evidently this dichotomy was questioned as early as the first few centuries when Christianity as a religious political power came into prominence.]
If Jesus was fully man when he suffered, was he still man when he worked a miracle, or was he then acting in his divine role? What form of humanity did he take—man as before the fall, man as now lost in sin or man as he would be when redeemed? If Jesus was created as a perfect man, what did Luke mean when he wrote (2:52) that “Jesus increased in wisdom, stature and in favour with God and men”? Surely an “increase” implied that he was at some point an undeveloped human being, but was this possible? It could be assumed that he was not man in any way before the Incarnation, but after his resurrection did he revert to being only God, or did he retain some of his humanity? (Hilary of Poitiers argued that he remained both perfect man, fully human but without sin, and perfect God.) Connected to these debates was the status of the Virgin Mary. She was now the object of growing personal devotion, and her status rested on her role as the mother of Jesus. Yet was she the bearer of God (Theotokos) or of a man (Anthropotokos)?
The person around whom the debate was to crystallize was Nestorius, appointed bishop of Constantinople in 428. Nestorius had shown concern at the use of the title of Theotokos for Mary. He felt that this title denied the human nature of Jesus altogether and would have preferred to see Mary as Anthropotokos, though he was prepared to compromise on Christotokos, “bearer of Christ.” After all, Mary had given birth as a human being to a man who was capable of suffering and dying, although he was, of course, the divine logos as well. Calling Mary Theotokos risked falling into the heresy of denying Jesus’ humanity. Where Nestorius, like everyone else, experienced difficulty was in finding a formula which could explain how Jesus’ two natures, human and divine, could co-exist. He favoured the term “conjunction” rather than “union,” but his theological fumblings made him vulnerable to the new bishop of Alexandria, Theopilus’ nephew Cyril. Cyril championed the Theotokos formula, and he saw the issue as one through which he could undermine Nestorius and humble the see of Constantinople. He prepared his ground carefully. He circulated a pastoral letter to his local bishops explaining that since the promulgation of the Nicene Creed as orthodoxy the only possible title for Mary was “bearer of God,” and he then persuaded the bishop of Rome, Celestine, a natural supporter of Alexandria against Constantinople, to agree to this formulation. Next he won over Pulcheria, the powerful elder sister of the young emperor Theodosius (who had succeeded Arcadius in 408). Pulcheria, who ruled as Theodosius’ regent, had a personal devotion to Mary, and Nestorius had offended her by refusing to allow her to take communion alongside the clergy in the sanctuary of his church. (A similar standoff took place between Theodosius and Ambrose in Milan.)
. . . .Even if, after 381, Christ and the Holy Spirit were fully incorporated into the Godhead, Christianity could provide a mass of figures who had some form of “divine” status in the afterlife as companions of God, such as the Virgin Mary, the saints and the martyrs. Then there were the angels and demons whose combined presence filled the Christian world with as many supernatural presences as there had been in earlier times. It needs to be remembered that Christians continued to believe in the existence of the pagan gods—as demons. None of this would have been alien to pagans. G. W. Bowerstock describes a number of instances, from Syria and Mesopotamia in particular, of gods being worshipped in groups of three.
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If these excerpts have piqued your curiosity enough to want to know more not only about this topic but also how early Christianity developed it’s doctrines over centuries, then please get a copy of Charles Freeman’s book. It is available on kindle edition from amazon.com.
NSB@S6K
