Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 16 March 2004

The Name Mary

The name of the Virgin Mary in the Greek New Testament is usually Mariam, but sometimes Maria. The Vulgate renders the name by Maria, both in the Old Testament and the New. Josephus calls her Mariamme. The Shem Tob Hebrew Gospel of Matthew uses both Maria and Miriam for Mary Magdalene. Most biblical commentators consider the New Testament names, Mariam and Maria, to be the later forms of the Hebrew Miriam, but the derivation of these names is uncertain. In the Jewish scriptures, Miriam was the sister of Moses, but no other woman had this name in them except one mentioned only in a genealogy. Gesenius thought Miriam meant “their rebellion”, from “marah” meaning “to rebel, to be contentious”, because:

Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses.

Num 12:1

As a nickname reflecting this incident, the name makes sense, but not as a birth name. Moreover, since Deuteronomy 21:18-20 calls for the stoning of the rebellious son, a likely name for a Jewish child would not have such an implication. It cannot have been a popular Hebrew name, that is plain, and it might not have been a Hebrew name at all. A J Maas in the CE thinks Miriam may be of Egyptian origin, derived from the Egyptian “meri”, meaning “beloved” or “my beloved”, implying God’s love, or with “am” meaning “a mother’s beloved”, or “beloved of the people”. The Massoretic bible renders Miriam by Marian, a form analogous to the Syriac and Aramaic word Mariam, and the Rabbis explain Miriam as coming from “merum”, “bitterness”, which, with “yam” “sea” means “bitterness of the sea”, “sea of bitterness,” or even “bitter water”. Perhaps related to an Arabic word is “mara” meaning “to be fat”, fat indicating prosperity and health. However “maria” was used only for well-fed animals, usually for sacrificial “fatlings” and seems unlikely to be a girl’s name.

Those who consider Miriam as a compound word usually explain it as consisting of two nouns:

1. “mor” and “yam” rendering “myrrh of the sea” though “mor” looks unlikely for “mar”
2. “mari” and “yam” meaning mistress of the sea, from “mari” meaning mistress
3. “mar” and “yam” meaning “drop of the sea”. “Stella maris”, star of the sea, is more popular than any other interpretation of the name Mary, and is dated back to S Jerome. But Jerome knew mar was translated by stilla (drop), not stella (star).

Too Many Marys!

Linked to the puzzle of the derivation and meaning of Mary is why Mary is such a peculiarly popular name in the gospel stories. In the gospels, there were some women who were not Marys, such as Elisabeth, Joanna, Susanna, and Salome, but, it seems that the prominent women were called Mary. Why? If Miriam was not a Hebrew name, it might have been an epithet or a title—“mar” meaning “lord, master”, and “marthah” meaning “lady, mistress, Martha”. L Y Rahmani (A Catalogue of Jewish Ossuaries) says marah is the diminutive form of Martha. Antipope Benedict XIII condemned and ordered destroyed an ancient Latin treatise called Mar Yesu, Lord Jesus. Thus Martha, Miriam (Mariam) and Mary (Maria) are the same name differing only in the suffixes which indicate a woman. They all therefore mean “lady”. For Catholics, Mary was always called “Our Lady”. Martha is the Aramaic equivalent of the Hebrew Maria, and Miriam is an older Hebrew form of the title. Quite possibly Lady was the Essene equivalent of Lord or Master, denoting a senior female member of the order.

Women play no significant role in the gospels, although Christians like to puff the parts they do play. This habit began at the outset. Most of the converts of the embryonic gentile Church were women and the New Testament was written to exaggerate the role women had in the events it describes. The most prominent woman was Mary, the mother of Jesus, because of the additions of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. In Mark, the earliest gospel, Christians might be surprised to know, Mary, the mother of Jesus appears explicitly only once (Mk 6:3)!

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.

Mark 6:3

To put this in perspective, Joseph, the father of Jesus, does not appear in the earliest gospel at all! So by adding the birth narratives, the early gentile Church switched the emphasis of the gospel events from the doings of the hero of a brotherhood into the hero of an ordinary Jewish family. Christians and their dishonest clerics might be attached to the birth stories, but there is no honest scholar who will not accept that they had no part of the original life of Jesus or the earliest gospel accounts. A more probable source of the birth myths, if they need one, is that Essenes had a rebirth or “born again” ceremony as part of their initiation, which required a surrogate mother, and one of the women members acted this role.

If the birth narratives are rejected, then Mary and Joseph as the homely couple would disappear, leaving sparse references to them. Joseph would disappear entirely from Matthew and Luke, matching then Mark. Besides those, Joseph by name appears twice in descriptions of Jesus as the “son of Joseph”. Mary is hardly better off. She appears in Matthew in the parallel passage (Mt 13:55) to Mark 6:3. Luke omits this because of the offence felt at Jesus by the family. In Mark, the other three places where the mother of Jesus might be mentioned are:

There were also women looking on afar off: among whom was Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the less and of Joses, and Salome.

Mark 15:40

And Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses beheld where he was laid.

Mark 15:47

And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.

Mark 16:1

Are we to assume that “Joses” where it occurs in these citations really means Jesus? Or is Joses a blood brother of Jesus as James was always said to have been, and Juda and Simon seem to have been. Or is this another Mary? One would be justified in thinking so, because any sensible author meaning the mother of Jesus would say so, and not identify her by the name of someone else, supposed to be a brother. This is the curiosity. There are too many Marys—as many as six could be different ones. Mary Magdalene, among them, is also mentioned in one additional place in Mark:

Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.

Mark 16:9

The trouble here is that scholars know this passage and the remaining passages in Mark are bogus, added at a minimum of a century later and probably nearer two centuries. So, Mary Magdalene also makes only these three appearances in Mark, yet, for Christians and especially feminist Christians, she is an important person in the gospel story of Jesus. Mary Magdalene in these three scenes was looking on at the crucifixion, she saw him buried and she discovered the empty tomb. Elsewhere, she also met the resurrected Christ. Yet all of this is based on just a few sentences, some of which were known to be bogus, and the others might also have been interpolations!

In Matthew, another Mary appears simply called “the other Mary”! Is she the mother of Jesus, or really another Mary, perhaps the mother of James, Joses and so on, if she is not the mother of Jesus? Luke mentions Mary Magdalene by name once only, and in connexion with a Mary who is the mother of James. John has another Mary, Mary of Bethany and her sister Martha. This Mary was the one who anointed the feet of Jesus with expensive oil and wiped it off with her hair. John also has another Mary, the description of whose appearance may give us the answer hidden by the Church:

Now there stood by the cross of Jesus his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene.

John 19:25

The passage is ambiguous. Does it describe four women or three? The natural way to read it is that the phrase “Mary the wife of Cleopas” qualifies “his mother’s sister”. But the Mary situation is then getting really out of hand because Mary, the mother of Jesus, had a sister also called Mary, that we had never heard of. Are these people mad? Perhaps not. The two Marys could be sisters in a sisterhood! The Essenes, like the Therapeutae of Philo, had female members called together in a sisterhood.

Another Mary, the mother of John Mark, appears in Acts 12:12. The early Christians were meeting in her house. Similarly, Simon Peter lived in a the house of his mother, but her name is not given. Like the Marys, mothers are mentioned unusually often. Are they really mothers? Were these “mothers” like the Catholic mothers superior that later ran priories—abbesses (a female form of “abbot”, a father superior, from Aramaic, “abba”, father)? If they ran Essene communal houses, they had status within the order. Were they also ritual mothers, acting a role in the born-again ceremony that Essenes perhaps had to undergo when they had passed their three year initiate, or, like Jesus, a further right of passage at the age of thirty (baptism)?

Mary Magdalene

Jews in general, and Essenes in particular, seemed to love punning, and the words they favoured often had multiple meanings. The word “mariam”, with a cognate in Arabic, is a woman who loves to discourse with men as brothers, and so does not behave improperly or sexually with them. It would fit Miriam who travelled with her brothers Moses and Aaron hearing their discussions, and also the gospel Marys who heard the conversations of Jesus and his disciples, and probably joinied in, but with no sexual connotations. The women of the Essene party, like those of the Therapeutae, must have been describable thus.

The idea here would also tie in with a meaning of “magdala”—“deliberator, a debater,” the cognate of Arabic “mujâdalat” meaning evidence discussed logically to discover the truth or convince an opponent. The gnostics understood this of Mary Magdalene. In the gnostic text Pistis Sophia thirty-nine of sixty-four questions addressed to Jesus are attributed to Mary Magdalene, who readily admitted to persistent questioning of Jesus, saying:

I will not tire of asking thee. Be not angry with me for questioning everything,

to which Jesus replied:

Question what thou dost wish.

In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Phillip, and the Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene discussed everything closely with Jesus causing the other disciples to be jealous, notably Peter. Mary Magdalene might have been so named to equate her with the scriptural Miriam of Exodus, the sister of Moses. Since Jesus had the role of Moses in leading the Jews into the promised land of the kingdom of God, he was the equivalent of Moses leading the Israelites into the earlier promised land, and so Mary Magdalene had the role of his symbolic sister in the drama.

All this might be a surprise to some Christians who think Magdalene is, like Nazarene, a description of a hometown—Magdala, supposed to be a fishing village near the Sea of Galilee. There are no contemporary records of any place called Magdala. It does not appear in the New Testament except as the inference that it was the home of this Mary. The places mentioned that are thought to mean Magdala by the biblicists are Dalmanutha in Mark and Magadan in Matthew. If these are meant to be Magdala, then the Holy Ghost has been its usual slack self in watching over the accuracy of God’s Word, especially as no one knows where these places were either.

Biblicists claim Magdala does appear in ancient texts, but they assume that places with different names are Magdala. The Babylonian Talmud has a Migdal Nunya and the Palestinian Talmud has a Migdal Sebiya, both meant to be Magdala. The first means the Tower of Salted Fish and the second means the Tower of Dyers, so they do not seem to be the same place. The Talmuds were not completed until five hundred years after the gospel events, and even if they depend on traditions going back that far, because they were still being edited so late, they cannot be considered reliable.

The universal Christian assumption, presumably based on the Babylonian Talmud, is that the city of Tarichaeae, mentioned in Josephus as a large city of fishermen with 230 boats, 40,000 people and a hippodrome, is Magdala, and many commentaries simply state it as so. The connexion is that the Latin name is said to pertain to salted fish, presumably, through the Greek, from “teresis ” and “ichthus ”, meaning “tower” and “fish” respectively, and so matching the description of the Babylonian Talmud. It looks like a dubious interpretation, and, in view of the hippodrome, a derivation from “trecho ” meaning “to run” or “to have course” seems more likely.

Tarichaeae was obviously a markedly Hellenized town—probably highly Romanized—and, excavations show it to have been like this in the first century. It had a tiny synagogue suggesting that it had few pious Jews in it. If Mary Magdalene had began her adult life as a prostitute, then she would have been in a good place to ply her trade, but we can conclude that whatever Magdalene meant, it had nothing to do with a place called Magdala. We have the usual bible mystery. The places mentioned do not exist, or no one knows where they are.

Mary the Mother an Adultress

The bible has no details of Mary Magdalene’s age, circumstances or family, but the Talmud identified her with Mary, the mother of Jesus—an adulterous Magdalene was the mother of a man, Ben Stada, who had been crucified:

Thus they did to Ben Stada in Lydda. They hung him on the eve of Passover. Ben Stada was Ben Pandira. Rabbi Hisda said: The husband was Stada, the paramour was Pandira. But was not the husband Pappos Ben Judah? His mother’s name was Stada. But his mother was Miriam, a dresser of woman´s hair. As they say in Pumbaditha, “This woman was departed from her husband”.

Talmud Sabbath 104b

Here is more of the Jewish love of puns. Miriam was a woman’s hair dresser (“magdala”) about whom it was said in Pumbaditha that she “departed from her husband”, earning her name Stada—she was adulterous. The Rabbis considered Stada a surname for Jesus of Nazareth. It is a Persian word meaning “a master, a skilful highly esteemed man, an ingenious teacher, a master craftsman”. Miriam Magdala, the wife of a man named Stada who also had the name, Pappos, a Greek name broadly synonymous with Stada, meaning “governor, tutor” as well as “grandfather”. Stada and Pappos are the same person. The son of mother and father Stada was therefore Ben Stada. If Ben Stada is Jesus, then Stada must be either Joseph as a craftsman, or Jesus as an “ingenious teacher” where the “ben” is not a patronym but indicates a quality—he is a son of ingenuity. The insult here is that Ben Stada ended being called Ben Pandira, meaning son of an idiot—a fool. The “Son of Ingenuity” became the “Son of an Idiot”. He was crucified on the eve of Passover at Lydda for his stupid acts.

The Gospel of Nicodemus 2:3 says the Jewish elders said to Jesus at his trial before Pilate, “…thou wast born of fornication”. So, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was called an adultress. According to the Church Father, Origen, Celsus confirmed that the mother of Jesus “was pregnant she was turned out of doors by the carpenter to whom she had been betrothed, as having been guilty of adultery, and that she bore a child to a certain soldier named Panthera”.

Magdalene a Prostitute

Magdalene sounds like the Greek nouns “magdalia” and “apomagdalia”, meaning “dirt” or “dog food” in that they are scraps from the table thrown to the dogs, especially bits of bread diners used to wipe their fingers. It is no more a complementary description than anyone might expect still! In Rome on 14 September, 591, Pope Gregory the Great, in a sermon, identified Mary Magdalene in Luke 8:2 with the unnamed sinner in Luke 7:37, who “previously used the unguent to perfume her flesh in forbidden acts”, and with the Mary of Bethany in John 11:1. Mary Magdalene was thus identified for Catholics as a penitent prostitute. Yet, nowhere does the New Testament mention that she was a prostitute or a sinner. The Church invented it. It was not a part of the original story, unless it had been washed out by the early Church, before being painted back in by the later one. Indeed, she looks much more like part of the true story of the Virgin Mary cut away and rendered separately to make the Virgin spotless while letting Mary Magdalene carry the burden of feminine sins. The cycle began again in 1969 when the Catholic Church announced that Mary Magdalene was not a prostitute.

Christian commentators make much of the fact that the gospels, amid the little they say about Mary Magdalene, do not say that she is married. A recent BBC documentary on Mary said:

A married woman would have carried her husband’s name and Mary didn’t.

The BBC is no guardian of standards of scholarship or even truth when it comes to Christianity. Christians assume that Magdalene is not a married name. Why? The word “tower” which it supposedly stands for, even as the name of a town, is “Migdal”. What stops her husband from being called Migdal? Perhaps she had left her husband to join the Nazarenes and her surname had become the nickname, Magdalene. Perhaps, just as Cephas/Peter was a rock, she was a towering woman! It is a simple illustration of the circularity of Christian argumentation, otherwise better called dishonesty—they assume Magdalene refers to a town and thereafter it must! Admittedly nothing suggests she is married, but we have seen how sparse the actual independent gospel material is about Mary Magdalene, or any of the Marys. It is true that women in Jewish society at large usually were married early in life, or at least betrothed, but that is not true of the women members of the Essene sect or the Therapeutae. Indeed, most of them were old maids or at least chaste old women, as we know from Philo.

That Mary was hysterical comes from the passage in Luke later transferred to Mark 16:9 also.

And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, And Joanna the wife of Chuza Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.

Luke 8:2-3

It is a likely insert, having no bearing on the story but adding the names of women to puff them in the story. Indeed, Mary is mentioned along with Joanna and Susanna, who were among those who “ministered unto Jesus of their substance”—“hyparchonta ”, a mysterious word!

Mary and Jesus

Christian commentators falsely say that only women were allowed to handle corpses because of their uncleanness, and so it was women’s work to prepare corpses for burial. For them, it explains why only women went to the tomb of Jesus on the first day of the week. In fact, burial of a corpse was a religious obligation for Jews according to Leviticus, and proper purification from uncleanness was provided for (Num 19:14-22) by sprinkling contaminated people and objects with the water of the Red Heifer on the third and seventh day after the contamination, with a final total immersion. The men who, in Judaism, were absolutely forbidden to touch corpses were priests and Nazarites! Essenes considered themselves to be priests, and, despite Christian objections, Nazarenes—and Essenes—were more than likely to have been Nazarites too. So, if the male followers of Jesus thought they were not permitted to minister to his corpse, the implication is that they were Essenes, or the Nazarenes were a type of Essene.

Curiously, the figure Mary met in the Garden of Gethsemane that she mistook for the gardener would not let her touch him, as if he knew she was unclean having just been in a tomb. It is a story that appears in John, the last of the canonical gospels, published about a century after Jesus lived, and again could have been meant to encourage the women of the gentile Roman empire, who were the most impressed of the earliest converts, and needed to see a greater role for women in the gospels than they actually had in what was really a revolutionary movement. If this man in the garden was Jesus, as Christians say, he was allowing the male disciples to touch him only a few days later. Either they had not been near the tomb, or they had already been ritually cleansed. Either way, it suggests that it was someone who remained concerned with ritual cleanliness under the law of Moses. Could this have been Jesus, a dead man himself, or was it the living man who succeeded him in the same position as Nasi of the Nazarenes?

Mary gets no mention by the early Christian writers like Clement, Hermas and Polycarp, and, though Justin Martyr and Irenaeus do mention her, it is over 100 years after the few events of her life we know about. Justin Martyr, in the middle of the second century, knew about the virgin birth and compared it with Pagan myths like the birth of Perseus. He knew about Gabriel’s annunciation and about the Magi, but his details were wrong if Matthew is considered to be correct. It shows that the fiction of the virgin birth evolved as all things do. It was not revealed in perfect form, as a perfect God ought to, nor was it invented in one sitting, but even that could not be expected when the churches were not under one central jurisdiction.

S Augustine of Hippo, considered the greatest scholar of the early Roman Church, a few hundred years on, declared that Mary was baffled by Gabriel’s announcement because she had vowed herself to virginity. Since the clergy accept that Augustine prepared the way for the Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God by declaring Mary as sinless, it is somewhat arbitrary of them to reject, when accepting her own immaculate birth, that he noticed she had made a vow of chastity.

The Marionite myth grows in the Gospel of Mary, where Mary is actually the post-resurrection leader. The Coptic gnostic texts found at Nag Hammadi seem to imply that Jesus loved Mary Magdalene particularly, and might even have kissed her on the lips regularly. It made the male disciples jealous, especially as Jesus, replying to their complaints, implies that they are blind by comparison with Mary. Of course, myths grow, and these myths were probably written one or two centuries after the events they purport to describe, and by then naturally had the agenda of the group who were composing them.

The real post-resurrection leader of the Jerusalem Church was neither Mary nor Peter, but “James the Brother of the Lord”. Since we know it is historically true that James was in charge of the Jerusalem Church until the eve of the Jewish War, the other tales can be dismissed as Christian speculations. They might contain some nuggets of historical truth but no one will ever know what they are without external confirmation. And those among the Christians who fancy themselves as historians ought to understand that history is not merely what is plausible. Lots of things may be plausible, but no Christian baulks at the implausibility of dead people being restored to life. History certainly has to be plausible, but it is decided by the best evidence available not hopes and desperate speculation!

Mary the Mother of God

The image of the Goddess, Cybele, Diana of the Ephesians, was broken by Christians around 400 AD, and therefter her temple was left derelict. Yet curiously, just at this time, the worship of Mary as Theotokos or Mother of God was becoming accepted in the Church after decades of growing popularity. By 431 AD, Ephesus had a basilica dedicated to Mary. This was the year that Cyril of Alexandria arranged for the expulsion of the Nestorians and, as a result, was feted by the Ephesians carrying him bodily by torchlight to the refrain of, “Praised be the Theotokos”. Mary was the Mother of God and Cybele was the Mother of the Gods!

Britain was lost to the empire, then Rome fell to the rampaging Goths in 410 AD. These Goths were Arianite Christians. The great clergyman, Jerome, wrote many letters in this period without showing the least interest in the fall of the empire. His concern was the virtue of virginity. Bertrand Russell wrote:

Never once do his thoughts turn to any measure of practical statesmanship…

The failure of the Church to be interested in secular matters was causing the internal decay of the empire, and it showed. Classical Pagan Rome had been getting increasingly urbanised, the Roman citizens living in cities, while the farms were left to be run by slaves. Christianity put the trend in reverse, allowing the cities to decay, and forcing people back on to the land as penniless serfs. Christians, trained on the New Testament yearning for the apocalypse saw it all as prophetic. It was God’s will, and so nothing need be done. The End of the World was inevitable. Pagans thought the decay and neglect was the revenge of the Pagan gods ignored and demonised by the Christians. As Geoffrey Ashe puts it (The Virgin ):

The Rome of Jupiter had been powerful and prosperous. The Rome of Christ was pitiable.

S Augustine felt obliged to write The City of God. Amidst all this, the Church opened its churches dedicated to Mary, often built on sites or the ruins of temples to the Pagan goddess who had served a similar function. Rome had Santa Maria Maggiore on the Esquiline Hill where a temple to Cybele had stood. Temples to Minerva were generally rebuilt as churches to Mary. Santa Maria Aracoeli was built some time later on the Capitoline Hill where a temple to the Carthaginian goddess, Tanit, had stood. In taking over the temple sites of Goddesses like these, Santa Maria also took over their titles, symbols and functions.

Needless to say, the Church was uninterested in recording Mary’s death, and there is no tradition about the fate of Mary after the crucifixion, when she seems to have been left in the care of John, according to John’s gospel. Some Christians presume she goes with him to Ephesus where, at an impossibly later date they are said to be still living—presumably shrines to them both in fact. Since it was such a long time after both were dead, the shrines are probably tributes to the legend rather than evidence of it, and Mary worship at Ephesus was simply a continuation of goddess worship, since it was the centre of the cult of Diana.

Some Christians claim that she never did die! If Mary was a spotless virgin free even from the taint of the original sin of Adam, then she could not have been human. Nor could she have been subject to Adam’s punishment, death, the factor in human existence that distinguishes us from gods or angels. Adam was the first man and his descendents were all subject to ultimate decay and death. The earlest of believers in Mary as an undying goddess or angel were the Collyridians, a sect of women worshippers, who adored the empty seat of the virgin, left empty for her to occupy, except that it was laid out in a kind of Eucharist consisting of sanctified bread! Naturally, it was declared heretical, and disappeared, perhaps understandably, when worship of Mary was admitted into the Church in the fourth and fifth centuries. Now Catholics seem to believe that she too was lifted up bodily into heaven!

The Mysteries of Mary

It is a mystery of the sacred marriage bed. For she saith, “The king hath brought me into his chamber”. Of such a chamber is this mystery.

On the Eucharist, S Augustine, Sermon 88:7

For Augustine, God’s insemination of the Virgin Mary is plainly a mystery of the sacred marriage chamber, whence God had taken the Virgin. Augustine might have known what most Christians now deny or ignore, that there was a pre-existent tradition behind the Virgin Birth. It was the hierogamos of God and Israel.

It has been denied by scholars that the Essenes enrolled women, but we know there were village Essenes who married and that scripturally girls could be dedicated as “Nazar” as well as men. If infant girls had been vowed to God, it is difficult to see how God’s Elect could have turned them away. The perfectly holy men certainly regarded women with disdain as temptresses, perennial Eves leading men away from the paths of God, but they were obliged to accept that some women were favoured by God and some female infants were vowed to God under the protection of the order.

In the Apocryphal and Gnostic texts the Virgin suffered no pain in the birth process. In the Odes of Solomon the Virgin gives birth at will, and in the Ascension of Isaiah she does not give birth as such, the divine child simply appearing fully formed before her, and with adult intelligence. If these miracles were possible because it was an adult son of God—a king—not a child, which appeared before Mary when she gave birth, it suggests it was a ritual rebirth not a real birth which was described.

The whole order was a human temple, so the virgins in its care were “temple virgins”, just as Mary was said to have been in some sources. Augustine believed that Mary had been vowed to God as a temple virgin and this was the explanation of her bewilderment when she became pregnant. These maidens took the role of Israel in the Essene ritual weddings and rebirths, and because the prophetess Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, led the Chosen People over the Dead Sea, the first step to the promised land, the temple virgins were called Mary and were to metaphorically give birth to the kingdom of God by giving birth to those who might be messiahs, sons of God. Despite their ritual role, they were treated frostily by the celibate men, whence the frosty treatment of his “mother” by Jesus in the gospels.

The Book of James, or Protevangelium as it became known in the Renaissance, is a sort of prequel to the gospels. It tells us Mary was vowed to God before she was born and, from the age of three, became a “temple virgin” under the protection of “the High Priest” Zechariah! Since the men of the Ebionites were chaste it seems logical to imagine that any young girls they took under their protection were also expected to be chaste like Vestal Virgins. At puberty she was entrusted to an old man, Joseph the Carpenter, who was really a builder. In his absence on one occasion on “building work”, Mary was asked to spin some scarlet thread for a curtain and was told by the angel Gabriel of her destiny. The logic of this seems to be that Mary was sent away from the monastic community into the care of the honourable village Essene, Joseph, precisely because she was found to have broken her vow of perpetual virginity. Because the child was fatherless, she dedicated it to God and the young Jesus was taken into the community of celibate monks. In the Protoevangelium, there is no mention of Nazareth.

As an Essene, Jesus was quite likely to have been surrendered in fact to the order as a babe consecrated to God. If he was not abandoned by his family as a child, the gospels maintain he was as an adult. His natural mother probably had no role to play in the gospel events and she and several other women were added in the earliest days of the gentile church as a sop to its mainly female congregations.

Mohammed must have had contact with Arabian Christians. He teaches that neither Mary nor Jesus were divine though Mary was blessed and Jesus was a great prophet. The Christians who believed this were the Ebionites but Mohammed also taught that there was no Trinity of God, Jesus and Mary! The Ebionites could not have believed this if they did not accept Jesus as divine so Mohammed’s Ebionite teacher must have been telling him what the Christians of the Empire believed. Now Cyril of Alexandria, murderer of Hypatia, had already ensured that Mary was effectively worshipped by this time. So the Ebionite critics of orthodoxy could justifiably accuse the Roman Christians of worshipping this trinity. Furthermore, by this time, there was in Arabia a sect of Collyridians, outright worshippers of Mary as a goddess and they must have inclined Mohammed toward the views of the Ebionites.

In a sacred work of the Ethiopic Church preserved in the Coptic language and called Discourse on Mary, Mary embodies “a mighty power in heaven called Michael” and was pregnant only for seven months. Michael was important to the Essenes and their number of perfection was seven, accounting for the short pregnancy. Yet more interesting is that the Virgin declares that she is also Mary Magdalene and also Mary Cleopas! The Coptic Church tells us that all the New Testament Marys were really the same person!

In the Passing of Mary we find an account of the death of Mary. She had made Jesus promise in life to have all the apostles gathered for her death and ascension so they were all miraculously whisked to Jerusalem when she was about to die, and Jesus and a host of angels also appear. Interestingly, in one part the Lord “delivered the soul of S Mary to Michael, who was the ruler of paradise, and the prince of the nation of the Jews” (cf Dan 10:13,21; 12:1).

Gregory of Nyssa says that “the other Mary” is really the Virgin and that she had the other sons only as stepsons of Joseph. He was a friend of Ephraem of Nisibus and might therefore have had the tradition indirectly from the Ebionites of Mesopotamia. Ephraem of Syria was born in Nisibis, then a Roman city in Mesopotamia in 306 AD. He introduced the singing of hymns into Christian worship, writing many himself. He was particularly fond of hymns devoted to the Virgin who he liked to call Christ’s bride or spouse. The chance is that he was influenced by Essenes of Mesopotamia who would have known of Essene ritual weddings and rebirths.

In the Questions of Bartholemew Mary is in the service of the temple dedicated to God when “one in the likeness of an angel” appears. Note the expression—it is not an angel! He bears with him bread and wine just as if it were for a Eucharist but, of course, this is supposedly some thirty or forty years before Jesus institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist. They eat and drink but nothing is consumed, a miracle if the nothing is literally true but really saying that the bread and wine taken were morsels and mouthfuls because the feeding was spiritual—it was indeed a Eucharistic ritual. The apparent angel, speaking as God, says Mary would bear his son in three years time to save the world. In the same work, Mary is identified with Eve and with the moon. In The Martyrdom of Bartholemew is a similar story where we find:

And as this virgin did not know man, so she, preserving her virginity, vowed a vow to the Lord God. And she said, I offer to Thee, O Lord, my virginity. And she being called for the salvation of many, observed this—that she might remain a virgin through the love of God, pure and undefiled. And suddenly, when she was shut up in her chamber, the archangel Gabriel appeared, gleaming like the sun; and when she was terrified at the sight, the angel said to her, Fear not, Mary; for thou hast found favour in the sight of the Lord, and thou shall conceive. And she cast off fear, and stood up, and said, How shall this be to me, since I know not man?

Mary’s protest:

How can this be?

when the angel told her she was pregnant in Luke, might imply that she had indeed taken a vow of chastity. She was saying—“How can I become a mother when I am vowed to virginity?” In a Coptic book Mary puts the question to Elisabeth, who recognises the symptoms of pregnancy that Mary did not understand, explains to Mary her condition and elicits the question in response. It all points to Mary being, not only vowed to virginity, but totally untutored sexually, allowing the possibility that she was indeed seduced naïvely and unwittingly made pregnant.

In Luke, the Angel’s salutation is translated as, Hail! When the Greek actually means, Rejoice. This seems an echo of the prophecies of Zephaniah 3:14-15 and Zechariah 9:9 when the Daughter of Zion or the Daughter of Jerusalem also called Israel, is commanded to rejoice because “the king ”was coming. The personification of Israel as a woman, sometimes faithless but usually a virgin as in Amos 5:2:

The virgin of Israel is fallen; she shall no more rise: she is forsaken upon her land; there is none to raise her up,

suggests that Mary was an embodiment of Israel, God’s betrothed. Mary was a perfect name for the perfectly holy men to chose—the root “mrm” at a time when writing had no vowels meant “bitter”, as in “marah” meaning “brine”, reflecting their attitude to women and much of the attitude of God to Israel. In Latin “mare” (plural “maria”) means sea, suggesting a connexion with the Hebrew root, and indeed Mary was always traditionally associated with the sea. Remember, Moses’s sister, who led the Children of Israel across the Red Sea, was called Miriam.

Gods and those akin to gods commonly have mothers called Mary or a cognate name. Adonis was born of Myrrha, Hermes of Maia, Cyrus of Mariana or Mandane, Joshua of Miriam, Buddha of Maya and Khrishna of Maritala.

Mary was a ritual bride, a ritual mother, a ritual Israel (in the raising of Jair’s daughter). Back towards the foundations of Christianity, convictions about Mary were held that had no foundation in the scriptures. Were they just made up, or did they hark back to tradition that has been lost or even suppressed by the church? The earliest traces of Mary worship came from Christians influenced by Gnosticism and indeed she seemed to be a divinity in her own right from the very start.

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