Who was Mary, the mother of Jesus?

Nazareth was a small settlement in Galilee. It does not appear in the Old Testament and it is not among the towns the Jewish sources of the period tend to list. The measure of the place is recorded inside the New Testament itself: when Philip tells Nathanael he has found someone from Nazareth, Nathanael’s first response is to ask whether anything good can come from there.

Luke introduces Mary by a legal situation rather than by a quality. She is betrothed to a man of the house of David. Jewish betrothal in that period was not an informal understanding: it was a binding tie entered into before the two lived together, and undoing it required a formal act. That is exactly the situation the first chapter of Matthew describes from Joseph’s side.

The text does not give her age, does not name her parents and does not describe her. It gives three things: a settlement, a betrothal and a name. Everything usually added to that comes from somewhere else, and is set out further down.

What unsettles Mary in Luke’s account is not the announcement: it is the greeting. The text records that she was disturbed by the angel’s words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be — that is, the disquiet comes before she knows what any of it is about. Only afterwards does the angel tell her not to be afraid.

The greeting itself deserves a note, because English readers meet it in more than one form. The Catholic Public Domain Version, the primary edition published here, was made from the Latin Vulgate and renders it as being full of grace, and it carries the blessing among women in that same verse. The King James Version, the second English translation published on this site, renders the first phrase as being highly favoured and places the blessing there as well. Elizabeth then repeats the blessing fourteen verses later. Both renderings are defensible readings of a Greek participle, and the two together explain why the same verse sounds so different depending on the Bible in a reader’s hands.

Then she asks how it will happen. The question is worth attention, because the same chapter already contains another one: a few verses earlier the priest Zechariah asks the same angel how he may know this, and is left unable to speak until the day his son is named. Mary asks, and receives an explanation. The text does not treat the two questions alike, and it does not say why.

Her consent comes after the explanation, not before it. She calls herself a handmaid and asks that what has been said be done in her. The angel then departs, and the account says nothing about what she did that day or whom she told.

Mary leaves Nazareth and travels quickly into the hill country of Judea, to the house of Zechariah and Elizabeth. She stays about three months. About the journey itself, which was not short, the text says nothing at all.

The meeting is built on recognition: Elizabeth hears the greeting, the child moves within her, and the blessing she pronounces is addressed to Mary and to the child Mary is carrying. Her last word of praise is not for motherhood but for faith: she calls blessed the one who believed.

Mary’s answer is the canticle known as the Magnificat, and it tends to surprise anyone arriving expecting sweetness. It says little about her and much about reversal: the powerful deposed from their seats, the humble exalted, the hungry filled, the rich sent away empty. The vocabulary is that of the prophets of Israel, and much of the imagery comes from the Old Testament.

The most productive comparison here is with the canticle of Hannah, in the second chapter of 1 Samuel: the same structure of reversal, the same move from a personal case to the fate of the powerful, and the same decision to begin in joy and end in a rearrangement of the world. Reading the two in sequence is one of the most useful side-by-side readings in the Bible.

The birth arrives in Luke inside an administrative matter: a census sends everyone to his own city, and Joseph goes up from Nazareth to Bethlehem because he is of the house of David. Mary goes with him, expecting. The birth happens during the stay, the child is wrapped and laid in a manger, and the narrator explains the manger by the lack of lodging. There is no midwife, no named animals and no date.

A few verses later Luke does something he almost never does for anyone: he reports what was going on inside her. He records that she held on to those words and turned them over. The observation returns at the end of the same chapter, after the episode in Jerusalem, and the two occurrences are practically everything the Gospels offer of her inner life.

The next scene is in the Temple. The family fulfils what the Law prescribed after a birth and presents an offering of two birds — which Leviticus provides for precisely when a lamb is beyond a family’s means. It is an economic detail given in passing, and it tells you what social condition is being described.

There Simeon blesses them and then turns to Mary with a warning addressed to her personally, in the image of a sword that would pass through her. The text does not explain the image, does not say when it would be fulfilled and offers no consolation afterwards. It leaves the sentence standing and moves on.

Between the birth and the years in Nazareth, Matthew narrates a departure into Egypt and a return. Joseph is warned in sleep, leaves by night, remains in Egypt until the death of Herod and, on returning, changes his destination because of who had come to reign in Judea. It is a flight, and Matthew tells the whole of it from Joseph’s side: he is the one warned, the one who decides and the one who leads.

In that part of the account, Mary is designated by a formula that recurs four times: the boy and his mother. Matthew does not name her there, and does not call her Joseph’s wife. The choice is consistent enough not to look accidental — the household is described outward from the child, and not from the couple.

Then comes the only episode from the childhood of Jesus that the Gospels narrate. At twelve, he stays behind in Jerusalem without his parents realising it, and they turn back to look for him. When they find him, it is Mary who speaks. She speaks for both of them, calls Joseph the boy’s father, and describes what the search had been like.

The answer she receives is a question, and Luke adds immediately that they did not understand what was said to them. The narrator records the parents’ incomprehension without softening it — and closes the scene by noting, once again, that she kept these things in her heart. After that the Gospels fall almost entirely silent about Mary for some eighteen years.

Between the episode in Jerusalem and the beginning of the preaching there is nothing about her. When Mary reappears, the scenes are not comfortable — and the Gospels kept them anyway, which is itself a fact about the kind of text they are.

Mark reports that, as the crowd gathered, those close to him went out to restrain him, convinced that he had gone out of his mind. It pays to be exact here: the text uses an expression covering household and kin, and it names no one. Ten verses later his mother and his brothers arrive and stand outside, sending in for him. Whether the two notices describe the same movement, the Gospel does not say.

The answer that comes out of that second scene is among the hardest in the Gospels and among the most quoted: he looks at those sitting around him and redefines mother, brother and sister in terms of doing the will of God. The text records no reaction from her, then or later.

In Luke, a woman in the crowd pronounces a blessing on the womb that bore him. The answer moves the blessing onto those who hear and keep the word of God — and in the edition published here that answer opens by agreeing and then adding, rather than by correcting. Readers of other English Bibles will find a stronger contrast in the same verse, which is why this passage is discussed as much as it is.

And there is Mark 6:3, the verse that any conversation about Mary eventually reaches. The neighbours in Nazareth call Jesus the carpenter and the son of Mary — not the son of Joseph, which in that culture is an unusual way to identify a grown man. They then name four brothers and mention sisters. It is over the reach of that word that the traditions diverge, and it is that verse the note at the foot of this page is given to.

At Cana, at a wedding, she is the one who notices that the wine has run out and the one who says so. The answer she receives carries a reservation about his hour. She then turns to the servants and tells them to do whatever he says. Those are the last words of Mary recorded anywhere in the New Testament, and they point at him rather than at her.

Worth noticing how he addresses her in that scene: as woman, not as mother. It is the same form of address that appears in the only other scene where the two speak, beside the cross. The repetition belongs to the text, and commentators in both traditions remark on it.

About the cross, this page does what the site does everywhere: it mentions and does not describe. All four Gospels record that there were women there, and John places her beside the cross, next to her sister, Mary of Cleophas and Mary Magdalene. What the account keeps of her place there is a gesture: he entrusts his mother to a disciple and the disciple to his mother, and the text notes that from that hour the disciple took her as his own.

The last time Mary is named in the Bible is in the first chapter of Acts. She is in the group persevering in prayer before Pentecost — inside the first Christian community, not at its edge. The same verse mentions the brothers of Jesus present there. After that the New Testament goes quiet about her: Paul, writing earlier than the Gospels, refers to her once and does not give her name.