The Real Mary WHY EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS
CAN EMBRACE THE MOTHER OF JESUS
BY: SCOT MCKNIGHT
1
Why a Book about the Real Mary?“Why are you—a Protestant—writing a book
about Mary?”I’ve been asked this question many times. In
fact, one person asked me the following question: “Wasn’t Mary
a Roman Catholic?” (No kidding.)
Why write a book for Protestants about Mary? Here’s why:
Becausethe story about the real Mary has never been told. The
Mary of the Bible has been hijacked by theological controversies
whereby she has become a Rorschach inkblot in which theolo-
gians find whatever they wish to find. In the midst of this
controversy, the real Mary has been left behind. It is time to let
her story be told again. Over the past ten years I have read
shelves of books and articles about Mary, and I have discovered
thatalmost no one is interested in what the real Mary was like
in her day. The Real Mary attempts to fill in that gap and
underscore the real Mary.
Why a book about Mary?
Because while Mary’s story is that of an ordinary woman, it is
also the story of a woman with an extraordinary vocation (being
mother to the Messiah) who learned to follow this Messiah
Jesus through the ordinary struggles all humans face. In this
sense, Mary represents each of us—both you and me—in our
call to follow Jesus.
Why a book about Mary?
Because for years the view of Mary in the Church has been
unreal. Mary has become for many little more than a compliant
“resting womb” for God, and she has become a stereotype of
passivity in the face of challenge, of self-sacrifice at the expense
of one’s soul care, and of quietude to the point of hiding in the
shadows of others. Nora O. Lozana-Diaz, a professor at the
Hispanic Baptist Theological College, traces the influence of
what she calls marianismoon Latin culture and claims this false
view of Mary (marianismo) oppresses women instead of challeng-
ing them to live with courage before God—as Mary herself did!
If a false view damages all of us, a more accurate view can
encourage all of us, women and men.
Why write a book about Mary?
Because she was the mother of Jesus, and being the mother of
Jesus ought to matter to each of us.
Because the Magnificat, her song in Luke’s first chapter, is the
Magna Carta of early Christian songs and a mosaic of what God
would do when Jesus, the Messiah, came: “My soul magnifies
the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has
been mindful of the humble state of his servant.” And these are
just the opening lines of her song.
Why write a book about Mary?
Because the developments about Mary in the Roman Catholic
and Eastern Orthodox traditions have generated “reaction for-
mation.” Many of us Protestants have reacted against Mary so
much we have been formed now in such a way that Mary has
been pushed entirely off the stage. Most of us know far more
about what we don’t believe about Mary—that she wasn’t
immaculately conceived, that she had other children with
Joseph and wasn’t perpetually virgin, etc.—than what we do
believe about Mary.
Why write a book about Mary?
Because a book about Mary for evangelicals that focuses on the
real Mary, so far as I know, has never been written. Other books
have engaged in polemics about the immaculate conception,
her perpetual virginity, devotion to Mary, and other so-called
Marian dogmas. But, to my knowledge, no one has written a
book about the life and character of Mary helping us develop a
positive, Protestant view of Mary. Allow me to say this more
forcibly: We are Protestants; we believe in the Bible; Mary is in
the Bible; we need to believe what the Bible says about Mary.
The Real Maryis designed to speak to our tradition.
Why write a book about Mary?
Because the Cold War between Protestants and Roman
Catholics over Mary has ended. There are many reasons for
this, some political, some social, some theological, and some
global, but evangelical Presbyterian pastor Mark Roberts of
Irvine, California, thinks at least one reason the Cold War has
ended is the song “Mary Did You Know?” Written decades ago
by Mary Lowry and now recorded by more than thirty
Christian artists, this song leads us back to the kind of Mary—
the real Mary—that Protestants can embrace.
I have one final answer to the question “Why write a book
about Mary?”
Because the real Mary always leads us to Jesus. When we discover
the real Mary, the one who lived in first-century Galilee with
Joseph, who I believe nurtured other children, and who
struggled at times herself, we also discover someone we can
embrace because Mary embraced her son as we are called to do.
When you find the real Mary of Scripture, the Mary of the first
century, you’ll discover that she’ll be talking about Jesus and
pointing us all to Jesus.
2
“May it be”
WOMAN OF FAITH
The first Christmas was full of surprises. Mary was
a young, poor, Jewish woman from an obscure Jewish village
called Nazareth when the angel Gabriel startled her. Perhaps
she was sleeping and the news came in a dream; perhaps she was
in a room praying all alone; perhaps she was meditating by a
stream of water. Somewhere, somehow, the angel appeared and
brought out from under his wings a special envelope with the
heavenly news that Mary had been chosen by God to be the
mother of a son.
Gabriel informed her that her son was not going to be just
any son, like a Jacob or a Reuben or a Benjamin. No, her son
would be the Son of the Most High, the Davidic king of Israel,
the long-awaited Messiah. And even more surprising to Mary
was that she would conceive miraculously: God’s powerful
Spirit, that Spirit who brooded over the waters on Earth’s
Opening Day, would brood over her and create a miracle in her
womb.
An angel for a visitor, news that she’d have a baby son, and
the word that her son would be the Messiah: Surely, Mary was
surprised. But the biggest surprise was that Mary consented to God’s plan.
After Gabriel read to her God’s good news, Mary consented
with the simple spoken words “may it be” (Luke 1:38).
We have two things working against us as Protestants when it
comes to understanding statements like “may it be” by Mary:
We have not only generally ignored her, but we have also
stereotyped Mary as a Christmas figure. Let’s look again at the
events that led up to that first Christmas, for in so doing not
only will we see the wonder of her statement but also we will
find standing there the real Mary.
However surprising and joyous that day must have been,
when Mary whispered “may it be” to the angel Gabriel, the
inner seams of Mary’s life were ripped apart. We need to
remember that Mary’s “may it be” to Gabriel occurred months
before her “I do” to Joseph. On that day Mary heard the strange
news from God that she would conceive out of wedlock as part
of God’s plan. For an engaged Jewish woman, the news itself
would have been a great surprise; that’s not how God or Jewish
law worked. And it’s not how society worked either.
To be a Jewish woman and pregnant before marriage meant
that many would question the integrity of her “I do” to Joseph.
Sooner or later, the wagging tongues would have been claiming
that they’d eventually find out who had been with Mary. That
was Mary’s real world.
In that same real world, Mary’s “may it be” was an act of
courageous faith. We take Mary’s act of consenting to the
angel’s words for granted. We need to consider her context—
what it would have been like for a first-century teenage Jewish
woman to trust God and what it would have been like to tell
this conception story first to her family and then to Joseph and
then to others in public. And when we consider this context, we
will come into touch with Mary’s real faith. We can romanti-
cize her faith and we can idealize her example and we can
stiffen her up by standing her up in a Christmas creche, but we
can’t get away from the stubborn reality that a young woman
pregnant before marriage would have a questionable and
spreading reputation—however false the accusations.
Mary’s faith in a Torah world
Mary knew what the facts about her life would point toward
and she knew the sort of things that would be said about her on
street corners in backwater Nazareth.
Mary was young. Most sources suggest she was about thirteen,
though some would raise her age to sixteen. Mary was also
engaged. It would be some months before she and Joseph had
their wedding ceremony. Even though only engaged, they were
legally husband and wife except for sexual relations. In Mary’s
Torah world, from the moment of betrothal and not from the
moment of the wedding ceremony (as is the case in the Western
world), Joseph and Mary were considered husband and wife.
She was young and she was engaged, but the hard fact for Mary
was that she was already pregnant.
Mary was pregnant, and because it is clear from every reading
of the Gospels that Joseph knew that he was not the father, her
status was also immediately clear: She would have been
labeled an adulteress, as she made no claim to having been
forcibly violated.
Joseph, now her husband according to the Torah, was not the
father; there must have been another man, adding up to a legal
accusation of adultery. Once again according to the Torah,
because Joseph and Mary were legally husband and wife, any
sexual behavior on Mary’s part outside that relationship would
have been considered adultery (rather than fornication—in
which case another law applied).
The Torah, which regulated Mary’s society and her own life,
stated this about adultery: death by stoning for adultery. Here are
the words from Deuteronomy 22:23–24:
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be
married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them
to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the
young woman because she was in a town and did not
scream for help, and the man because he violated another
man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
Because life is frequently complex, there were issues and
evidenceto consider for those whose task it was to adminis-
ter such laws: How do you know if the woman really is guilty
of adultery? What if she claimed she had been raped? What if
her husbandhad brought false charges against her? What if
the young woman denied any wrongdoing? In the midst of
all the village gossip, there was a practical, legal question:
How to determine if a woman was guilty of adultery in dis-
putable cases?
The law of “bitter waters” was designed for disputable cases.
According to the fifth chapter of Numbers, a suspected adulteress
(sotah) was brought before the priest, required to let her hair
hang down and under oath asked to drink the bitter waters: a
mixture of dust, holy water, and the ink of the priest’s written
curse. The oath involved these words: “may the LORDcause you
to become a curse among your people when he makes your
womb to miscarry and your abdomen swell.” If the woman was
guilty, she would become sick. If she didn’t become sick, she
was acquitted.
Whatever we might think today, this law was implemented in
the ancient world. And by the first century this legal procedure
of drinking bitter waters sometimes became a public display of
justice and other times outright family revenge. In the first
century, so far as we can tell from later rabbinic sources, the
sotah, or suspected adulteress, was brought into the court in
Jerusalem to see if a confession could be extracted. If the sotah—
suspected adulteress—maintained her innocence, which
Mary would have maintained, she would have been taken to
a conspicuous location (such as Nicanor’s Gate) for public
humiliation. She would have been required to drink the bitter
waters, her clothes would have been torn enough to expose a
breast, her hair would have been let down, and all her jewelry
would have been removed. And passersby, especially women,
would have been encouraged to stare at the publicly shamed
woman in order to make an object lesson of her.
That is the real world of a suspected adulteress. That is also
the real world of Mary.
Mary’s faith as “may it be”
What was it like for Mary to have said “may it be” in that sort
of world? Here are the sorts of things that would have torn
through Mary’s mind the minute Gabriel explained to her this
“good news.” Instantaneously—because she grew up in a Torah
world—Mary’s mind would have connected her pregnancy to
being a sotah(suspected adulteress) and to the public humiliation
of a trial, and to how Joseph, her Torah-observant husband,
would respond. We, as those who are familiar with the story,
already know that Joseph never went forward with the “bit-
ter waters” procedure, yet that is what weknow. With the scent
of the angel still in Mary’s presence, she had little idea how
Joseph might respond to her claim of a virginal conception.
What were the chances that her Torah-observant husband
would back down from insisting that legal procedures be
followed?Slim.
There’s more to what Mary instantaneously knew, and most of
these things we have learned from Jewish sources at the time of
Jesus. She knew that villagers would taunt and ostracize her son.
He’d hear the accusation that he was an illegitimate child (in
Hebrew, a mamzer) and that he would be prohibited from special
assemblies (Deut. 23:2). She knew as well that Joseph’s reputation
as an observant Jew would have been called into question. As
we noted in the law about stoning the adulteress, she knew that
he was legally required to divorce her. And one more mental con-
nection for Mary was that a divorce could leave her stranded with
the Messiah-to-be without a father. She knew that they were
poor and that any legal settlement that came to her after the
divorce would make life financially difficult. No sane, intelligent,
pious young Jewish woman—and Mary was all these things and
more—could avoid thinking these very things about herself,
about Jesus, and about Joseph.
She must have wondered if there was an easier way.
Knowing what the Torah said, knowing how that law was
interpreted, and knowing what her society would accuse her of,
we are ready to be surprised (if not amazed) that Mary consented
to Gabriel with the simple words “may it be” as recorded in
Luke’s Gospel (1:38).
Why then, we ask, did Mary consent to this plan? Because she
knew God. She knew from the pages of her people’s history
that the God of Israel was a merciful God who would look
after her. She knew the stories about other women who were
threatened in Jewish history who were protected by God—
women whose stories are found in the Bible, women like Tamar,
Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, women whom the evangelist
Matthew singles out when he writes his genealogy that leads
to Joseph, Mary, and Jesus. Because of Mary’s trust in God, and
in spite of all these threatening thoughts of accusation and
rebuke, Mary uttered those courageous words that changed
history: “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me according to
your word.”
Mary, in faith, consented to God’s plan. Mary, in faith, began
to carry a cross before Jesus was born. Mary began to suffer for
the Messiah before the Messiah suffered.
Mary would never have a normal life again. Mary’s family,
Mary’s friends, and Mary’s Nazareth would never look at her the
same again. If later evidence is any indication, very few would
believe her story. I was stunned the first time I read these words
about Mary from the great reformer Martin Luther:
How many came in contact with her, talked, and ate and
drank with her, who perhaps despised her and counted her
but a common, poor, and simple village maiden, and who,
had they known, would have fled from her in terror?
Walking around Galilee was a young and special woman who
seemed to be ready for the extraordinary vocation God had
called her to perform. But surely we will ask: How was Mary so
prepared? The answer to that question can be found by looking
at Mary’s Song, called the Magnificat, found in Luke 1:46–55.
When we listen carefully to that song of Mary’s, we’ll under-
stand both why she was ready and also why we must contend
that Mary was a woman of deep and courageous faith.
