Virgin: The Untouched History (22 page)

Church fathers offered various explanations to explain the unique nature of Jesus' virgin birth. Justin Martyr maintained that Mary's conception of her child differed from, say, Leda's or Semele's because Mary was neither seduced nor coerced by God but rather accepted the Word freely and without any sensual pleasure whatsoever. Origen, for his part, argued that Mary's conception had been a sort of spontaneous generation. It was not until the end of the fourth century, when the Apostles' Creed was developed, that a uniform understanding that Jesus was "conceived of the Holy Ghost through the Virgin Mary"—
conceptus est de Spirito Sancto, ex Maria Virgine
—-began to become the accepted party line. Even so, the Creed was not formally drawn up as a document within the Church for another four centuries after that, which gives some indication of just how long it could take for even such a seemingly fundamental element of Marian theology as the manner in which she conceived Jesus to become set in stone.

The long, drawn-out process of establishing stable dogma in regard to Mary's conception of Jesus is an excellent illustration of the way that the personality we think of as Mary developed over time. By the end of the fourth century, a more or less consistent, if not yet complete, image of her had coalesced. Specific events, like Pope Siricius's 390 proclamation of Mary's inviolate virginity both during pregnancy and throughout her labor
(in partu),
signaled key points in the solidification of Mary's public image.

Lurking behind the scenes of these papal bulls and council proclamations, and contributing enormously to them, were a number of now-obscure sources of information, opinion, and imagination. One of the most important of these sources is the document called the
Protoevangelion,
the "pre-Gospel," attributed to James, the "brother" of Jesus.
*
Given the date of its likely composition, which would have been approximately a hundred years after Jesus' birth, it seems rather unlikely that the author was a direct contemporary of Jesus, much less an actual brother. Nonetheless, well-read Christians of the second century knew this document and believed it to be accurate: both Origen and Clement of Alexandria cite it as proof of the virgin birth.

This enormously influential piece of writing, the earliest version of which exists in Syriac (other copies exist in Greek and Ethiopic), was not fully translated into Latin until the sixteenth century. Parts of it, however, were combined with parts of the likewise apocryphal
Gospel According to Thomas
and issued in Latin in the eighth or ninth century under the titles
The Gospel According
to the Pseudo-Matthew
and
The Story of the Birth of Mary.
This timing is probably partially responsible for the enormous increase in Marian veneration in the centuries just following, because what the
Protoevangelion
provided above all else was a fleshed-out life of Mary, including an elaborately fanciful justification of her pure, unsullied, ritually ensured virginity.

The
Protoevangelion,
according to historian of ancient literature Helen Foskett, is the only piece in the early Christian literature that goes into any detail at all regarding the ancestry and upbringing of a female protagonist. This is not because it is the only one that has a female protagonist. Rather, it seems that its author felt that Mary needed a very specific kind of background, one which could immunize her against skeptics and firmly situate her as a woman without peer.

The
Protoevangelion
begins with the story of Mary's parents, Anna and Joachim. Anna is barren, and has, like several miraculous Old Testament mothers, reached a fairly advanced age without being able to have children. Then, as happened to Sarah and Abraham (the Old Testament parallelism is detailed and clearly intentional), an angel brings word that Anna and Joachim are to have a child. Anna and Joachim embrace when they hear this happy news. This bear hug of joy, a popular subject for paintings throughout the Middle Ages, transfers the spark of life to Anna's womb. This coitus-free beginning for Mary is an obvious harbinger of things to come.

The baby is born, and her parents raise the child in a cloistered bedchamber. Anna, respecting what she somehow understands are the needs of this late-life miracle baby, does not offer the child her breast until after she has undergone the ritual purification that all Jewish mothers undergo following the several-week-long
niddah yoledet,
a period of ritual impurity caused by childbirth and postpartum bleeding. While Mary is at home as a small child, her feet are not permitted to touch the ground, so she literally never comes into contact with the earth. Her companions are "the undefiled daughters of the Hebrews." Then, at the age of three, Mary is taken to live at the temple, where the high priest greets the toddler with the phrase "the Lord has exalted your name among all generations." Little Mary is allowed to run around freely in the temple, even dancing on the steps of the altar. She is fed "from the hand of an angel." She only leaves the temple at the age of twelve, when the priests raise the issue that she is now about to become a woman (the age of legal autonomy for women under Jewish law is twelve and a half). The implication that she would present a threat of ritual defilement should she start to menstruate and thus become
niddah
while in the temple is not elaborated, but clearly the author understood the nature of the menstrual taboo. After an elaborate process in which Joseph is chosen as the best and holiest possible guardian for her, the priests entrust Mary to his care and turn her out into the world.

This is a unique upbringing, to be sure, rather holier than the way Jesus' own is described. It's also demonstrably fictional. Although it is conceivable that a baby might be coaxed to suck milk from a wet rag (an alternative to baby bottles in the days before they existed) for the minimum of fourteen days during which Anna would have been
niddah yoledet,
the refusal to breastfeed the child during this period is unprecedented, and not in any way required by Jewish law. And on the point of Jewish law, we might well wonder by what unprecedented exception Mary would have been raised in the temple, where such fostering of children was not practiced and from the inner reaches of which females were categorically prohibited. It seems impossible that such a radical departure from a centuries-old norm could have gone unnoted in the copious writings of the Rabbis.

Very probably, Anna (or whatever Mary's actual mother's name might have been) didn't really wait two weeks or more to feed her baby. We can take as writ that no little girl was ever raised in the presence of the Holy of Holies like some aberrant Jewish vestal. In all likelihood Mary wasn't raised in a sanctuary-like bedchamber with a retinue of virgins as playmates, either, except perhaps insofar as she might possibly have been raised around a lot of other little girls in a family compound of the sort that were reasonably common in the antique Mediterranean region. The
Protoevangelion
makes a fine story, but it bears only glancing resemblance to anything remotely historically likely.

Not that this mattered to those who read it. The vividly detailed life of a very special little girl growing up in unprecedented circumstances formed a compelling chunk of backstory predisposing the reader to accept the special circumstances attached to a known event: the birth of Jesus.

As the story winds closer and closer to the Nativity, this preparatory agenda becomes more and more overt. After Mary leaves the temple and goes to live under Joseph's protection, she is given the task of spinning the thread for the temple hangings, which is described as being performed only by "true virgins of the lineage of David." This again emphasizes Mary's sexual status as well as giving her an ancestry that puts her in line with Old Testament prophecy concerning the messiah, without having to supply an actual family tree.

Joseph is out of town on business when an angel comes to Mary and announces to her that she has found Divine favor and will conceive by the word of God. Mary accepts this, and wonders if this means she will give birth like other women do, or in some other manner, a question that goes unanswered. Mary then goes to visit her cousin Elizabeth (as in the canonical Gospels), who recognizes Mary's divine pregnancy. After her visit Mary returns home to Joseph, by now visibly pregnant. Joseph is furious, and presumes that the pregnancy is illegitimate, a reasonable deduction given that Mary has been away from home for a while. He gives Mary (who should know better, what with her upbringing) a thorough tongue-lashing for having done something so stupid as defiling herself by getting pregnant out of wedlock. Mary's response is bizarre. She maintains that she is still a virgin, but at the same time, she does not know how she became pregnant. One would not think that the Annunciation would be something a girl would just forget.

Joseph takes Mary to the temple to have the matter addressed legally and religiously. The high priest decrees that both of them will undergo the trial by ordeal described in Numbers 5:17—28. This is the trial of the
sotah,
the woman who is suspected of adultery by her husband, a frightful ordeal with permanent consequences. In it, the priest mixes a potion, curses it, and gives it to the woman to drink. If she is guilty, her belly bloats and sags, her genitals become grotesque, and she becomes infertile. If she is innocent, however, she is made fertile (some interpretations understand this to mean that the innocent wife will then conceive her husband's child).

The implication of the
sotah
trial applied to Mary is obvious: the rabbis of the temple believe that she may have fornicated. It is a little harder to determine why Joseph would also be made to undergo this trial, but it seems possible that the author of the
Protoevangelion
wanted to make sure to remove any suspicion from Joseph as well. Both of them are vindicated by the test, and the story proceeds, with the reader and Joseph redundantly reassured of Mary's virginity.

The next substantial episode in the
Protoevangelion
is the Nativity sequence itself. Mary and Joseph travel to Bethlehem so that Joseph and his household can be counted in the imperial census, although Joseph notes that he is somewhat confused as to how to categorize Mary as a relation for official purposes, since she is neither his wife nor his daughter. Mary begins labor en route, and Joseph leaves her in a roadside cave and rushes off in search of a Jewish midwife. He returns with a midwife just in time to witness a cloud of light hovering at the mouth of the cave, which both he and the midwife recognize as a sign of God's presence. The midwife announces that the savior of Israel has been born. As they enter the cave she announces, using the explicit word
"parthenos,"
that a baby has been born to a virgin.

Although her presence is not explained, another woman (whom some have identified as a second midwife) is also on the scene. This woman, named Salome, is no relation to the more familiar Herodian Salome who requests and receives John the Baptist's head, but she is nonetheless portrayed as being a bit on the wicked side: she is suspicious and refuses to believe the trusting midwife's claim that Mary remains a virgin. Salome begins a manual virginity test, reaching between Mary's legs as any midwife might, but on touching Mary's genitals Salome's hand is instantly burned to a withered crisp. "I am damned for not believing and for my transgression!" Salome yelps. "I put the living God on trial!" An angel (some versions claim that it is Gabriel) tells Salome to pick up the baby, and when she does, she is miraculously healed. Loud praises of the infant savior finish out the episode. A more dramatic or colorful Nativity scene is hard to imagine. Little wonder that it was a favorite subject for religious art—Salome's hand and all—for hundreds of years.

Every aspect of the
Protoevangelion
is crafted to hammer home the message that Mary was a virgin. From her sex-free conception and her strange "boy in the bubble" upbringing to her calm acceptance of the Annunciation and her apparently unattended and, we are given the impression, effortless childbirth of Jesus, Mary's life is abnormal in every particular. Even the virginity tests she is subjected to are bizarre. Astute observers have remarked that the Salome episode of the
Protoevangelion
is actually about the presence or absence of belief in Mary's virginity, and not about virginity itself. This insight applies equally well to the
Protoevangelion
as a whole. Who could come away from such a meticulously interwoven tapestry of purity, innocence, otherworldliness, submission, and virginity with anything resembling doubt?

Certainly not the medieval Christians who encountered aspects of this story beginning around the ninth century. Although it isn't really possible to pinpoint a precise date on which general interest in Mary began to increase, the emergence of the Latin versions of the
Protoevangelion
stories coincided with a sharp rise in her popularity across western Europe. The story arrived at the right time. Politically, culturally, aesthetically, and theologically, the time was ripe for the Virgin Mary to become more popular than ever before.

After Jerusalem fell to the Ottoman Empire in 638, many Christians felt that the very origins of Christendom were under siege. Because of Mary's association with Bethlehem and Jerusalem, anything that aroused interest in the Holy Land—very much including the ongoing Crusades—tended to arouse interest in Mary, and vice versa. There was a strong sense among Christians that they deserved to have a real political presence in the country that had produced the mother of the human embodiment of their God.

Culturally and aesthetically, too, the Virgin Mary was figured in ways that made her iconic to the Middle Ages. She was, for example, elevated to the rank of queen. If the world was governed by kings and queens, it only made sense that heaven should have a queen, too. Many of the greatest churches and cathedrals of Europe, like the great Notre Dame of Paris and the monumental cathedral at Chartres, both built at the height of the Middle Ages, specifically honor Mary's queenship. Within these churches and thousands of others, statues and paintings of Mary show her draped in silk, gold, and pearls, just like a well-dressed earthly queen. Of the four Marian antiphons of the Catholic liturgy, all of which date from the period between the tenth and twelfth centuries, three are dedicated to Mary in her queenly aspect, the
Regina Caeli
(Queen of Heaven),
Ave Regina
Caelorum
(Hail, Queen of the Heavens), and the
Ave Regina
(Hail, Queen). They invoke her as the lady of heaven and the queen of paradise, her royalty inseparable from the perception of her as
"0 clemens, opia, o dulcis Virgo Maria"
("o clement, o loving, o sweet Virgin Mary").