Mary mother of Jesus

“Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”

— Luke 1:38

Mary was a young Jewish woman of Nazareth, betrothed to Joseph, whom the angel Gabriel told she would conceive a son by the power of the Holy Spirit while still a virgin (Luke 1:26-38). That son was Jesus, and the church has confessed from its earliest centuries that in bearing him, Mary bore God incarnate.¹

Life and Ministry

Gabriel greeted Mary as “highly favored” and announced that she would conceive “the Son of the Highest,” whose kingdom “will have no end” (Luke 1:28-33). Mary, “engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David” (Luke 1:27), asked how this could be “since I do not know a man,” and was told the Holy Spirit would come upon her and “overshadow” her, so that “the Holy One who is to be born will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:34-35). She answered, “Behold, the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). When Joseph learned of the pregnancy, he resolved to divorce her quietly rather than expose her to public disgrace, until an angel told him in a dream that “what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:18-20).

Mary traveled to visit her relative Elizabeth, who was then pregnant with John the Baptist; at Mary’s greeting, Elizabeth’s child “leaped in her womb,” and Elizabeth pronounced Mary “blessed… among women” (Luke 1:39-45). Mary answered with the song known as the Magnificat, praising God because “he who is mighty has done great things for me” and “has regarded the low estate of his servant” (Luke 1:46-49).

Mary gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, “because there was no room for them in the inn,” and laid him in a manger (Luke 2:1-7). Shepherds who had been told of his birth by angels came and found the child, and Mary “kept all these things and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:16-19). When the family presented Jesus at the temple, the aged Simeon blessed them and told Mary specifically, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also” (Luke 2:34-35). Warned in a dream that Herod intended to kill the child, Joseph took Mary and Jesus to Egypt until Herod’s death (Matt. 2:13-15). When Jesus was twelve, Mary and Joseph found him in the temple after searching for him three days; Mary asked, “why have you treated us so?” and Jesus answered that he “must be in my Father’s house,” a reply Luke says his parents did not understand at the time (Luke 2:41-51).

Mary was present at a wedding in Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, his first public sign, at her prompting (John 2:1-11). At one point during Jesus’s ministry, his mother and brothers came to see him and were unable to reach him for the crowd; Jesus, told they were outside, responded that “my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it” (Luke 8:19-21). Mary stood near the cross at Jesus’s crucifixion, where he entrusted her care to “the disciple whom he loved,” saying to her, “woman, behold your son,” and to the disciple, “behold your mother” (John 19:25-27). After the ascension, Mary is named among those who “with one accord devoted themselves to prayer” together with the apostles in Jerusalem (Acts 1:14). Scripture does not record her later life or death.

Theological Significance

The virgin birth

Mary’s conception of Jesus “of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:18, 20) bears directly on the person of Christ: it accounts for how the eternal Son of God could also be truly human, descended from David, without ceasing to be sinless. Herman Bavinck writes that the incarnation “takes place through a virgin birth,” a doctrine attested consistently by Matthew and Luke and “part of Christian confession from the time of the earliest symbols of the faith.”¹ Because a man played no part in Jesus’s conception, he was not implicated in Adam’s guilt and “remained exempt from human sin”; the Spirit’s activity in Mary’s womb was “a demonstration of power,” not the infusion of any divine substance into her.¹

Theotokos and the dispute over Mary’s title

The church’s confession of Mary rests entirely on what it says about her son. In the fifth century, a dispute broke out over whether Mary should be called Theotokos (“God-bearer” or “Mother of God”), a title already common in the church, or Christotokos (“Christ-bearer”), the term Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, preferred.² Nestorius reasoned that “the eternal God, who is without beginning and without end, could not have spent nine months in a woman’s womb and been born,” and objected in a sermon, “Does God have a mother? Then the heathen may be excused when they introduce mothers for their gods…. The creature did not give birth to the creator; she gave birth to a man, the instrument of deity.”³

Cyril of Alexandria answered that denying Mary the title Theotokos divided Christ into two: “I am amazed that there are some who are extremely doubtful whether the holy Virgin should be called Mother of God or not. For if our Lord Jesus Christ is God, then surely the holy Virgin who gave him birth must be God’s mother.”⁴ An ordinary mother, Cyril argued, is not said to have given birth merely to a body while some other agent supplied the soul; she gave birth to the whole person. In the same way, whatever Mary bore, she bore the whole person of the incarnate Son, divine and human together.⁴ The Council of Ephesus (431) sided with Cyril, and the Council of Chalcedon (451) confessed Christ as “born from the Virgin Mary, the Theotokos, as touching the manhood.”² Bavinck affirms the same conclusion from the Reformed side: “Mary is thus properly called ‘mother of God’ (theotokos).”¹ The title vindicates the deity of Christ; it was never, in the councils’ own use of it, meant to honor Mary above what an ordinary mother is owed.

Perpetual virginity

Some traditions, both Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox, hold that Mary remained a virgin throughout her life, appealing partly to the Gospels’ references to Jesus’s “brothers” and “sisters” (Matt. 12:46-47; 13:55; Mark 6:3; John 2:12; 7:3, 5; Gal. 1:19) as cousins or as Joseph’s children by an earlier marriage rather than Mary’s own other children. Bavinck treats the question as dogmatically secondary: “The perpetual virginity of Mary is a later notion, and debates about whether Mary had more children, though interesting and contentious, are dogmatically of secondary importance.”¹ What Scripture requires is Jesus’s supernatural conception, not a further claim about Mary’s condition after his birth.¹

Historical Significance

Protestant and Roman Catholic Christianity differ over how Mary should be regarded beyond the New Testament’s own account of her. Bavinck states plainly that “all Protestants who confess the incarnation of the Word hold Mary in high esteem as the favored one among women, chosen and prepared by God to be the mother of his Son.”¹ But he distinguishes that esteem from the veneration Roman Catholicism pays her: “the veneration paid to her by Rome, including the doctrines of her immaculate conception, sinlessness, and assumption into heaven are excessive and unscriptural, tied more to tradition and the Roman hierarchical system. In Rome, Mariolatry increasingly crowds out the true Christian worship of God. It is against this idolization of the human that the Reformation rose up in protest.”¹

Related Doctrines

References

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 14, “The Only Begotten Son of the Father”: “The history of revelation as preparation for the incarnation is concentrated and comes to completion in the election and favoring of Mary the mother of Jesus, the blessed one among women.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸
Ronald E. Heine, Classical Christian Doctrine: Introducing the Essentials of the Ancient Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), chap. 8, “Truly God and Truly Man,” 78-89. ↩ ↩²
Nestorius, Sermon 1, quoted in Cyril of Alexandria, Five Tomes against Nestorius (Oxford: James Parker & Co., 1881), li-lii, quoted in Heine, 82. ↩
Cyril of Alexandria, Letter 1 to the Monks of Egypt, in The Later Christian Fathers, ed. and trans. H. Bettenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 252, quoted in Heine, 81. ↩ ↩²