Chris Maunder - Mary, Founder of Christianity

Mary the mother of Jesus of Nazareth is as important in the world today as she has ever been. Christianity continues to grow as a global religion. Among Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox communities, and others which are associated with them, Mary continues to be revered and venerated. It would be true to say that, while Jesus Christ as God Incarnate is at the centre of the Christian faith, Mary is indispensable to an understanding of Jesus in the many branches of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. Belief in the Incarnation means that the context in which Jesus lived is important, as a Jew growing up in Galilee in the Roman Empire under Augustus and Tiberius, and as the son of Mary. Protestants also understand that Mary plays an important part in the Christian story as proclaimed in the New Testament, even if, generally, they do not share the devotion that she inspires in other denominations.

This book sets out to ask the question who was Mary? based on an investigation of the New Testament texts, just as many others have done but in a new and radical way, taking into account modern trends in biblical studies. Major theological, political, and social developments have changed the way in which we approach the Bible. There are many interesting questions that can be asked about the virgin conception of Jesus and Marys contribution to Jesus ministry. There is also an interesting and long-standing mystery concerning Marys involvement in the events of the crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. The answers suggested in this book will cast a new light on Marys role in the story of Christian salvation.

In world religions and philosophies, we are used to the idea of a founder. Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Gautama Buddha stand at the origin of great world religions. Abraham is the forefather of the Jewish tradition, and Moses the one who received and established the Torah . Confucius could be said to have founded a philosophy rather than a religion; perhaps that is true of Buddha too. Zoroaster was the founder of a smaller but still influential religion named after him. Western philosophy looks back to Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who created the baseline for everything that came after them. More recent philosophers have also created traditions that acknowledge them as founders: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Marx, for example. Eastern philosophers as founders of systems of thought include Sankara and Ramanuja.

When you ask people to name a woman who founded a religion, they struggle to answer. You can suggest Ann Lee, who brought the Shakers into being, the Fox sisters, unwitting originators of Spiritualism, Madame Blavatsky for Theosophy, and Mary Baker Eddy for Christian Science. These are new names to many. Even to those who have heard of them, how much more marginal these movements appear beside global religions and philosophies! This, of course, reflects our patriarchal world in which initiatives in society, politics, and religion have been thought to reside within the province of males.

This book argues that the global religion with the most adherents, Christianity, has its origins in the mission and vocation of its most famous female, Mary the mother of Jesus, along with other women who accompanied her, including Mary Magdalene. Despite the often-held assumption that the Bible says little about Mary, there are plentiful signs in the New Testament that she preceded and inspired her son in the emergence of a new faith, planted in Jewish soil but eventually extending to all regions and peoples of the globe after its adoption by the Roman Empire.

It is easy, in a patriarchal religion focused upon a male saviour, to fall back on a general principle that behind every great man you find a good woman, or some such words. This presupposes that the male is primary in the events, and that the contribution of the female must therefore be subordinate or secondary. This is the assumption of the social world into which Jesus and Mary and their associates were born, and it has survived almost to our own times. In this thinking, Mary was the stereotypical good mother in a male-dominated world: loving and well-meaning, not always understanding what men must be about, prioritizing the safety of the family over urgent social and political projects, and therefore subject to the heartbreak of having her concerns and fears dismissed and then realized. This, of course, was always a stereotype, even in the first century. However, it does intrude into the New Testament and the way in which it has been interpreted in Christian tradition. But there is much more to it. Recent important changes in the way that we conceive of the relationship between the genders (changes which are still slowly coming to pass across the world with much resistance) mean that we can consider afresh the role of females in the formation of the Christian faith, and the pleasant surprise is that the gospels themselves contain clear indications that will help us do this.