Revealing the Life of Mary of Nazareth

Revealing the Life of Mary of Nazareth: History and Archaeology

They can be obtained at various moments and in different situations of the life of Mary of Nazareth. We begin with the Marian vow of virginity, presupposed not only by Luke, but also by the Protoevangelium of James, which tells us explicitly that there existed a college of girls consecrated to God in the Temple, called the “Weaving Virgins,” which Mary entered. The information about the existence of the college of the Weaving Virgins can also be deduced from other ancient sources, such as the Apocalypse of Baruch, a first-century A.D. baraita of R. Simeon b. Según, and the Pesiqta Rabbati, Piska. The Judeo-Christian Church zealously preserved this information, also because the College wove the Veil of the Temple, which in turn covered the Holy of Holies, considered as a human body, and which one day would clothe the Angel Ruah, guardian of that sacred place and identified with the Messiah, Son of God. All this, as can be seen, provides a new key of interpretation not only for the account that all the Synoptics give of the tearing of the Veil of the Temple at the death of Jesus, identifying the former with the body of the latter and therefore destroying them concomitantly, but also for the account of the Finding of Jesus in the Temple by His parents and His astonishing answer.

One must not overlook the fact that Mary certainly wove the first garments of her Son, if not even His famous seamless tunic, and that such a gesture must have had for her a greater meaning than a simple domestic task. Connected to this context is the putative marriage, or hieròs gámos. Down to the second and third centuries, the rabbis permitted the marriage both of prepubescent virgins and of aged virgins or widows, in order to protect their virtue and for symbolic reasons. The custom was taken up by the Christians who, as Tertullian attests, married the prophets to the virgins called unripe, in the likeness of the marriage between Christ and the Church. These marriages were, both in Judaism and in Christianity, prepared by a vow of continence on the part of the women, and frequently had as partners elderly men, incapable of any sexual relation.

This, however, did not always happen, and it was not the case with Mary, since Joseph’s work and the numerous journeys with the family, attested in the Gospels, do not allow us to imagine him as elderly. In fact, just as for the women, there existed a consecrated male College in the Temple, of which Joseph, according to an ancient tradition, was a member. Among consecrated persons, virginal marriages were therefore obvious and advisable. Particularly esteemed among the Ebionites, these marriages, within the sphere of the Weaving Virgins, were accompanied by the conviction that God or one of His Angels could spiritually make fruitful a consecrated princess who would beget a divine King. This gives a particular significance to the fact that Mary, probably a relative of the house of David, was virginally married to Joseph, who was a representative of that family.

Three theological concepts must be developed in order to understand how Mary was prepared to adhere to the preaching of her Son, concepts that she herself probably transmitted to Him. The first is that the Messiah is an Angel, but that the Angel is, consistently with the most ancient Old Testament tradition, a hypostasis of the Lord Himself, and that, all the more, He must be so in the case of the Messiah. The second is that this Angel is a divine Spirit, a Ruah, which, being messianic, becomes the Ruah par excellence, the One Conceived of Ruah, that is, of Spirit. The third is that, by virtue of these two concepts, the Messiah is the Son of God, because begotten by Him.

In the milieu of the Weavers, this concept must not have had the importance it had for the Christians, but certainly its articulation through these three steps constituted the prehistory of its formation in Mary’s mind, as an existential possibility, and the context in which there developed and flourished, at the family level, the maturation of Jesus’ thought and preaching about Himself and about the mystery of His birth, as well as about its acceptance by Joseph. Still on the subject of messianism, it should be noted that Mary’s Levitical birth was probably one of the causes of the conversions of priests to Christianity attested in Acts 6:7. Among the clergy and laity close to the Qumran groups, in which Joachim and his relatives evidently also took part, many awaited the Messiah of Aaron and of Israel, of Levi and of Judah, the first as priest, master and interpreter of the Law, the second as Davidic prince. Only in that milieu could the idea of the single Messiah, at once King and Priest, take shape, an idea that Mary obviously had to accept.

We pass now to the famous first census made when Quirinius was governor of Syria. This reference, clear to Luke, is not so clear for posterity. In fact, we know of a census of Publius Sulpicius Quirinius (45 B.C., A.D. 21) in the provinces of Syria and Judea, but it dates from A.D. 6, when the tetrarchy of Archelaus was annexed to Rome and constituted an equestrian province under the procurator Coponius, while Quirinius himself was legate in Syria, thus occupying a higher rank in the administrative hierarchy. The legate saw to it, by order of Augustus, that a census be taken of Judea in order to evaluate its worth and possibly to sell the property of Archelaus. This census marked the direct subjection of Judea to Rome, and the Zealots reacted with the second revolt of Judas the Galilean, an aspiring political messiah, later erased from the face of history despite his more certain chronological placement in relation to the birth of Christ. It is not clear whether in this census the inhabitants were obliged to register in their city of origin, nor whether it continued through the following year. But obviously this is not the census during which Jesus was born, since by that time He was already an adolescent.

Luke, in fact, speaks of a first census of Quirinius, over all the earth, that is, throughout the Empire, presumably by the will of Caesar Augustus. This allowed Joseph to go up to Bethlehem, his native city, so that Jesus would be born there. It follows that there were two censuses, of which the second is known to us and the first is not. The one to which Luke refers is probably the second Augustan universal census, that of 8 B.C., which may have taken place in 7, the year of the astral conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces, that is, of the phenomenon of the Star recalled by Matthew and observed by the Magi, and which counted among individuals those who were Roman citizens, in order to assess the possible manpower of the army. The Emperor had carried out a first one in 28 B.C. and would decree a third in A.D. 14. It is true that such a universal census did not directly concern the population of client kingdoms such as that of Herod, much less their inhabitants, but the firmness of Luke’s statement, which has all the earth enrolled, permits both the identification of the registration of 8 B.C. with the one he narrates, and the hypothesis that, concurrently with it, one or more provincial censuses, and censuses of the vassal states themselves, were carried out, in accordance with the Augustan practice attested by Tacitus.

A reason for taking a census of Palestine may have been an episode of 8 B.C., in which Herod had undertaken a military campaign against the neighboring Nabateans, also clients of Rome. Augustus was indignant and perhaps imposed the census on Herod as a sign of submission to Rome. The custom of registering in one’s own city of origin and not in that of residence, as Lk 2:3-4 suggests with great force (all went to be registered, each to his own city), and which certainly could not have been invented in a book circulating so widely in the Empire, was not common, but neither was it impossible. For example, it is attested in A.D. 104 in Egypt by Papyrus London 904. Moreover, the Jewish people were deeply attached to their history, and the Roman administration, careful to adapt itself to local customs, must have taken this into account.

In the case of Joseph and of all those who claimed Davidic descent, the move to Bethlehem represented a source of social prestige, as Luke moreover suggests, underlining both the lineage of the Patriarch (Joseph also, who was of the house and family of David) and the importance of Bethlehem in dynastic history (from the city of Nazareth and Galilee he went up to Judea, to the city of David called Bethlehem, together with Mary, his wife), while it accords perfectly with the rigid dynastic, familial, and tribal legitimism of the inhabitants of Nazareth. The matter then becomes even more credible if we consider the hypothesis of a Joseph who returns to Bethlehem in order to remain there and who therefore wishes to be enrolled where he intends to live.

The greatest difficulty for this reconstruction lies in the fact that, as we have said, Quirinius became legate of Syria in A.D. 6. An earlier term of office for Quirinius in Syria has therefore been hypothesized, at the end of the reign of Herod the Great, for which, however, we have no direct proof. An indirect one would come from the Tivoli Inscription, found in 1764, which reports a second mandate from Augustus for a governor of Syria, without, however, its being possible to read the name, since the stone is mutilated. It is also possible that Quirinius went to Syria not as governor, but as superintendent of the census. The Greek title is hēmētés, in Latin censitor, recurring in countless inscriptions and textual sources of the period. Luke does not use the proper term because of the extreme fluidity that characterized the various Roman administrative titles, especially in Greek and in the Semitic languages. This mandate may be related to the Tivoli Inscription and not to a governorship, and so there is no need to disturb the known list of the Roman governors of Syria. The census assignment also implied military power, given the continual possibility of public disturbances.

Proof of this is the testimony of Tertullian, who states that Jesus was born in Judea during a census ordered by Augustus and carried out by Sentius Saturninus (9-6 B.C.), probably concurrently with the universal census of 8 B.C., and evidently executed in practice by Quirinius, who would then have carried out a second census in A.D. 6-7, as imperial legate. The name of Quirinius is, in fact, the key element in the Lucan dating, together with the numeral adjective referring to his census.

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To deepen the historical reflection on Mary of Nazareth, consult the Encyclical Redemptoris Mater of Pope John Paul II.