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Often there have been only one or two books ever written about the subject of one of my episodes. Not so here. The University of Dayton’s Marian library has over 100,000 volumes on Mary (National Geographic, Dec 2015, 48). Obviously, I haven’t read them all. This story has been scrutinized for so long and by so many people that literally every word said about it is contradicted by someone else somewhere else. Also, I found on picking up a source it was hard to tell whether I was getting a history book or a devotional book.

Sometimes it was hard to tell even after I’d read it. Scholars are supposed to be unbiased, but speaking honestly: they’re not. They are people. And pretty much everyone comes to a discussion of Christianity with an opinion already in place, either for or against. Believe me, that shows in the scholarly work.

I’m sure it will show in mine as well, so in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll just say that I am fully capable of writing a devotional on Mary, and in fact, I have done so in the past, but that’s not what this is intended to be. I do not belong to any of the denominations that insist on every word of the Bible being the literal truth. In fact, we explicitly state the exact opposite: there are errors in the text. Just how many and exactly where is much more complicated, of course, but it means that I have no problem pointing out contradictions within the Bible or between the Bible and other historical sources.

Whether you are religious or not, Mary’s story is an important part of world heritage. She is obviously the great female figure throughout Christianity, but she is also highly honored in the Koran. There have been over 2000 sightings of her claimed since the year 40 BCE. Millions of people pray to her daily. Millions more read her story regularly. The modern world was shaped in part by people who believed in her whole heartedly. So many legends have grown up around her, and those legends have also shaped the world and are worth studying, but in this series I will try to focus only on what history can say about  the woman herself during her lifetime. Today I will set the scene, talking about the situation for the Jews in the early 1st century. And I’ll discuss to what extent the Bible can or cannot be treated as a historical source. Then next week I will talk about what life was like for a girl from Galilee.

How Rome Got Involved in Israel

So let’s set the scene. In the early 1st century BCE, the 100 pound gorilla in the Mediterranean was Rome. The Romans didn’t yet rule it all, but nobody could afford to ignore them.

If you listened to episode 2.2 on Cleopatra, you may remember that Julius Caesar was in a struggle for control of Rome with Pompey, the one whose head was chopped off on the orders of Cleopatra’s younger brother and delivered on a platter to Caesar.

Well, a number of years before getting his head served up on a platter, Pompey was a successful general. Among other things, his army put down the King of Pontus (in modern Turkey). And then, you know, Syria was there, so he figured he might as well take that too. And while he was in the neighborhood, he thought he might as well introduce himself to the next country over too, as you do when you move into a new neighborhood.

The next neighbor over was a small and utterly insignificant kingdom of people who called themselves Jews and were ruled by a family called the Hasmoneans. Under Queen Salome Alexandra, life was paradise, if later stories were to be believed. It was a time when “rain invariably fell for them on Wednesday eves and on Shabbat eves, until wheat grew as big as kidneys, and barley as big as olive pits, and lentils as golden dinars.” (Ta’anit 23)

The trouble was that the Queen died in 67 BCE. She had two sons. The older one was high priest. The younger one refused to accept his place in the natural pecking order and succeeded in defeating his brother. But then a governor in the south decided to help the older brother and invited a neighboring king to join in the fun, so the whole place was in a bloody mess (literally) when Pompey as the face of Rome turned his not- so-benevolent eye on the Hasmonean Kingdom.

Now if they’d had just a little more foresight, the various factions would have dropped their quarrels immediately, joined forces, and presented a unified front to the far, far greater threat now facing them. But instead they all rushed to Pompey to persuade him (by which I mean bribe him) to support their side. This worked as well as it usually does (by which I mean, not at all). Pompey did exactly what you might expect: he supported his own side and took the Hasmonean Kingdom for Rome. He did condescend to install Salome’s oldest son Hyrcanus as a vassal, but in no way shape or form was Hyrcanus pulling his own strings.

One interesting point about this campaign was how Pompey took Jerusalem. Jerusalem had 100,000 people at the time, which was so tiny as to be hardly noticeable to the Romans, but extremely important to the Jews (Aslan, 40). It’s in a good location, easily defensible. It might have held out for a long time.

But Pompey was a good general and he knew that understanding the locals is key to any military campaign. In particular, he knew about this weird Jewish religious thing called the Sabbath day. On the Sabbath they wouldn’t work. At this point in history the Jews took this very, very seriously and the definition of work was pretty broad. It wasn’t just about not showing up at the office. You weren’t allowed to carry anything. Certainly not a weapon.

It was serious business, and Pompey said that sounded just fine to him. He waited until the Sabbath. His men came up and built earthen walls for his siege engines completely unmolested because the Jews were busy keeping the Sabbath day holy. If they thought God would bless them for their obedience by way of immediate military victory, they were mistaken. When Pompey pulverized a large tower, it was a crushing blow to morale as well as the city.

Thus, the independent Jews became part of Rome. After Queen Salome, no stable Jewish ruler governed an independent Jewish state until the mid-20th century.

King Herod

Queen Salome’s son Hyrcanus was the vassal ruler, but he had a very strong prime minister named Antipater. Antipater’s family was from Idumea, an area that was annexed into the Jewish Kingdom. Forced conversion to Judaism was required. Thus, Antipater was outwardly Jewish, but not ethnically so, and also not faithfully so.

Antipater himself is not very important to our story, but he had a son who is. That son’s name was Herod. He was put in as provincial governor of the northern part of the country, which means Galilee.

Again if you remember the Cleopatra episode, you may remember that after Caesar was stabbed on the Senate floor, Roman politics split between those who had done the stabbing (notably Brutus and Cassius) and those who were either outraged or pretending to be outraged (notably Octavian and Mark Antony. Antipater and Herod supported Brutus and Cassius, which in the long run was not the right choice, but they got through it okay.

Cassius demanded cash to support the cause, and lots of it. One estimate in today’s money was 6.3 million dollars just from Palestine and no, Palestine was not rich compared with other provinces in Rome. Any governor who failed to produce the goods would be personally sold into slavery.

Herod’s province of Galilee was particularly poor, as it had essentially no assets. Just a lot of small farms. So the only way to raise the money was to raise the taxes, which was exactly what Herod did.

Naturally the local farmers were not pleased. While no one in history has ever really loved paying taxes, the Galilean farmers had more than the usual justification. Jewish farmers had always paid a Temple tithe of 10% of the harvest. That’s from the Book of Numbers. There was also a Temple tax of half a shekel annually. They had also always paid a secular tax to whoever the ruler of the day happened to be whether Queen Salome or a foreign ruler during the many times they were conquered.

Under this new situation, farmers had to pay a hefty tax to Rome as foreign ruler, and they also had to pay a hefty tax to Herod as Jewish ruler. And Herod added taxes on salt, fishing, commerce, manufacturing, etc. As much as 40% of the harvest went to taxes and tithing. While some nations in the world today have a 40% tax rate, those nations generally also have free public education, free health care, free roads, welfare when needed, etc. No one in the ancient world had any illusions about that. The government would provide nothing. In contrast, Egyptian peasants only paid 9-12% of their harvest in taxes, and I’m sure they still grumbled.

But here’s the real kicker: I’m sure I wouldn’t mind if those who can afford it pay 40% of their income to my government. The Galileean peasants couldn’t afford it. Julius Caesar gave his legionnaires about 6 acres of land when they retired from the army. Your typical Galileean peasant had only about 4 acres. Each acre produced around 1,320 pounds of grain each year (in a good year), but you had to rotate your crops, so you couldn’t keep all your acres in cultivation all the time. If you do the math (as multiple scholars have done), a Galileean farmer needed at least 5.5 acres to feed a family of four or five. And that was before taxes (Isbouts, 118). The point is that the Galileean peasants were hungry. A lot of Jesus’s parables had to do with debts and debtors. There’s a reason for that. He may have had personal experience, and if he didn’t, then many of his listeners did.

The Religious Crisis

On top of the very real financial and humanitarian crisis, there was the very real religious crisis.

In some ways Rome was quite an enlightened conqueror. Unlike many later Christian and Muslim conquerors, they really didn’t care if you kept worshipping your old gods as long as you also gave lip service to theirs. For many conquered peoples this wasn’t a big deal. If you already have a lot of gods in your pantheon, why not add a few more? If they are powerful, you might as well curry favor where you can. And if they turn out to be weak or indeed nonexistent, then no harm done.

But the Jews didn’t have a lot of gods in their pantheon. They had just one, and he was self- described as jealous (that’s Exodus 20:5). Jews had always lived surrounded by people of other faiths and other gods & worshipping those other gods had always been a temptation, particularly the ones that had decadent, erotic worship services. It never ended well. In fact if we wanted to give the Old Testament a subtitle, one possible contender would have to be: How the children of Israel messed up big time with foreign gods again and again and again.

By the 1st century, many Jews felt they had learned their lesson at last. God was not named Jupiter. The real God was not depicted in art at all, certainly not in the nude, which seemed to be Jupiter’s favorite fashion statement. The Roman pantheon, not to mention the Roman decadence, was just the latest attempt to subvert Jewish faith and they were determined not to be subverted this time.

The Jews tried various forms of rebellion, and Herod (Jewish in name only) made a name for himself putting them down. One of the more successful rebel leaders was Hezekiah, who called himself the Messiah, a religiously loaded term. But eventually Herod hunted him down. Meanwhile, the remaining members of the Hasmonean family reached out to Parthia for help. They managed to claim Jerusalem, until 37 BCE when Herod retook it for Rome. Rome rewarded him with the title king of the Jews (Aslan, 50), which didn’t mean independence or anything ridiculous like that, but was certainly a cheaper reward than any other reward they could have come up with. Meaningless titles are great that way. And later “King of the Jews” would become a religiously loaded term as well.

As king, Herod knew perfectly well that he was utterly despised by his subjects. He made a half-hearted attempt to repair relations by rebuilding the Jewish temple, which was the center of religious life. But then he ruined the gesture by putting a big Roman eagle on it, reserving the right to choose the high priest himself, keeping the high priest’s sacred garments himself and handing it out only when he wanted to, and insisting on sacrifices being made to Caesar Augustus, all of which were desecration as far as the Jews were concerned (Alsan, 43 and 53). It is no wonder that they idolized the good old days when they were ruled by the own properly Jewish Queen Salome, when men were men, women were women, and the wheat grew as big as kidneys and all that.

To some extent, the negative feelings came from the Roman side too. Cicero called Jerusalem a “hole in the corner” (Aslan, 40). Caesar Augustus watched Herod’s behavior to his own family and said, “I would rather be Herod’s pig than his son” (Aslan, 51).

The Historical Evidence for Mary (or Lack Thereof)

So it was into this world, where the Jews had good reason to despise Rome in general and Herod in particular, that a girl named Mary enters the story.

Now wait, you may be saying to yourself, was Mary even a real person? Jesus is mentioned by ancient writers outside the Bible, such as Josephus, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger (Aslan, 19). Virtually all scholars (whether religious or not) agree there really was a man named Jesus who founded a movement that became popular and then was crucified by the Romans. That’s pretty much all they agree on, but it’s something.

Mary is not mentioned in any historical source outside of the Bible. That’s hardly surprising. Poor peasant girls rarely get a mention. But it does mean that for historians who are not also believers, Mary’s very existence hinges on whether the Bible counts as a historical source.

The gold standard for historical sources is to get multiple eyewitness accounts, written very soon after the events they describe, by authors without an overt motive to lie. We get that gold standard for some big and fairly recent events in history, such as the Holocaust, which makes it all the more ironic that there are still some who try to deny it. But as we go back in time, we hardly ever get that gold standard in sources. The ideal sources often—I would even say usually—just don’t exist. A great deal of the craft of a historian is to assess just how far a less-than-ideal source can be trusted.

The Bible cannot be assessed as a whole because it’s a compilation of sources that have very little in common with each other. The Book of Genesis does not pass muster as a historical document because it’s only one account, written hundreds or even thousands of years after the events, and with the very clear motive of explaining to the Israelites why God chose them to be more special than everybody else. I will hasten to add that this does not mean that you cannot accept it as true. Just that your acceptance is based on faith, not historical evidence.

The New Testament is something else entirely. The four gospels are four accounts telling roughly the same story. So far so good. Traditionally, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were thought to be written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Matthew and John were apostles of Jesus and therefore eyewitnesses. Mark and Luke never met Jesus, but they were disciples after his death, working closely with people who did know Jesus. So their accounts are second hand, which is unfortunate, but still fairly good in the realm of less-than-ideal documentation.

Unfortunately, nobody wrote this stuff down during Jesus’s lifetime. All four gospels were written in the late 1^st century to early 2^nd century (estimates vary), so decades after Jesus’s death, which is not as good as we’d like, but still much better than it could have been.

A larger problem for the Gospels as history is that many (maybe most) scholars now think they were originally anonymous and later attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John to boost their appeal. Therefore, not eyewitnesses. This is so well accepted that some of the sources I looked at stated it as fact without bothering to include the rationale for it. Which is a shame because the counter arguments were not hard to find. My original draft of this episode included some of the debate back and forth. But ultimately I cut it all, partly because it’s a hole so deep I might never get out, but mostly because I realized it was irrelevant to my purposes. Even if the book of Matthew was written by Matthew, it is highly unlikely that he would have witnessed Mary’s big scene right at the beginning of the story. He probably wasn’t born yet. And John doesn’t even include the birth of Jesus in his version.

So as far as Mary is concerned, the gospels are at least second hand. Possibly quite a bit more than just second hand. Again, not ideal as a historical source.

Some of the commentators take all this as a “Gotcha” moment. See, the authors weren’t eyewitnesses, therefore, they didn’t know what they were talking about, therefore we can ignore everything they say.

What they usually fail to mention is that while all this certainly weakens the gospels as a historical source, it does not eliminate them as a historical source. I guarantee you were taught things in other areas of history that were based on similarly flimsy evidence. One example: I was taught that after the Roman legions left Britain, it was invaded by the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes, who dominated the Romano Celtic people there, with the Angles even donating their name to become England. It was quite a long time before anyone mentioned that that whole scenario is based on one sentence in one chronicle written several hundred years later. Definitely not eyewitness testimony. It was accepted as true because it sounds reasonable, and we haven’t got any better sources. We wish we did, but we don’t.

The larger problem with the gospels as a historical account is not their authorship or their date, but their bias. These writers have a very clear motive and that is to convert the unbelievers and strengthen the faithful. But again, if we tossed out every source that where the writer had a motive, we’d be tossing out practically all of history. A very high percentage of all writers were working under the principle of make-the-currently-powerful-people look-good and make-their-enemies-look-bad. Just reread the American Declaration of Independence to see what I mean. That does not mean the events described are complete fabrications. Just that we ought to remain aware that there is another side to the story. George III would have written it differently. And in the same way, we must stay aware that miracles can generally be explained as God’s hand at work or as naturally occurring events based on scientific principles or as con tricks, depending on your personal preferences.

The bottom line is that the Gospels are not great as historical sources, but they are not worthless either. If we all agree that Jesus existed, then it seems reasonable to me to assume that he had a mother. And if Mary was not her name, then it is at least a very good guess, since Mary or Miriam was an extremely common name at the time. The gospels, even if you accept them, say very little about her, so much of what we can say is not specifically about events in her life, but about what life was like for ordinary Jewish girls at the time. This is as close as we can get to telling their story too, and in my view, that’s a story worth telling, regardless of which details the gospel writers got right, and which they got wrong. I hope you’ll come back next week to hear that story.

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Selected Sources

In the Footsteps of Jesus by Jean-Pierre Isbouts is a beautiful book with background, social details, and many gorgeous photographs about the time and place of Jesus. It does focus on Jesus, so a great deal of it was not about Mary, but it was a major source for this episode (and next week’s as well).

As I referenced in the episode, there are many conflicting views on the authenticity of the Gospels. Bart D. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar who wrote How Jesus Became God : the Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee among many other bestselling books. He is a leading proponent of the prevailing idea that the Gospels were originally anonymous and therefore not eyewitness or even reliable second hand testimony. Reza Aslan’s book ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth accepts that position and takes a positive, but secular, view of Jesus as a teacher and humanist. The other side of the argument can be found in The Case for Jesus: The Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ by Brant Pitre. He argues for earlier authorship of the gospels, by the authors as traditionally claimed.

This reading list is not even remotely complete. The University of Dayton’s Marian library has over 100,000 volumes on Mary. Obviously, I haven’t read them all, and even the most cursory search of the Internet will bring up a wealth of other information. Much of it is extremely dubious, so a better way to get more information would be to take a look at the bibliographies of the books listed above.

Mary was a poor, peasant girl, so it is unsurprising that there are no images of her from her lifetime. What probably would have been a surprise to her is that since her death right up to the present day, she has been such a popular subject for art that images of her crop up all over the world in every medium, giving her a wide variety of features, ethnicities, clothing, setting, etc. Historical accuracy varies greatly, but often historical accuracy was not really the point of the image. The feature image for this post is by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay.