The Gospels provide very few concrete details about Mary, but historians can use archaeology and other sources to say what a typical life for a Jewish peasant girl would have been: what she ate, what she wore, where she lived, how she worked, and what marriage and childbirth might have been like for her.

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. I also referenced Reza Aslan’s book ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. There is an interesting NBC news article on tekhelet blue. The quote about Mary as the ideal woman is from Amy-Jill Levine, quoted in “The Virgin Mary” in National Geographic, Dec 2015, p. 37.

The feature image is by Jo-B from Pixabay.