Mother and Son

Abstract

The biblical record concerning Mary, the mother of Jesus, is extremely sparse. And yet from antiquity to modern times, Mary of Nazareth has been of great significance in the Christian (and Muslim) tradition. The purpose of this presentation is to consider Mary of Nazareth through ancient Mediterranean eyes so as to account for the status and roles ascribed to her. This investigation seeks to uncover the cultural bases for the development of the vast amount of traditional discourse about Mary in face of the extreme paucity of historical information. Regardless of the extent of our ignorance of the actual figure of Mary of Nazareth, the fact that Jesus had a mother would alone have sufficed to account for the Mediterranean generated attitude toward that relative unknown personage. For it is as ideal Mediterranean maid and mother that Mary is symbolized, and it is that role that she continues to play in Mediterranean Christianity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 26 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.