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Was Mary the Name of Jesus' Mother?

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Was Mary the Name of Jesus' Mother? Was Mary the Name of Jesus’ Mother? A Source-Critical Perspective By Gary Greenberg Blogging at biblemythhistory.com (This essay was originally published on the Bible and Interpretation site in September 2020. There may be some slight formatting differences between this version and the published version.) If we had no reliable written sources mentioning the name of Jesus’ mother, a good guess would be Mary. Statistically, it was one of the most popular, if not the most popular, name for Jewish women in the first century.1 In the Christian scriptures, more women have the name Mary than any other name. The question I wish to raise here is whether we have any reliable written evidence that Mary was the name of Jesus’ mother. Following standard scholarly practices, I will rely on the following source-critical principles. • Paul’s letters appeared before the first gospel, and were written about twenty or more years after the death of Jesus. • Mark was the first gospel to be written. Most scholars date it to 65 C.E. or later, about thirty-five years after the death of Jesus. • Matthew and Luke both made extensive use of written Mark as a source of information about the life of Jesus. Matthew dates to about 85 C.E or later. Luke dates to about 90– 110 C.E. • It is widely believed that John had no knowledge of any of the gospels in written form, a thesis I challenge in my recently released book The Case for a Proto-Gospel: Recovering the Common Written Source Behind Mark and John. However, I will not make use of my thesis in this essay. • The gospels were written anonymously and few if any scholars believe that any of the gospel authors had firsthand information about Jesus or came from Judea or spoke Aramaic (the language of Jesus and the Jews.) Paul’s letters, the earliest Christian writings, make no mention of the name of Jesus’ mother. Putting aside for now the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, the New Testament contains only three direct mentions of a Mary being the mother of Jesus. I’ll address the reliability of the birth narratives later. The first written mention of the name of Jesus’ mother appears in Mark, in the course of a story about Jesus appearing in a synagogue whose congregation knew the names of members of Jesus’ family.2 There are, as I show below, some serious problems with the reliability of Mark’s use of Mary’s name in this story. The second mention occurs during Matthew’s version of Mark’s story, which account is clearly dependent upon Mark as a source.3 The third mention appears early in Acts, where “Mary the mother of Jesus” is incidentally mentioned as one of the women in a room with the apostles.4 Although Luke is also the author of Acts, outside of the birth narrative in his gospel he makes no mention of the name of Jesus’ mother anywhere in his gospel account of the adult Jesus. Was Mary the Name of Jesus’ Mother - 2 John, the fourth evangelist, never refers to the mother of Jesus by name except for one possible but highly unlikely and ambiguous reference to the names of two women at the cross with Jesus. Although Luke and John also have variations on Mark’s story about the congregation that knew the names of Jesus’ family members, both say the only name mentioned was Joseph, the father of Jesus.5 That Luke, who used Mark as a source and mentions the name of Jesus’ mother in his birth narrative, and John agree with each other against Mark suggests that there existed an earlier core source for this story in which the only family member name present in the story was Joseph, the father of Jesus. If Mark knew this source story, he may have changed the identity of the Jesus parent known by the congregation. If Mark did make a change, then there is a question as to whether his use of the name Mary is reliably sourced. Just prior to the start of Jesus’ mission, Luke and John each report one incident in which Joseph is again mentioned as the name of Jesus’ father.6 In all four gospels, right after Jesus begins his mission, there is only one story in each that mentions the name of any members of Jesus’ family and in each gospel it is a variation on the story about the congregation knowing the name of one of Jesus’ parents and rejecting Jesus’ teaching. During the adult life of Jesus, there are no other gospel mentions of the names of Jesus’ parents. The Hometown Rejection Story Mark is the first of the gospels to tell the story of Jesus’ rejection. In the NRSV translation this episode is titled “The Rejection at Nazareth” but Mark only uses the term “hometown” and does not mention Nazareth.7 The only gospel placing this incident in Nazareth is Luke’s.8 According to Mark’s account, Jesus returned to his “hometown” synagogue and taught to the congregation.9 The members were “astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us [emphasis added]?’”10 (Joses is a variation of the name Joseph.) Mark’s phrasing implies that things were going quite well for Jesus. But suddenly, right after the congregation tells us the name of Jesus’ family members, “they took offense at him.”11 Why? Something happened here and Mark appears to have deliberately omitted the cause of the hostility. In response, “Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house. [emphasis added]’”12 The implication here is that whatever caused the congregation to turn hostile, Jesus’ own family also took offense. When Jesus left the synagogue, “he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.”13 Mark omits what words impressed the congregation, why the members turned hostile, and what powers Jesus lost and why. His story evidences a good deal of redaction concerning the underlying events. Matthew generally follows Mark’s version of this story but makes a few minor changes.14 Where Mark identifies Jesus as a carpenter, Matthew identifies Jesus as “the son of the carpenter,” a possible indication that Mark may have deleted the reference to Jesus’ father. Matthew also redacts Jesus’s speech about the rejection of prophets, removing the reference to “kin” being among those rejecting him. Was Mary the Name of Jesus’ Mother - 3 Outside of the birth narratives, this one story in Mark and Matthew is the only reference in the gospels to Mary being the name of Jesus’ mother. Given how closely Matthew follows Mark’s story, Matthew cannot be considered an independent source for the name of Jesus’ mother. An odd thing about Mark’s story is that he identifies Jesus by reference to his mother instead of his father. Joel Marcus, in his commentary on this episode, notes that in “Jewish sources the father’s name is normally used to identify the son even when the father is dead.”15 Richard Bauckham and others have tried to explain this away by citing some exceptions to the rule.16 Marcus, however, in his commentary on Mark, finds these arguments wanting.17 He suggests that the congregation’s use of the mother’s name was intended as a slur against the legitimacy of Jesus, in line with later post-crucifixion criticisms of Jesus that he was born a bastard.18 He cites other sources in which the use of a mother’s name indicates an attack on the birth legitimacy of other individuals.19 Although Luke mentions Mary as the mother of Jesus in his birth narrative, his gospel never mentions her by name again in the course of Jesus’ adult life his gospel. He does, however, as noted above, briefly mention her by name in the beginning of Acts. (See also discussion below.) Especially surprising is that despite using Mark as a source, when presenting his version of Mark’s rejection story his account looks nothing like Mark’s.20 It is significantly longer, presents substantial dialogue between Jesus and the congregation, and, shockingly, the only family member named is Joseph, Jesus’ father, the only member of Jesus’ family not mentioned by Mark. Why would Luke, who uses Mark as a source, so radically alter the identification of Jesus’ family members, such that he omits the name of Jesus’ mother and substitutes the one name that Mark avoids? The many changes and details present in Luke could not be reasonably intuited from Mark’s account. Luke’s very much longer and different story appears to be based on a source independent of Mark. Of course, if Luke knew that Jews traditionally used the father’s name for the purpose of identifying a son, he may have thought he was correcting Mark. However, his very different version of Mark’s account suggests that a source version of Mark’s story was floating around that used the father’s name and Mark may have significantly redacted the details. This raises the question of which family names were in the source story, Mary the mother in Mark’s story or Joseph the father in Luke’s (and John’s) alternative.
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