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MARY OF NAZARETH ‐ MORE THAN MOTHER OF GOD
Gail Sidonie SOBAT *
Introduction: Genesis
“To write of anyone’s history is to order, to give form to disparate facts; in short, to
fictionalize.” – Linda Hutcheon 1
“All historical accounts, even the most seemingly objective historical records are
stories” – Cheryl Glenn 2
“Woman is made/ She is not born” – Luba 3
Simultaneous to my burgeoning feminism and interest in feminist theory, I became fascinated
with the narrative of Mary of Nazareth, a figure who has been reduced to a de‐sexualized vessel who
neither bled nor suffered the pains of labour, who bore Jesus willingly and silently like a good little
handmaid of the Lord Almighty – Mary, the silenced and suffering oxymoronic virgin mother who
quietly witnessed her son die – Mary, the “white” symbol of Christianity and the Catholic church,
source of veneration, adoration, and centuries of guilt, but also undeniably a potent symbol of hope
for billions of believers, worldwide, and for many, the feminine face of god.
I pondered the questions surrounding this woman, who is mentioned nineteen times in the New
Testament, who speaks on a mere four different occasions in Luke and John, who, correspondingly, is
a figure shrouded in mystery, largely because, but for the birth narrative, she stands silently on the
periphery of the greater story of her son’s life and ministry. I wondered what she had to say to me
and to others in the 21 st century. I considered at length how a son like Jesus came to be the rabbi we
read about, admire and some worship. In recalling all the best men I personally knew, it came to me
that these shared in common a close and personal bond with very special mothers. So I arrived at
the premise that Jesus was the best of men because he must have had a remarkable mother.
Thus began my re‐visioned narrative of Mary of Nazareth in The Book of Mary, 4 a work that is a
hybrid of mythology, biography, history and fiction, wherein Mary recounts her autobiography.
What little historical truth that we know about this biblical mother is intersected with (what many
consider) fictive elements constructed by the Church and with others from my imagination. Many of
my narrative details are anachronistic and unlikely or impossible, given the status of women in 1 st ‐
century Nazareth.
But why tell this story at all? First, I felt it important that official (read: Church) versions of the
historical Mary be deconstructed so that we might hear her stoppered voice and witness her largely
unrecorded life. Though Mary is not invisible as a historical subject, apparently for the 60‐110 CE
scribes, details of her participation in both great and small events of Jesus’ life were deemed too
inconsequential to record. As Basak Dörschel muses, “the exclusion of women from history, gives
the illusion that women have not contributed to the making of civilization,” 5 and I would further
argue, ignores the contribution the mother made in raising the son. As Hannah Arendt
correspondingly asserts, “we need to find a discourse, a lexis, that can answer the question ‘Who are
you?’…Narrative will fulfill this role, the invented story that accompanies history.” 6 And like millions
of others, I asked of Mary of Nazareth, “Who are you?” The Book of Mary became my answer.
Michael Benton asks pointedly of the writer of a hybrid fictive‐history‐biography, “What sort of
truth can we expect from a narrative art form in which verifiable data from history have been
crossbred with the temporal and rhetorical tactics of fiction?” 7 I echo Lyndall Gordon: “a lasting
imaginative truth based on a selection of facts.” 8 Because the past can only “be represented in either
consciousness or discourse in an ‘imaginary way,’” 9 the novel seemed an apt form for reconstituting
a fictive history for Mary of Nazareth.
*
MacEwan University, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.