Mary, the mother of Jesus - a biography

The King James Version of the Bible erroneously presents a profile of Mary, the mother of Jesus, (page 1715), as the mother of seven children: Jesus, James, Simon, Joses, Juda and [two] daughters. The Bible, a compilation of the texts accepted in the religious canon, has authority in itself, and the readers rely absolutely on the information presented. Despite the extensive literature published on Mary, little is known about her story. The overall image from literature written mostly by men is negative: she is illiterate, submissive, silent, weak, diffident, dependent, voiceless, and enslaved. In the religious canon, she is relegated to obscurity. Yet Mary was the only human that totally cooperated to carry on the divine salvation plan. Most important of all, and never mentioned, is the vital and conclusive leadership of Mary in Asia Minor while she was exiled in Ephesus (Turkey). This literary and historical research brings about the "historical Mary" found in the noncanonical literature of the first centuries, written in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, and Ethiopian languages. Collective or historical memories are the result of individual recollections of a society, in the structure of a collective narrative, a legacy left in manuscripts, some recently found and published in the last century. The stories add nuance to Mary's role in the development of the early church. Exploring the literature of the first centuries, mining from these narratives, I synthesize Mary's story in a hybrid, fuller biography. To write the story of Mary is a challenge that required crossing genre boundaries: biographical, fictional, historical, scholarly, autobiographical, and academic. Only a biography would substantiate and recover the multi-layered, dynamic character of Mary and her undisputable perpetual virginity.