The Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary

Era

First century

Region

Nazareth in Galilee, Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and — by tradition — Ephesus

Category

Theotokos; Ever-Virgin; foremost among the saints

Principal feast for this profile

The Dormition, August 15

About 11 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to Everything About Her Is About Him What the Gospels Give Us What Scripture Does Not Tell Us Where the Rest of It Comes From Why the Church Honours Her What Her Life Asks of Us

Everything About Her Is About Him

No one is honoured in the Orthodox Church as she is. Her name is in every Liturgy, at the third ode and the ninth ode of every canon, on every Wednesday and Friday, at the end of nearly every prayer any Orthodox Christian says.

And every single definition the Church has ever made about her is a definition about Christ. That is not a defensive claim; it is demonstrable from the texts. The title Theotokos was defended at Ephesus because denying it meant dividing Christ. The Fifth Ecumenical Council’s anathemas condemn calling her Mother of God “only in a relative sense” — because a relative sense would mean she bore a man whom God afterwards joined. The doctrine is Christological all the way down.

She herself set the pattern. Her last recorded words in Scripture are spoken to some servants at a wedding, about her Son: Whatever He says to you, do it.

What the Gospels Give Us

Luke tells the story from her side. Gabriel comes to a girl in Nazareth and greets her as one who has been graced. She asks the practical question — how shall this be, since I do not know a man? — and receives an answer that is no explanation at all, and says: Let it be to me according to your word.

She goes into the hill country to Elizabeth, who greets her as the mother of my Lord — which is as close as the New Testament comes to the word Theotokos — and she answers with the Magnificat, in which she says the thing that is the whole scriptural warrant for everything the Church does with her name: all generations shall call me blessed.

Then Bethlehem, the manger, the shepherds. Twice Luke says the same thing about her: that she kept these things and pondered them in her heart. And in the temple, the old man Simeon, who blesses them and then turns to her alone: a sword shall pierce through your own soul also.

The last scene of Christ’s youth in any Gospel is hers. He is twelve, He is missing for three days, they find Him in the temple, and she says what any mother would say — Your father and I have sought you sorrowing. Luke then records, without softening it, that they did not understand what He said to them.

Matthew tells it from Joseph’s side, and shares almost nothing with Luke except the virginal conception, Bethlehem, Nazareth and the names. Matthew has the dream, the flight into Egypt, the return. Luke has none of that and sends them from the temple straight home to Nazareth. The two accounts are independent witnesses rather than one story told twice, and where they are hard to fit together this site would rather say so than pretend.

Then the ministry. She is at Cana, and she tells Him there is no wine, and He answers in words that translate awkwardly and have troubled readers for two thousand years — Woman, what is that to Me and to you? My hour has not yet come — and she turns to the servants and tells them to do whatever He says. He does it.

There is the hard saying, too, and it should not be skipped. When He is told His mother and brothers are outside, He says: Who is My mother? — and answers, whoever does the will of God. He is not disowning her. The form is the one He uses often: the natural bond is real, and the bond of obedience is greater. Luke has already told us twice over that she is precisely the one who heard the word of God and kept it. But the saying is in three Gospels and it means what it says, and a site that tells the truth about the saints has to let it stand.

At the cross, John alone puts her there. The Synoptics name women watching from a distance and do not include her. John has her standing by the cross with her sister, and Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene — and has Christ, dying, give her a son and give the disciple a mother, and says that from that hour he took her into his own home.

And then Acts, once. In the upper room after the Ascension, in prayer with the women and with His brothers: Mary the mother of Jesus. That is the last time Scripture names her.

What Scripture Does Not Tell Us

It is worth setting out plainly, because everything else the Church knows about her comes from somewhere else, and the reader deserves to know where.

Scripture gives no account of her parents or their names, her birth, her childhood, her presentation in the temple, her age, her appearance, her death, her burial, or any appearance of the risen Christ to her. John’s Gospel never names her at all — she is always the mother of Jesus, or Woman.

Paul, writing earlier than any of the Gospels, mentions her once and does not use her name: God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law.

Where the Rest of It Comes From

The Protoevangelium of James. Almost everything Orthodox Christians take for granted about her early life — Joachim and Anna, their childlessness, the angel, her birth, her entry into the temple as a small child, Joseph as an elderly widower chosen by lot — comes from a single second-century book, usually dated around 140 to 170.

Three things are true about it at once, and all three should be said.

It was never Scripture. It appears in no canon list, East or West, and the Decretum Gelasianum lists it among the apocrypha. Origen, around 240, knows the tradition of Joseph’s earlier marriage and regards the book itself as of doubtful authority.

It is genuinely ancient and was enormously loved. It survives in more than a hundred Greek manuscripts and at least nine ancient translations, with fragments from around the year 300. The traditions it carries are old even though the book was never canonical.

And the Church kept the traditions while declining the book. That distinction is real and worth understanding rather than being embarrassed by. Two of the Twelve Great Feasts — her Nativity on 8 September and her Entry into the Temple on 21 November — rest on its narrative and on nothing in Scripture.

One further precision, since popular Orthodox writing gets it wrong constantly: the story is second-century, but the feasts are not. The Nativity of the Theotokos is being celebrated by about the middle of the sixth century; the Entry into the Temple appears at the beginning of the eighth, its earliest homilies coming from Germanos of Constantinople and John of Euboea. And the famous details of the Entry — the fifteen steps, the child entering the Holy of Holies — are not in the Protoevangelium at all. They are later liturgical and homiletic development.

Ever-Virgin. This one is firmer than most people realise, and it is usually argued on the weakest available ground.

Aeiparthenos — ever-virgin — is not devotional overflow. It appears three times in the anathemas of the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, the Fifth Ecumenical Council: in the second, sixth and fourteenth capitula. That is conciliar dogmatic language, in a definition, in an anathema.

On the “brothers of the Lord,” three explanations have been held. The Orthodox one, associated with Epiphanius and already present in the Protoevangelium, is that they were sons of Joseph by an earlier marriage. Jerome’s, standard in the Latin West from about 383, makes them cousins. The third, which Jerome was arguing against, makes them later children of Joseph and Mary.

The Orthodox position has more going for it than is often noticed. It is the older of the two traditional views — second century, known to Origen by 240 — where Jerome’s cousin theory is his own innovation of 383, argued for the occasion, with no patristic precedent claimed for it. It explains why the dying Christ entrusts His mother to a disciple rather than to a brother. It explains why the “brothers” behave with the authority of elders toward Him. And Richard Bauckham, a leading non-Orthodox specialist on the relatives of Jesus, judges the Western cousin theory the least probable of the three, and finds the other two historically undecidable rather than disproven. That is an honest result, and a favourable one, and it does not need overstating.

The Dormition. Here the honest statement is the striking one, and the Church has never needed to hide it.

The first four Christian centuries are almost entirely silent about the end of her life. Epiphanius of Salamis — who defends her perpetual virginity more vigorously than anyone in his century — writes around 375 that he does not know how she died, records three current opinions, and says he is not asserting that she remained immortal but neither is he asserting that she died. The Father best placed to know says he does not know.

The narratives appear from the later fifth century onward, in a body of texts scholars call the Transitus literature, in several families and languages. Their dating is genuinely disputed among specialists — Stephen Shoemaker argues some of the material is much older than its surviving manuscripts, while others hold that the traditions emerged in the late fifth and early sixth centuries. That is an open question and it should be described as open.

The famous story that Patriarch Juvenal of Jerusalem told the Emperor Marcian at Chalcedon in 451 that her tomb had been found empty but for the shroud is not a conciliar record. It comes from the Euthymiac History, composed somewhere between about 550 and 750, which survives as an excerpt inside John of Damascus’s second Dormition homily and is usually regarded as an interpolation there. It reports a fifth-century conversation, from a sixth- or seventh-century text, inside an eighth-century homily. Nothing in the acts of Chalcedon mentions it.

Even the date is less simple than it looks. The oldest Marian feast at Jerusalem, a Memory of Mary on 15 August attested in the fifth-century Armenian Lectionary, appears to have been a general commemoration rather than a Dormition feast; the Dormition proper is a development of the late sixth century. The Dormition Fast is traceable to the ninth century and was regularised by a synod at Constantinople in 1166. It is not apostolic, and saying so takes nothing from it.

What the Church holds is clear and should be stated as clearly as the caveats: that she died a real, bodily, human death; that Christ received her soul; and that her body was raised on the third day and taken up. Gregory Palamas puts it in one sentence — her death was life-giving, and she is at present the only one besides her Son who is in heaven with a glorified body.

It is often said that Orthodoxy denies the Assumption. It does not. It affirms her bodily translation, declines the papal definition of 1950 as a definition, rejects the Immaculate Conception on which that definition’s own wording is built — and insists that she truly died, which the 1950 formula pointedly does not say. The difference is close to the opposite of how it is usually reported.

The title itself. The word Theotokos was in ordinary use among Alexandrian and Cappadocian writers well before the controversy of 431. The oldest surviving prayer addressed to her, Sub tuum praesidium — We turn to you for protection, Holy Mother of God — is often dated to the third century on the strength of one palaeographer’s brief remark in 1938, which the volume’s own editor disputed in print at the time; specialist opinion has since moved considerably later. The firmer ground is that the hymn appears in the ancient Jerusalem chantbook and was in liturgical use by the fifth century. Either way, Christians were asking her to pray for them before any council said they might.

At Ephesus in 431 the Council approved Cyril’s second letter to Nestorius and deposed Nestorius. Strictly, it issued no separate dogmatic definition of the word; the Twelve Anathemas were Cyril’s own and their conciliar standing is argued. The undisputed conciliar definition using both Theotokos and Ever-Virgin is Constantinople II in 553 — stronger ground, and hardly anyone uses it.

Why the Church Honours Her

Because of what the Incarnation required. God did not take flesh in general; He took flesh from one woman, in one town, with her consent given out loud. Nicholas Cabasilas, in the fourteenth century, puts the weight exactly where it belongs: without her consent and the cooperation of her faith, the design could not have gone forward.

And because of Eve. The parallel is one of the oldest pieces of Christian theology in existence, older than any list of the New Testament books: Justin Martyr around 155, and Irenaeus around 180 — the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. A woman’s no at the beginning; a woman’s yes at the turn.

The Church’s year is built around her. It opens on 1 September and reaches her Nativity within the week; it closes in August with her Dormition. The Christian story begins with her birth and ends with her death, and Christ is in the middle of it.

What Her Life Asks of Us

Let it be to me according to your word, said to a message that made no sense, carried no guarantees, and would cost her a great deal — beginning with her reputation in a small town.

And then a life of not understanding. Luke says it outright: she did not understand what He said. She kept things in her heart because she could not yet make sense of them. The Church’s greatest saint spent thirty-three years being told she would be blessed by all generations while watching her Son be misunderstood, rejected, and finally executed in front of her.

The sword Simeon promised arrived. She stood there while it did. That is the model, and it is not a comfortable one.

Most Holy Theotokos, save us. Pray to Christ our God that we may say yes before we understand, keep what we cannot yet explain, and stand where we are needed when it costs us everything.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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