Mary

Mary is a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth whom the Gospels name as the mother of Jesus. The text says an angel told her, “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and give birth to a son, and shall name him ‘Jesus’” (Luke 1:31), and that this son “will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High,” receiving “the throne of his father David” and reigning “over the house of Jacob forever” (Luke 1:32–33). When she asks how this can be, the answer given is, “The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy one who is born from you will be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35), followed by “For nothing spoken by God is impossible” (Luke 1:37).

The text also preserves her own words in the hymn she speaks over this promise, praising a God whose “mercy is for generations and generations on those who fear him” (Luke 1:50) and who “has filled the hungry with good things” and “has sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:53). Her son’s birth is announced to shepherds as good news “to all the people”: “there is born to you today, in David’s city, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11), with the heavenly host saying, “Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men” (Luke 2:14). Earlier, Isaiah 7:14 gives the sign, “the virgin will conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” Linguistically, the Hebrew noun there denotes a young woman of marriageable age, and the Greek Old Testament rendered it with a word meaning “virgin”; Christian reading has long linked the verse to Jesus’ birth, which is an interpretive judgment rather than something the verse states by itself.

Mary is not the only woman so named in Scripture. John 20:17 records the risen Jesus speaking to Mary Magdalene — “Don’t hold me, for I haven’t yet ascended to my Father; but go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” — a different Mary with a distinct role, and the Gospels as a whole distinguish several.

Christian traditions read her differently. Historically, the Council of Ephesus (431) gave her the title Theotokos, “God-bearer,” held by both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic teaching; Rome further defines the Immaculate Conception (1854) and the Assumption (1950) as dogma, while Orthodoxy honors her highly without adopting those definitions. Protestant traditions generally honor her as one who received God’s promise and believed it, and typically reject the later dogmas and the invocation of saints.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.