The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in comparative religion, history, art, and related fields.

Mary: Founder of Christianity is about the mother of Jesus. The TU Library collection has several other books about Mary and her role in early Christianity.

According to the gospels of Matthew and Luke in the New Testament, Mary was a first-century Jewish woman of Nazareth, the wife of Joseph, and the mother of Jesus. Both the New Testament and the Quran describe Mary as a virgin. According to Christian theology, Mary conceived Jesus through the Holy Spirit while still a virgin, and accompanied Joseph to Bethlehem, where Jesus was born.

Mary and is considered by many to be the holiest and greatest saint because of her extraordinary virtues as seen at the Annunciation by the archangel Gabriel. She is said to have miraculously appeared to believers many times over the centuries.

The Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican, and Lutheran churches believe that Mary, as mother of Jesus, is the Mother of God. There are many differences in Marian beliefs and devotional practices of major Christian traditions.

For example, Protestants tend to minimize Mary’s role within Christianity. Mary also has the highest position in Islam among all women. She is mentioned in the Quran more often than in the Bible, where two of the longer chapters of the Quran are named after her and her family.

Mary: Founder of Christianity was written by Chris Maunder, a theologian based in North Yorkshire, the United Kingdom. Dr. Maunder’s other books, including The Oxford Handbook of Mary, are available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

In 2015, the journalist Maureen Orth observed,

Mary is everywhere: Marigolds are named for her. Hail Mary passes save football games. The image in Mexico of Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most reproduced female likenesses ever. Mary draws millions each year to shrines such as Fátima, in Portugal, and Knock, in Ireland, sustaining religious tourism estimated to be worth billions of dollars a year and providing thousands of jobs. She inspired the creation of many great works of art and architecture (Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” Notre Dame Cathedral), as well as poetry, liturgy, and music (Monteverdi’s Vespers for the Blessed Virgin). And she is the spiritual confidante of billions of people, no matter how isolated or forgotten.

Muslims as well as Christians consider her to be holy above all women, and her name “Maryam” appears more often in the Koran than “Mary” does in the Bible. In the New Testament Mary speaks only four times, beginning with the Annunciation, when, according to Luke’s Gospel, the angel Gabriel appears to her and says she will bear “the Son of the Most High.” Mary answers, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord.” Her only extended speech, also in Luke, is the lyrical Magnificat, uttered in early pregnancy: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant. Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.”

Indeed they have.

Yet clues about her life are elusive. Scholars of Mary must take what they can from Hebrew Scriptures, first-century Mediterranean texts, the New Testament, and archaeological digs.

The Bible says she lived in Nazareth when Romans had control over the Jewish territory. After Mary became pregnant, her betrothed, Joseph, a carpenter, considered quietly leaving her until an angel came to him in a dream and told him not to. The birth of Jesus is mentioned in just two Gospels, Luke and Matthew. Mark and John refer to Jesus’ mother several times.

The Evangelists were writing 40 to 65 years after Christ’s death and were not biographers, says Father Bertrand Buby, the author of a three-volume study, Mary of Galilee, and a distinguished member of the faculty in the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton, in Ohio. “So don’t expect them to have all the elements about Mary. Her life is picked up from hearsay.”

Some of the latest Mary scholarship focuses on her as a Jewish mother. María Enriqueta García, in her sacred theology dissertation at the Marian Institute, explains that Mary brings us to Jesus, who is the light of the world, just as Jewish mothers light the Shabbat candles. “We see the relationship of Mary with us isn’t just any relationship—it’s sacred.”

During the first millennium, as Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and began spreading into Europe, Mary typically was portrayed as an imperial figure, the equal of emperors, dressed in royal purple and gold. In the second millennium, beginning in the 12th century, says medieval historian Miri Rubin of Queen Mary University of London, “she underwent a dramatic shift,” evolving into a more accessible, kinder, gentler maternal figure. She served as a substitute mother in monasteries and convents, which novices often entered at a tender age. “A mother’s love,” Rubin says, “came to express the core of the religious story.”

Because so little is known of Mary from Scripture, “you can project on her whatever cultural values you have,” says Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University. “A cultural confection,” according to Rubin. Levine adds, “She can be the grieving mother, the young virgin, the goddess figure. Just as Jesus is the ideal man, Mary is the ideal woman.”

During the Reformation (1517-1648), the idea of Mary as intercessor fell out of favor with Protestants, who advocated going straight to God in prayer. But Mary gained millions of new Catholic followers with the Spanish conquest in the New World in the early 1500s—and, more recently, in Africa as Christianity has spread there…

Certain images and stories of the Virgin Mary are so powerful they help define a country. That’s the case with Our Lady of Guadalupe, whose image on the tilma, or cloak, of a poor Indian man gave rise, in 1531, to Mexican identity. Anyone witnessing the outpouring of love and devotion that pilgrims demonstrate for their beloved Madre on the days leading up to the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe—broadcast live throughout the country on December 12—can see that the Virgin Mary is deeply embedded in Mexican hearts and souls.

Her image was what Mexicans carried into their war against Spain for independence in 1810 and their internal revolution in 1910. César Chávez marched with her banner in his fight to unionize farmworkers in California in the 1960s. Our Lady of Guadalupe conferred instant benediction on the once despised mestizo children of Spaniards and Indians. She is the symbol of la raza, the definition of what it means to be Mexican, and because of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexicans have always believed they’re special.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)