Frederica Mathewes-Green, a prolific and wide-ranging writer, is author of the new book,
The Lost Gospel of Mary: The Mother of Jesus in Three Ancient Texts from Paraclete Press. Frederica is
khouria (spiritual mother) of an Eastern Orthodox Church, Holy Cross Orthodox Church, that she and her husband founded in Baltimore. In preparation for Easter, she has a Holy Week conversation with
National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.
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Kathryn Jean Lopez: Frederica, you have a new book out about Mary. Have you discovered a new gospel? Where was it hiding?
Frederica Mathewes-Green: I feel ambivalent about the title — kind of lurid, isn’t it! But my point was that there are many, many ancient Christian texts that are fully orthodox; it’s not only a matter of New Testament versus gnostics. Earlier generations of Christians read the same kind of supplemental and devotional works we do today: biographies, commentaries, letters, sermons, debates with non-believers...pretty much anything you would find in a Christian bookstore today.
Except men’s dress socks with little fish and crosses on ‘em. These works got “lost” mostly because we forgot them — our “family memory” fades after a few decades or centuries. Contemporary Western Christians have a bad case of spiritual amnesia. So I’m hoping to put a few of the more appealing and worthy works back on the shelf. In this book I present three ancient texts concerning the Virgin Mary, with new translations and verse-by-verse commentary. The first is a “gospel,” or narrative biography, of the Virgin Mary’s birth, and early life.
Lopez: How important is the life of Mary, especially in her Son’s final days, as a model for Christians?
Mathewes-Green: Mary’s suffering faith during our Lord’s last days is a model and inspiration for all believers. But what I found in these three documents was that the greatest interest for early Christians was in her pregnancy. The fact of the Incarnation was something early Christians continually marveled over; also, it was the grounds on which they had to fight most often, defending the real divinity and real humanity of Jesus. And it was Mary whom God called on to provide the physical matrix for Christ’s appearance in the flesh; she was a regular human being, one of us. That means that on one side, Jesus’ grandmother was named Anna, while on the other side...you see how mind-blowing it is.
Lopez: What does she teach us about sacrifice?
Mathewes-Green: The first text, the “Gospel of Mary,” shows us Mary as an adorable little girl, and then as a teenager coping with a “crisis pregnancy” that could cause her execution as a suspected adultress. This was an extremely popular work among Eastern Christians (that is, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern) in the second century. Many of the stories here made it to Europe, but the intact text did not. A 16
th-century scholar who translated it into Latin named it “the Protevangelium of James;” this is how scholars know it today, but it’s not the original title (no one title stuck, actually). In this work, Mary is steadfast under this trial, and teaches us much about courage.
The other two texts illuminate other aspects of Mary’s role. The second is a very short prayer that was found on a scrap of papyrus in Egypt in 1917, and dated 250 AD; it is the earliest prayer to Mary. It begins, “Under your compassion we take refuge...”, and it’s still in use East and West (Roman Catholics know it as “Sub Tuum Praesidium.”) This second text shows us that early Christians believed that she (like all the saints) are alive in Christ’s presence and continually in prayer, so we can call on her as a prayer partner. The third text is a beautiful and intricately complex “sung sermon”, written around 520 A.D., which explores the mystery of the Incarnation and all the ways that Mary’s role is foreshadowed in Scripture.
Lopez: Is Mary of particular importance to women as a spiritual guide?
Mathewes-Green: One of the things that has surprised me, as I explore early Christian spirituality and the Eastern Church, is that there is so little interest in gender division. There aren’t separate types of prayer or spiritual disciplines for men as opposed to women, or for Greek rather than Arab or Egyptian Christians, or for rich versus poor Christians — none of that seems to matter. In Western Christianity, of course, we hear a great deal about tailor-made spirituality, right down to personality type; it fits the grid of our consumer culture. But in these texts there’s very little interest in Mary’s femininity; all the emphasis is on her humanity. She is the
Theotokos, the “God-bearer” in the sense of bearing a child; her example invites all people everywhere to be Theophorus, “God-bearers”in the sense of bearing God’s presence like a candlewick bears a flame.
Lopez: It often seems that poor Joseph doesn’t get the coverage Mary and Jesus (natch) get. What should we know of him?
Mathewes-Green: Yes, Joseph is usually relegated to standing in the background and leaning on his staff. There’s a bit more about him in the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew knew the story of Mary’s pregnancy from Joseph’s point of view, Luke from Mary’s), and in the “Gospel of Mary” he is an even more developed figure. When he discovers Mary pregnant, he becomes extremely distraught; when the High Priest tells him he must separate from Mary now that she’s pregnant, he weeps openly; when he’s making plans to bring her to the enrollment in Bethlehem, he talks about how embarrassed he is to present this pregnant woman, decades younger than he is, as his wife. Most interesting is the scene when Joseph helps Mary down from the donkey and goes to find a midwife. Suddenly all of nature is frozen: he sees the birds motionless in the air and the stream standing still. The time of Christ’s birth is accompanied by nature’s stillness and awe, just as his Crucifixion will be accompanied by noontime darkness and earthquakes.
