Earliest Depictions of the Virgin Mary

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Historians of both Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism face serious gaps in knowledge about the early centuries of the Common Era (C.E.). For Judaism, there are some “data deserts,” especially with regard to Jewish religious beliefs, practices and leadership in the period between the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. and the final codification of the Talmud in the sixth century.¹ On the Christian side, despite evidence from the first-century New Testament and from the writings of the Church Fathers in succeeding centuries, it has become increasingly clear (as Tony Burke’s recent BAR article and Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities [Oxford Univ. Press, 2003] demonstrate) just how much we don’t know about what many Jesus-centered groups believed and did.^a Among the puzzles is how Christians viewed Jesus’ mother Mary in the earliest centuries of Christianity. Mary’s status in Christianity only became official in 431 when the Council of Ephesus awarded her the title Theotokos, “the one who gives birth to God.”^b Information about Mary’s significance before then, whether visual or textual, is surprisingly sparse, but archaeology has supplied some helpful clues.

In an intriguing recent development—splashed across the pages of the New York Times and the Huffington Post—new data about Mary has come to light from an archaeological excavation that ended before World War II. The site is Dura-Europos, the third-century Roman town in eastern Syria famous for its fabulous synagogue frescoes.^c Because Roman Dura was abandoned after the Persian conquest of 257 C.E., its excavators had a secure date to work with. Dura contained a slew of shrines and temples, among them the famous synagogue and the earliest known Christian church, the subject of The041042 World’s Oldest Church (Yale Univ. Press, 2016) by Michael Peppard of Fordham University.² In a detailed reconsideration of the paintings that decorated the walls of the church’s tiny baptistery, Peppard concluded that the long-unquestioned identification of the figure of a woman beside a well was incorrect. She is not the Samaritan woman who talks to Jesus beside Jacob’s well (see John 4:1–42); rather, argues Peppard, the woman is the Virgin Mary at the moment of the Annunciation when she learns she is to bear Jesus. If so—and to my mind Peppard is absolutely spot-on—this may indeed be the earliest image of the Virgin Mary, as the New York Times suggested on January 30, 2016.

As Peppard explains, the third-century Dura Annunciation is based not on the Biblical Annunciation in Luke 1:26–38 but on the Gospel of James (a.k.a. the Protevangelium of James), a second-century apocryphal (i.e., not considered authoritative)043 gospel that narrates the life of Mary up to and including the birth of Jesus.^d According to the Gospel of James, Mary “took the pitcher and went forth to fill it with water and lo! a voice saying, ‘Hail thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women.’ And she looked around on the right and on the left to see from where this voice could have come.”

The words of the “voice” that surprises Mary come from Luke 1:28, but the story’s setting—with Mary fetching water and looking around for the voice’s source—does not. Additionally, in the Dura image a young woman in a long dress leans over a well, drawing water up with a rope. Peppard sees a starburst on the woman’s chest and some sort of wide band (light ray?) arching above and down toward her back. Of these I am not convinced, but they are not particularly salient; the identification depends on the motif of a woman leaning over a water source.

Peppard faces the problem that any “first” entails—namely the absence of earlier images to draw upon to support his argument. It is noteworthy, however, that when Annunciation images finally (if rarely) appear in the fourth and early fifth centuries, they are always based on the Gospel of James, either with Mary at a water source, as in the scene044 Peppard has identified at Dura, or with Mary spinning with a wool basket by her side. The latter detail comes from the second part of the Annunciation in the Gospel of James. An example of Mary at the water source appears on the Adelphia Sarcophagus, named for the woman whose name it bears.³ On the upper left-hand portion of its lid, this Annunciation scene features a personification of a spring in the form of a giant bearded face above swirls of water toward which Mary leans with her pitcher; a wingless angel behind her raises his hand in a speaking gesture. (The earliest Christian angels lack wings.)

Egypt is the source of another example, this one from the early fifth century, in the form of a fragment of silk (now in the Abegg-Stiftung textile museum045 near Bern, Switzerland) that had been used as a burial shroud. This Annunciation is part of a repeating pattern that also includes other episodes from the Gospel of James. In this Annunciation, the angel leans forward, his “speaking hand” raised toward Mary, who has knelt down to draw water with a handled bucket. Mary’s left arm is raised in the standard gesture of surprise. Above the angel, Greek letters spell out the angel’s words in cartoon style, “Greetings,” and Mary is labeled “Maria.” Clearly, as an Annunciation, the Dura scene fits seamlessly with subsequent Annunciation visual conventions.046 On the other hand, the earliest representations of the Samaritan woman (see John 4:1–42) always pair the woman with Jesus. Examples include a mosaic in the late-fourth-century baptistery of the Naples Cathedral and a fourth-century fresco in the Catacomb of Via Latina in Rome. As Peppard points out, on the Dura baptistery wall, despite available space, no other figure accompanies the woman.

The Christians at Dura in eastern Syria seem to have followed Christian practices associated with Eastern or Syrian Christianity, which differed in some ways from what would eventually become “standard” in Christianity. One of the most important of these practices was their use of a harmonized, rewritten gospel called the Diatessaron (Greek: “through the four [Gospels]”)⁴ that was composed in mid-second-century Syria by an ascetic named Tatian. This single gospel wove text from all four canonical Gospels into one unified narrative. It is thanks to archaeology that we know Dura Christians047 used the Diatessaron: In the rubble outside the church, the excavators found a parchment fragment of the Diatessaron.⁵ The Diatessaron, in contrast to all four Gospels, includes the Virgin Mary among the witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection. Apparently, in the eyes of Eastern Christians, the mother of their God Jesus mattered enough that her absence from the essential Christian event, the resurrection of her son, was troubling and needed “improving.”

Another distinctive aspect of Eastern Christianity was its understanding of baptism. Unlike what came to be the dominant view of baptism as a symbolic death and rebirth following the model of Jesus’ death and resurrection, Syrian Christians believed that at baptism the Holy Spirit entered into and transformed the Christian into a new, more Christ-like and perfect person. Ephrem, the great fourth-century Syrian theologian, celebrated what he saw as a spiritual parallel between three events: the Annunciation, when Mary conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, the baptism of Christ when the Holy Spirit descended “like a dove,” and, ultimately, the baptism of each Christian, which is a conception that “comes from water.” In the following passage from Ephrem, the speaker is a Christian, presumably the person being baptized. First, the speaker praises Jesus and then describes him/herself metaphorically as the mother of Jesus who receives the Holy Spirit and is born a second time. Finally the Christian exults, “I put on his glory,” extolling the effect of baptism:

Christ, you have given birth to your own mother in the second birth that comes from water. …

The Son of the Most High came and dwelt in me, And I became his mother. As I gave birth to him, his second birth—so too he gave birth to me a second time. He put on his mother’s robe—his body; I put on his glory.

(Ephrem of Syria, Nativity Hymn XVI, 9, 11)

These thematic connections explain why an Annunciation scene would decorate a room where baptisms took place. At the same time, it is important to note that Mary’s significance in the Dura baptistery is typological; she functions, as in Ephrem’s hymn, as a “type” or symbol of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit available to all Christians at baptism. More broadly, her image served as a reminder for Christians at Dura that God’s plan of salvation was fulfilled with the incarnation of the promised Messiah, Jesus. There is no evidence that Christians at Dura prayed to Mary or believed she exercised special powers of her own.

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The third-century Mary of the Dura baptistery has competition for the honor of being the earliest image of the Virgin Mary. The Catacombs of Priscilla in Rome contain some of the earliest indisputably Christian art, including the earliest example of the Adoration of the Magi (wise men) from Matthew 2:1. In this somewhat blurry mid-third-century fresco from a Christian tomb, three men offer their gifts to the infant Jesus, who sits on Mary’s lap. As at Dura, there is no suggestion in this catacomb image that Mary has special status beyond the honor of being Jesus’ mother. Early Christians interpreted this scene in a variety of ways: as evidence that all the nations (not just his fellow Jews) acknowledged Jesus or that all nations turned from pagan idolatry to faith in Jesus.^e The homage is directed at Jesus, not his mother.

This may be the moment to register the fact that in a real sense Biblical archaeology began with the catacombs of Rome. It was the accidental “discovery” of the Roman catacombs in 1578 that set off the first Bible-inspired exploration of ancient ruins. In the 1500s the Catholic Church was under attack from Protestant Reformers who condemned many Catholic beliefs and practices as essentially pagan and certainly not based on the Bible. For their part, Catholics were quick to capitalize on the evidence of the catacombs as a direct link to the early Christians of Rome, a community with a unique claim to the chief apostles, Peter and Paul. The generations of Catholic archaeologists to whom we are indebted for much that we know about the catacombs and early Christianity did remarkable work. At the same time, however, their enthusiasm sometimes led to assertions that went beyond the evidence. The Roman Colosseum, for example, was consecrated to the blood of Christian martyrs in 1749, but there is no evidence that any Christians were martyred there.

One of the most distinguished of all these archaeologists of early Christianity was Monsignor Joseph Wilpert (1857–1944). He was also a pioneer mosaic and fresco restorer, and here is where his enthusiasm could run away with him. There is a story recounted by an elderly art historian about a visit to Rome in the 1930s where Wilpert, supervising some restoration work boasted, “Remember that we are today so much better at producing medieval mosaics and frescoes than they were in the Middle Ages.”⁶ An apparent example of Wilpert’s inclination to read later church tradition about Mary into early Christian art may be seen in another fresco in the Catacombs of Priscilla that many past publications (and today’s internet) credit as the earliest image of the Virgin and Child. Visitors to the catacombs today see a small image in which a man points to a star that hovers over a seated woman nursing a child. The pointing man was identified as a prophet—or049 the seer Balaam who foresaw a star “coming forth from Jacob” in Numbers 24:17—and the object of his gesture as the star in Matthew 2:9 that led the Magi to the “place where the child [Jesus] was.” Recently, however, scholar Geri Parlby used early photographs taken under Wilpert’s own auspices before a “restoration” of the fresco to show that the angle of the man’s arm had been adjusted to aim toward the star.⁷ In addition, Parlby reports that a study of the fresco by modern conservators found that the “star” was not painted with the same paint used for the rest of the fresco; in other words, it was a later addition. The original scene was in actuality a traditional Roman funerary image from the life of the deceased woman, not the Virgin and Child. Yet a third fresco from the Priscilla Catacombs is now also recognized as a life-of-the-deceased scene and no longer the Annunciation, as was occasionally claimed.

Our knowledge about Mary in early Christianity is not limited to visual evidence. Thanks to its natural climate-control system, Egypt has preserved a remarkable number of early Christian papyri, many of them recovered from graves and garbage dumps. Of particular importance to our understanding of Mary is Rylands Papyrus 470, which dates to the third century—roughly contemporaneous with both the Dura Annunciation and the Adoration of the Magi in the Priscilla Catacombs—and contains a Greek prayer to the Virgin in elegant handwriting. This fragment, not quite the size of an index card, entered the collection of the John Rylands Library in Manchester, England, early in the 20th century. Part of a batch of papyri purchased in Cairo, it may have been dug up by fellahin (farmers) from the famous papyrus “dump” at Oxyrhynchus^f in Middle Egypt.⁸ The prayer as reconstructed reads: “We flee to your mercy, Mother of God (Theotokos). Despise not our petitions in our necessity, but deliver us from danger, only pure and only blessed one.” In contrast to the evidence of the images from Syria and Rome, at least some Egyptian Christians apparently believed Jesus’ mother possessed power in her own right, and so they prayed to the Virgin Mary for protection from harm. Interestingly, this prayer, the earliest known prayer to the Virgin, appears to be the forerunner of a popular medieval Marian (related to Mary) prayer, Sub tuum praesidium (“Under your protection”).

The Rylands papyrus is also the earliest clear evidence that Christians called Mary Theotokos (Greek: literally, “the one who gives birth to God”), the title that became official at the Council of Ephesus some two hundred years later. Because of Mary’s title and the fact that it appeared in Egypt, some scholars have proposed that this prayer reflects traditions absorbed from the cult of another mother of God, Isis, the enormously popular Romano-Egyptian goddess, whose son was the chief Egyptian god, Horus. This is certainly a possibility. On the other hand, this was an era and a country with highly fluid religious boundaries. It is extremely difficult, for example, to determine from the text of a magical amulet whether the owner was Jewish, Christian, pagan or some combination thereof. Furthermore, language can drift from one group to another without a specific confessional basis for its use.

Perhaps Rylands Papyrus 470 is the tip of an iceberg of popular Christian devotion to Mary for which we have very little direct evidence. After all, the dominant voices in early Christianity—or rather, the dominant voices preserved for us—were elite and educated Church Fathers like Origen, Tertullian068 and Augustine, who did not have much to say about Mary or, in the case of Tertullian, even criticized her for lack of faith! Historians like Ramsay MacMullen have shown that the Christianity of the common people could be quite different from elite Christianity,⁹ and that recognition recently led Stephen Shoemaker to suggest, very plausibly, that devotion to Mary could have been a natural outgrowth of the popular Christian cult of martyrs.¹⁰ Shoemaker’s theory is supported by the invocation of Mary along with angels, martyr saints and Jesus in the texts of early Christian magical amulets in the form of hundreds of small papyri (and the occasional inscription on metal). These give a vivid picture of popular Christian piety, practiced with no apparent compunction despite vehement condemnation of amulet use by “Church Fathers” such as John Chrysostom in the fourth century. Papyrus Oxyrhynchus VIII 1151 is representative of such an amulet, carrying a spell to keep a woman named Joannia from harm.¹¹ This papyrus069 came from the dump at Oxyrhynchus. The amulet reads in part:

Flee, hateful spirit, Christ drives you out. The son of God and the Holy Spirit have gained advantage over you. … Lord, Christ, son and Word of the living God, the one, who healed every disease and every sickness, heal and look upon your female slave Joannia … expel from her and put to flight every fever-heat and … every evil, on account of the prayers and entreaties of our mistress, the Theotokos, and of the glorious archangels and of John, the holy and glorious apostle and evangelist and theologian, and of Saint Serenus and of Saint Philoxenus and of Saint Victor and of Saint Justus and of all the saints.¹²

Mary (the Theotokos) heads a list that includes archangels, an apostle and martyr saints, all of whom are called upon, like influential officials in the imperial court, to pray to Jesus on behalf of Joannia.

I have one final set of objects to mention in relation to Mary and early Christianity. In this case, it is Mary’s absence that is telling. Later Christian tradition found evidence of Mary’s intercessory powers in the story of the Marriage at Cana at which Jesus turned water into wine (reported only in the Gospel of John 2:1).^g In the gospel story, when the wine runs out at the wedding, Mary tells Jesus, “They have no wine.” After an enigmatic comment from Jesus, Mary tells the servants to do what Jesus says, and the water becomes wine. This popular miracle story was featured in the catacombs, on sarcophagi, on ivory reliefs and on glass objects, and in a number of cases, Mary is not included in the image. The focus is Jesus’ miracle-working and not Mary’s participation in the story. Two examples of the Wedding at Cana without Mary come from Rome: a fourth-century sarcophagus and a fifth-century ivory. (For a sarcophagus with Mary present at Cana, see Vatican Sarcophagus 31508.) Mary is also missing from some early images of the Nativity where we most expect to see her. Alongside early Christian nativities that include Mary, there are a number from which she is absent, although the ox and the ass who are not in the Gospels are depicted. A famous example is the so-called Stilicho Sarcophagus of c. 387.¹³ Also from the late fourth or early fifth century is a gravestone from the Aegean island of Naxos.¹⁴

Ultimately, the archaeological evidence shows that the roots of what later grew into the Christian cult of the Virgin Mary are diverse, just as the roots of Christianity itself are diverse—and that we can expect future surprises070 and enlightenment on this subject from archaeology!

A third-century portrait of a woman drawing water from a well was uncovered at a church in Dura-Europos, Syria. While this was originally interpreted as the Biblical scene of the Samaritan woman who speaks with Jesus, further analysis suggests that it portrays the Annunciation—making this painting the earliest depiction of the Virgin Mary. But there are other candidates.