It was the year AD 626. The city of Constantinople, outnumbered by Persians and Avars, was about to be overtaken. However, people began carrying icons of the virgin Mary, and, “according to an eyewitness, in the battle for Constantinople in August 626 the Virgin Mary ‘put flight with a single blow the military force of both enemies.’ ”1
About 1,300 years later, in 1981, four bullets nearly killed Pope John Paul II in Vatican City itself. However close he came to being killed, John Paul II and many Roman Catholics believe that he was saved by the same one who saved Constantinople. Yes—the virgin Mary, who “by the power of her Son, did something so profound and so powerful that it makes one to rethink the limits of miracles. It was a sunny day in 1981 when an assassin’s bullets tore into the body of Pope John Paul II, who was not even three years into his papacy. The shots that gravely wounded and should’ve killed him didn’t, and against significant odds, internal damage and blood loss, he survived, attributing it as a miracle from the hands of Mary.”2
Though not quite as dramatic as the siege of Constantinople or the shooting of the pope, another perceived example of Mary’s intervention happened at the Benedictine College, in Kansas. “Our Lady’s intercessions date as far back as 1856 when she saved the founder of St. Benedict’s Abbey, Fr. Henry Lemke’s life during a torrential thunderstorm and flood, to most recently when we implored her help in increasing our enrollment and growth. . . . Thus, we believe that it is very appropriate to formally Consecrate Benedictine College to the Blessed Virgin Mary.”3
Who is this Mary, anyway, also known as Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Our Lady, Queen of Heaven, Madonna, Theotokos (“God-bearer”), Our Lady of Sorrows, Mother of Good Counsel, Comforter of the Afflicted, and not only Mediatrix but also Co-Redemptrix as well? Who is this Mary who has schools named after her, who has churches dedicated to her devotion and statues to her veneration, whose name adorns shrines worldwide, whose life is so studied that some colleges offer PhDs in Mariology (an entire academic discipline based on her), and who is credited with everything from protecting Constantinople from the Persians, to saving John Paul II’s life, to helping Benedictine College increase enrollment?
We ask, again—Who is this Mary, and why do so many people credit her with having so many roles, and with doing miracles long after she lived on earth?
Where does this all come from?
Mary in the Bible
Not from Scripture, that’s for sure. Of course, this young Jewish peasant woman, Mary, a virgin, was chosen by heaven to carry Jesus in human flesh, God Himself (see John 1:1–3). This was no small thing either. “Do not be afraid, Mary,” said the angel Gabriel to her “for you have found favor with God. And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bring forth a Son, and shall call His name JESUS. He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Highest; and the Lord God will give Him the throne of His father David. And He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of His kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:30–33, NKJV).
That’s quite an announcement, and when she asked the logical question about how could this happen, her being a virgin and all, he said that nothing was impossible with God (verse 37), to which she famously replied: “Be it unto me according to thy word” (verse 38, KJV).
And it was unto her, according to his word. Indeed, most references to Mary deal with her pregnancy, the birth of Jesus, and then with Jesus in His youth. To begin, Scripture tells about Mary’s visit to Elizabeth, who says to Mary: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (verse 42, NKJV). Then, of course, there is this “So it was, that while they were [in Bethlehem], the days were completed for her to be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn” (Luke 2:6, 7, NKJV). Mary appears with the baby Jesus at the temple (verses 22–38), she shows up in the account of the Magi (Matthew 2:1–12), she is part of the flight to Egypt and return to Israel (verses 13–23), and she is in the visit of the young Jesus at the temple (Luke 2:41–50).
All these incidents deal with Jesus before He, as an adult, began His ministry. From then on, Mary appears only three times: at the wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11), with her other sons seeking to speak with Him (Matthew 12:46), and when Jesus was on the cross (John 19:25–27).
That’s it. Though key in the early years of Jesus (after all, she was His mother), Mary later becomes a marginal figure in Scripture. With one exception, a direct mention in Acts 1:14, and an indirect one in Galatians 4:4, Mary appears no more in Scripture. In the New Testament she’s mentioned by name around 18 times, about as many as Judas, in contrast to 153 times for Peter.
So how did we go from the Mary depicted in the Bible to her not only being deemed the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God, Our Lady, Madonna, Our Lady of Sorrows, Mediatrix, Co-Redemptrix, and more—but to someone who (supposedly) answers prayer, performs miracles, and appears in apparitions with special messages for the faithful? Not to mention, how is it that she is believed to be sinless, a perpetual virgin, and up in heaven, having never seen death?
the pagan angle
There’s a long and convoluted history to this transformation of biblical Mary into all but a “goddess,” a term that though most Roman Catholics would object to is, really, close to what happened. And what happened was that within a few centuries, the church—succumbing to the great temptation to meld with the culture—incorporated elements of the religions around it and “baptized” them. According to Elliott Miller and Kenneth Samples, “The religious life of the Greco-Roman world was largely founded upon devotion to various deities associated with fertility, particularly goddesses. When the Roman Empire was nominally converted to Christianity under Constantine and his successors, the devotion was idolatrously transferred to Mary and the saints.”4
As early as the fifth century AD, cults on the periphery of the church were devoted to Mary, a phenomenon best explained by the church melding the identity of a pagan goddess into the figure of Mary. Though taking centuries, by the Middle Ages devotion to Mary flourished in the Roman church, a process that extended even into modernity. In 1854, for instance, dealing a concept brewing for centuries, Pope Pius IX declared that Mary was immaculately conceived, which means “that Mary, the most holy Mother of God, by virtue of the foreseen merits of Christ, our Lord and Redeemer, was never subject to original sin, but was completely preserved from the original taint.”5 In other words, while all the rest of us were born in sin, Mary, along with Jesus, wasn’t.
privileges and graces
But the “Immaculate Conception” is only one element in this idolatrous exaltation of Mary. As far back as AD 431, Mary was officially given the title Theotokos (“God-bearer” or “Mother of God”). This was done, however, not to exalt her but to deal with a theological issue about the humanity of Jesus. However, once this title took hold (and was not always carefully qualified), it opened the door for more. “There is no question that the entire array of Catholic doctrines concerning Mary issued out of the church’s unreserved pronouncement that she is Theotokos, mother of God.”6 Or as Pope Pius XII expressed it: “From this sublime office of the Mother of God seems to flow . . . all the privileges and graces with which her soul and life were adorned to such extraordinary measures.”7
And among those “privileges and graces” were not only that Mary was, as the Bible says, “a virgin” (Luke 1:27) when she conceived Jesus, but that she remained one the rest of her life, “perpetual virgin” as the church calls it. And though done supposedly to help preserve the idea of her purity, the notion reflects the idea of Greco-Roman goddesses like Vesta, Minerva, and Artemis, perpetual virgins all, more evidence of obvious pagan influence.
Close on the logical heels of an immaculately conceived Mary is the teaching that, sinless, she never faced death but was, instead, taken directly to heaven, called the Assumption, which helps explain her other roles, both as Mediatrix and Co-Redemptrix, feminine titles for the biblical roles of Jesus as Redeemer and Mediator. Scripture does say, “For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5, NKJV), and tha “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13, NKJV), roles never assigned, in any way, to Mary. She also is depicted as the “Queen of Heaven,” a rather unfortunate appellation given that this same phrase, “queen of heaven,” appears five times in the Old Testament (Jeremiah 7:18; 44:17–19, 25) in the context of pagan worship.
idolatry?
No wonder, then, elevated to this status, Mary is the object of veneration and prayer for millions of people around the world and is constantly credited with answering prayers and performing miracles on behalf of the faithful. The only problem? Many of these roles and titles, “the privileges and graces,” are based on centuries of church tradition built on the foundation of pagan beliefs incorporated into the early church, and all the caveats, justifications, and attempts to connect this devotion to biblical truth cannot change the stark fact that Mariolatry is not only not biblical, but, instead, starkly unbiblical.
However much the Constantinopolitans in 626 credited Mary in defeating the Persians, or John Paul II in 1981 credited her with saving his life from the assassin’s bullet, or Benedictine College credited Mary with increasing their enrollment—it was not Mary who acted in any of these and the countless other “miraculous” situations attributed to her. It could not have been. Mary was a sinner, like everyone else, and like everyone else who has died, she sleeps in the grave awaiting the resurrection (Daniel 12:2; 1 Corinthians 15:12–19).
Sincerity, piety, devotion, and prayer are fine; but sincerity, piety, devotion, and prayer don’t turn error into truth, and the truth is that Mary, however faithful a woman she might have been, and however blessed to have given birth to the Son of God, is not someone to pray to, to venerate, or to credit with miracles. And to do so is a form of idolatry, no matter what justifications are promoted by church authorities. Although Mary played a unique role in the story of salvation, Jesus remains our only Savior. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6, NKJV).
Clifford Goldstein writes from Tennessee and is a frequent contributor to Signs of the Times®.
1. Leena Mari Peltomaa, “Role of the Virgin Mary at the Siege of Constantinople in 626,” in Scrinium 5: Symbola Caelestis, ed. Andrei Orlav and Basil Lourié (Gorgias Press, 2009), 284.
