Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion
by stephen j. shoemaker
yale, 304 pages, $28
The Virgin Mary is a shibboleth. Whatever one thinks of Jesus, it is impossible to be neutral about her place in Christian doctrine and devotion. Either Mary is essential to the faith as the Mother of God, or she is a mere woman, or (perhaps) she is a quasi-pagan goddess who endangers the dignity and prerogatives of her son as Creator and Lord. There is no middle ground, no shared pronunciation by which Mary might be both the glorious Virgin Mother and the historically humble mother of Jesus. There is no historiography by which she might be both theologically necessary as the creature in whom the Creator took on flesh and historically recoverable as the Jewish peasant from Galilee. Either she is the Woman seen and foreseen in the Scriptures to become the Mother of God or she is a later historical invention who distracts from the singularity of Christ.
Of course, most scholars of Marian devotion do not put the dichotomy in such stark terms, instead leaving the reasons for Mary’s presence in Christianity open to debate and the early history of her cult unresolved. Stephen Shoemaker is one of the few historians brave enough to tackle the question head-on, and his book Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion is almost the only recent attempt at anything like a comprehensive study of the development of the cult of the Virgin in late antiquity. Byzantinist Averil Cameron called for such a reassessment more than twenty-five years ago, but thus far only disparate studies, as for example those collected by Chris Maunder in Origins of the Cult of the Virgin Mary (2008), have appeared. In his earlier scholarship, Shoemaker has concentrated on the apocryphal stories associated with the traditions of Mary’s death, resurrection, and Assumption into heaven. In the present book, he brings together more than twenty years of studies of the evidence for Mary’s cult from the centuries before the Council of Ephesus (a.d. 431) recognized her formally as “Mother of God” (Theotokos) to argue for a new version of how Mary emerged in these early centuries as a focus for Christian devotion as one of a number of non-martyr saints.
Typically, scholarship on Mary has broken down along confessional lines, with Catholic scholars looking to the early evidence for traces of modern Mariological dogmas, and Protestant scholars and their secular confrères looking rather to demonstrate that Marian devotion did not quite belong in the early Church but became a significant feature of Christian piety only after the Council of Ephesus. Neither tradition of historiography, in Shoemaker’s view, considers the evidence properly on its own terms. I would agree. The question is whether Shoemaker himself is able to avoid making a similarly bounded confessional claim.