Conclusion

Abstract

The character of Mary in the Matthean and Lukan infancy narratives has long been the object of much speculation by both male and female biblical and theological scholars. As women scholars in particular have repeatedly demonstrated, traditional interpretations of Mary’s textual performance of motherhood have been androcentric and patriarchal. They have idolized her by constructing her maternal body as pure, virginal, and spiritual, thereby resulting in placing her on a pedestal that is higher than the rest of womankind. As Rosemary Radford Ruether long ago pointed out:

The female roles have been both sublimated and taken over into male “spiritual” power. Male headship power controls the higher conception, gestation, birth, and suckling, and relates this to a transcendent sphere that negates the “carnal” maternity of women. It then becomes possible to symbolize the female life-giving role as the source of “death,” while expropriating the symbols of conception, birth, and nurture to males. Male eschatology is built on negation of the mother.¹