Читать книгу Simply Mary - James Prothero - Страница 7

So Mary was and is a woman, born poor, in an agricultural village far from the heart of a Judaism centered around Jerusalem. Recent archaeological digs in Nazareth indicate that during the first century the population was a mix of Jewish and non-Jewish people, so Mary grew up not only amongst her own people, but among Gentiles. We don’t know her father’s profession, if he was named Joachim. There is good reason to believe his name was actually “Heli” and he was descended from David, if we believe that the genealogy in the Gospel of Luke is actually Mary’s. I’m going to go with that assumption for the purposes of this meditation. There’s a good chance that Heli’s profession was farming and that the first home she knew was a farmhouse on the edge of town. The Bible tells us that she was of the line of David, the tribe of Judah, even though Galilee was the territory of the tribe of Naphtali. But most of those northern tribes had been deported by the Assyrians centuries back and even during the time of the Maccabees, those Jews still in Galilee were pulled out. Apparently, they didn’t all pull out. And perhaps, searching for affordable land to farm, other Jews from the surviving tribe of Judah in the south had wandered north and moved into towns around the Sea of Galilee, and further inland as well. The fact that both Joseph and Mary claimed descent from David indicates that Jews from the south, of the principle surviving tribe of Judah, were populating Galilee. Certainly, there were other survivors, and Hazleton makes an error here when she presents Mary’s family as northerners who didn’t trust those southern Jews. Certainly, there was a small distinction in customs and language. We know from the Gospel, when Peter is denying Christ, that he had a Galilean accent that gave him away. But Jesus and Peter, though Galileans, were still Jews, and mostly likely, Jesus, Peter and the rest of the Galilean disciples were from southern stock originally.

But Hazleton confuses Mary’s people with the Samaritans, who were survivors of the destroyed northern tribes, mixed in with Gentile stock. The Samaritans still exist today, a small group in the State of Israel, insisting on their worship away from Jerusalem and seeing themselves as much part of ancient Israel as their more populous relatives who are descended from the tribes of Judah, Benjamin, and to some degree, Levi, and Simeon. Now, as then, Israeli Jews consider Samaritans as half-breeds. The DNA evidence supports their claim to being purer blood Jewish, as they’ve always claimed. But the dwindling numbers of the Samaritans today make the sort of antagonism known in Jesus’ time irrelevant. Mary’s family was up from the south. They were no Samaritans—though it is interesting that Mary’s son had no problem talking freely to Samaritans.

Let’s be like Scrooge and the ghosts of Christmas, and invisibly visit Mary’s home. Heli—if that is his name—is there, wringing his hands in the dark of the sleeping room he shares with Ana, for other than the light from the fire and the light through the door, the windows are narrow and high up on the wall beneath the eaves to keep in heat or cool and keep out smells in this mud-and-stone house, which would look to American eyes like a primitive adobe house. The rooms are gathered around a central courtyard, fenced off by a mud-and-stone wall around the perimeter. The roof is mud, sticks, and rushes. The floor is dirt. Ana, Heli’s wife, is on a pallet bed in the corner attended by two midwives, women of the village of Nazareth. They tell Heli to go outside, which he does. This is woman’s work. Men are worse than useless at a birthing.

And I’m reminded of all the Christmas cards I’ve seen picturing Mary having just given birth to Jesus in clean, blue robes, looking peaceful. This is an echo of the Manichaee and Gnostic concept that Jesus was cleanly teleported out of Mary’s womb and left her hymen intact. I cannot say just how much I find that unbelievable. I believe that just as her son experienced the pain and dirt and hard aches of human life, so was Mary exposed to these things. If pain and dirt and frustration were allowed to visit the Son of God, surely his mother wasn’t spared them.

So years later, Mary gave birth like any other woman—in incredible pain that no male has the ability to stand. Tests have been done recently on men with technology which allows them to experience the pain of childbirth. And the men were given a kill switch when they couldn’t stand it anymore. So far, no man has made it all the way through the test. Women are provably far better at taking pain than men.

Childbirth, even today, in the 21st century, with modern medicine, is noisy, painful, and very sloppy, with blood and amniotic fluid flowing everywhere. In the first century it was done in sanitary conditions that were appalling. Women often did not survive it, either because the birth was too difficult, or they contracted infection in the process, what used to be called “puerperal fever”, and died shortly after giving birth. Caesarian section was an option, but it invariably killed the woman. To be a wife was to be in constant risk of pregnancy, and risking death with every childbirth. Women of this era were saddened and shamed if they were infertile and couldn’t give birth—at least that’s what the stories tell. With disease and hunger and war bringing death so frequently, the insurance that the family would continue was to have as many children as needed to help on the farm, and maybe a couple of spares. This was done in hope that enough of them would survive to adulthood and become the caregivers for one’s final years. But I often wonder how many infertile women of the time secretly rejoiced in the realization that they would not risk childbirth and death.

There is a tradition amongst the Orthodox that the reason Jesus had brothers and sisters was that Mary was Joseph’s second wife. Given how often women died in childbirth, this is fully believable. Men often went through three wives in a lifetime and never divorced.

But Ana pulls through the birth, with only the usual amount of screaming, while Heli paces outside in his courtyard and is comforted by other men of the village standing about to offer support. It would have been a long vigil; if Ana took the average time, she was in agony for eighteen hours. Yet, the midwives know their job and the baby wails into the afternoon air. The umbilical is cut. The afterbirth is evacuated. Hopefully, the midwives didn’t accidentally infect Ana’s womb. We won’t know for possibly a few weeks, which is the amount of time that Puerperal Fever needs to take hold and kill a woman. Ana is cleaned up and the soiled and soggy, bloody woolen sheets that were under Ana are disposed of. Like in most pre-industrial societies, women’s blood frightens men. Under Jewish law, they were ritually polluted. The woolens will be burned as ritually unclean. The women will have to undergo a ritual bath after the business is done. Ana and the child will be ritually unclean for two weeks. Heli can’t hold his new daughter till then or risk being ritually unclean himself. And Ana should make a cleansing offering in the Jerusalem temple, an expensive journey, but one demanded by the law. I suspect that she and many poor women merely took a ritual bath and left the trip to Jerusalem for another time when they could afford it.

The midwife comes out to Heli. “You have a daughter, Heli. She is healthy.”

Lusty wailing from inside the house confirms the midwife’s account. Heli rushes in to meet his newest daughter. We are never told whether or not Mary had siblings. The fantastic tales make Ana barren except for Mary. It is possible that she was an only child. But the odds are that she had siblings, just because women became pregnant so often. It was considered their duty to do so. So it is very possible several brothers and sisters crowded into the space around their father to meet their new sister. Or perhaps she was the first-born. Her fiery confidence later in life makes me suspect that she was a first-born.

“What will we call her?” he asks.

“I will name her for the sister of Moses, Miriam,” Ana replies. And so it is. Ana is illiterate and has never read the Torah and the story of Moses. But it is read every Shabat in the synagogue, and she knows it by heart. But the old stories are in Hebrew, a language they know vaguely, and Heli and his family speak the language of the ancient conquerors, Aramaic. We cannot know what vowels they pronounced. Aramaic is still a living language, but languages change over two-thousand years. We don’t know what the name the family called her sounded like. The question of how Mary spelled her name is irrelevant. The answer is that she grew up illiterate and never once spelled it. The New Testament gives it as Maryam, and sometimes Maria, the Latin variation. I doubt there was much difference in pronouncing Maryam and Miriam.

As Maryam grows up, she begins to know the world. Since in a world of no birth control and the need for children to work a farm is the most likely scenario, I will go with my assumption that she is the eldest. Heli and Ana need sons to help work the farm and provide for their old age, presuming they live long enough to have one. Around her second and fourth years, two brothers are born and of course, her status as eldest is now irrelevant, because she is a girl. Let us call them Jacob and Jeremiah. For though she is older, they are boys, helping their father in the fields, while Maryam aids her mother in the home. But farm life is too tough for a strict definition of male and female work to hold forever. There are times when Jacob and Jeremiah are with Heli in the fields and Mary rakes out the stalls for the goats and sheep, or the cattle. Work is work and has to be done.

Given the odds, it’s quite possible that the birth of the second son was more than Ana could survive. A difficult birth, or perhaps an infection, or even both, claim her life at the birth of Jeremiah. I picture Maryam, now lady of the house at age seven, while her brothers and father labor in the fields. Heli is alone without Ana, and too poor to consider attracting another wife. Plus, another tragedy has befallen Heli. But more on that in a bit. First, let’s look outside in the farmyard and see if we can find Maryam. When she’s not working the kitchen fire or cleaning, she’s herding the goats, sheep, and any cattle. Her aunt Rachel, her mother’s sister, and her cousin Dvorah come over frequently and help her with the baking and sweeping. Rachel teaches her carding and weaving of wool, and soon she is making the family’s clothes in addition to feeding them and cleaning the home. As Maryam grows in ability, Aunt Rachel comes over less and then not at all. By age nine, Maryam manages the house for her father and brothers all on her own, leaving her little time to be a child.

From Scott Korb’s excellent book, Life in Year One, we learn that Herod Antipas, effectively the Roman-backed king of Galilee, instituted a program in the first century where his wealthy friends bought up farm lands and pushed sustenance farmers like Heli off their lands. Using something akin to eminent domain, farmers were forced to sell out to King Herod’s cronies, and then be hired for small wages as tenant farmers to work what had once been theirs. It was a clear moving of wealth in vast amounts into the hands of a few of Herod’s wealthy friends, who now became great land-owners, and farming became what we now call agribusiness. Talk about plans to create economic inequality and the rule of the 1%. Nazareth was but three miles from Herod’s Romanized capital at Sepphoris. There’s no way that Nazareth would be spared the new land policies, being so close. The record shows that Herod Antipas expropriated all but three percent of Galilean farm land this way. And that means, unless Heli was an artisan/mason/carpenter like his future son-in-law, Joseph, there’s a 97% chance he got caught up in the land-grab.8

I can see Mary standing hurt and bewildered in the courtyard of her father’s house, her brothers silently standing next to her, as the agent of the king, one Lucius, in fine clothes, backed by two heavily-armed soldiers to make sure everything goes smoothly, shoves a small bag of coins into Heli’s hand, explaining that Heli is now his employee and tenant. Mary’s family goes from growing their own food to having to live by a handful of coins from month to month, risking hunger even as the fields around their house are bursting with plenty. And then I think of the words:

He has shown strength with his arm

He has scattered the proud in their vanity

He has put down the mighty from their thrones

And exalted those of low degree.

He has filled the hungry with good things

And the rich he has sent empty away.

If we believe that these are, more or less, Mary’s words, they are bold words to be spoken in Roman-dominated Judea and Galilee. Is she thinking of the men that took her family’s livelihood to make themselves obscenely rich while driving her father into poverty?

Such an economic turn would drive young men out of farming, as only so many tenant farmers would be needed. Mary’s oldest brother Jacob will take his father’s place working the farm which they tenant; Jeremiah will follow the men that head up the road early most mornings to work in Sepphoris. The construction of the splendid, Roman-style city of Sepphoris, built to glorify Herod and Caesar, would probably draw off the few young men not needed for farming to be tektons, which the Gospels translate as “carpenters.” But tektons would work with everything, from carvings, to stone work as well as wood work. The Christmas cards show Joseph working in a carpentry shop. But it’s just as likely to see him setting stones in place up a scaffold in the Roman-style city under construction.

But Joseph is hardly in the picture yet. Mary has seen him around the village, with the other young men and her brother Jeremiah, heading up on foot in the first morning light, carrying large and small hammers, saws, large chisels, and pry bars, the tools of their trade, on their way to construct the glory of Rome and the glory of King Herod in Sepphoris. She thinks him handsome, with his new beard and the long curls dangling from his sideburns in front of his ears. She notices that he watches her back. She remembers five years ago when he stood up in the synagogue and read out a blessing before the reading of the Torah, thus entering his manhood. They have never really spoken. And like all women, she keeps her plain, brown, woolen veil over her head when she goes into the village. (Sorry, no blue. Dye is for rich people, not poor girls like Mary.) It is easy to glance at the handsome young men and then hide your eyes behind your woolen veil. Though Mary is a little alarmed and curious that on two occasions, she has taken a second glance and found Joseph looking at her.

At this point, I can’t say whether the Joseph Mary sees is not only older, but already married and widowed, being the father of James, Joses, Jude, and Simon, as well as three daughters, or whether she sees Joseph as an eligible young man in her village.9 The older widower is the way Catholics and the Orthodox would have it. Protestants prefer to believe that Jacob, Josef, Judah, and Shimon (their real names without Hellenizing them) are yet-to-be-born future sons of Mary herself.

For the purposes of this meditation I’m going to go with the second option. I realize this puts me on the Protestant side of the issue, but I am willing to stand corrected on this matter should better evidence arise. And I really, really, really don’t know. Currently, the evidence is all over the place. For every indication towards one conclusion, there is counter-evidence for the opposite conclusion. The first and somewhat telling piece of evidence leans toward Jesus having step-brothers and step-sisters. This is when Mary and Jesus’ brothers come to straighten him out in Matthew 12:47 and Luke 8:20. Such behavior would not be quite so possible were Jesus the eldest, son of a dead father and therefore head of household. Such behavior is more in line with James, the eldest, having a serious talk with his little step-brother. Of course, this is nowhere near conclusive. If Joseph has existing family, sons and daughters, and married Mary as a second wife after the death of his first, where were they when Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem and Jesus was born? And where were they when the family fled to Egypt? It’s entirely possible that the Protestant view is correct and that Mary had eight children, Jesus being but the first. But that raises other questions. If James were the next-oldest brother, and we know he was around after the crucifixion, because he is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 15, as a leader in the Christian movement at Jerusalem, why does Jesus give his mother, Mary, to John, son of Zebedee, at the cross? And even if James were son of Joseph and a first wife, why wouldn’t he step up and take care of his father’s second wife? Families did things like that. The rampant individualism which is so American, where we cut ties with all but our nuclear family (and sometimes with them as well) is not known in first-century Palestine. As if this were not enough to stir controversy, the Greek word for cousin is ξαδερφος, or in English spelling, xaderfos,.When the word used in Matthew 12:47 and Luke 8:20, it is αδελφός, or adelphos, that is, “brother.” Catholic and Orthodox writers since the time of St Jerome have been telling us that adelphos could just as easily translate as “cousin.” But if so, why is there another Greek word for cousin?

The controversy is hopeless. So I will just go with the second option for the sake of this meditation, admitting that I may well be wrong. And sadly the main reason the controversy exists at all is because so many Christians need Mary to be ever-virgin in order to satisfy their unconscious Manichaee and Gnostic tendency to equate celibacy with holiness.

Yet, despite the fact that this issue is loudly controversial, this is not really nearly as important as the other point I was trying to make above. And that is, Mary is like Jesus, because Jesus is like Mary. It’s DNA. It’s the raising Jesus had. Chances are they looked like fraternal twins but for their ages. Certainly the Lord got all his human DNA from his mother, the Holy Spirit being his father. This leads to a rather tenuous but interesting idea. We have the face from the Shroud of Turin, which has stumped most of the scientific attempts to declare it a fraud, but is, of course, unprovable as true. In it, Christ has a long oval face, deep-set, slightly wide eyes, a long, thin, straight nose, and high cheek bones. The beard obscures his jaw line, though he seems to have a pointed chin. If this is the face of Jesus Christ, it is also, by the DNA which he solely inherits from her, the face of Maryam of Nazareth. She is no Northern-Italian beauty, nor Amish white girl with brown hair, pretty eyes (by the standards of the American make-up industry), round-cheeked girl with a button nose, looking like she was on sedatives.

She had, if this is accurate, a long oval face, deep-set, slightly wide eyes, a long, thin, straight nose, and high cheek bones. Recently, I had a Mexican-American student, a young woman, who exactly fit this description. So, this is why I believe the Mary of Tepeyac Hill probably looked like the real Maryam of Nazareth more than any other appearance.

But this connection on the physical and the personality level between Maryam and her son, I will continue to follow. But for now, since she was seven, Maryam has been the woman of the house. Certainly, after the death of her mother, her aunts and older cousins came in to help, but Maryam has slowly absorbed all the domestic chores, plus any farm-work around the house she can find time to do.

The question comes up here about all those years. Most biographies are full of change and events. Even if I could actually hop into Dr Who’s tardis and observe Maryam, I doubt I could produce that. She has had the daily life of a pre-industrial peasant woman, with no interest and no dynamic events. She has never traveled up to this point, farther than a couple of miles from Nazareth. She has met no famous authors or actors or not been encouraged in her creativity or to seek education. She cooks, she cleans, she washes. She feeds the animals. She sleeps and she does it again. The only break for her is Shabbat, when all work stops and meals are what we’d now call left-overs. She listens to her father read from the Torah and the prophets. She listens to him read the Psalms.

Romanticism and the seeing of divinity in nature is still centuries away, but she likes Psalm 24 about the earth being the handiwork of the God of her people, the God of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Moses, known as Yahweh, or sometimes El. Yahweh’s name is rarely spoken aloud, being too sacred. Heli and the men refer to him as “Adonai”, the Lord. Yet, their very names as a family are full of the unspoken name. Her brother, “yirmiya”, or Jeremiah in the Greek, means “exalted by Ya(weh)”. Her cousin Elisheva’s name means “El is my oath.” Yahweh is all around them. She feels his presence both in her heart and in the ritual baths they take, the Law they follow, which means she will never taste pork, and he is in their very names that mean who they are, and their common name as a people, Isra-EL” On her few breaks from an endless cycle of work, she walks outside and takes in the beauty of the sky and the fields. It is but a moment, and she has not the freedom to launch into a movie version of the hills being alive with the sound of music. Chores await her. But her heart is moved nevertheless.