A new book argues that the mother of Jesus was a powerhouse in her own right.
For two thousand years, Mary—the mother of Jesus—has been honored in cathedrals, hymns, and paintings as the Virgin Mother of God. From Michelangelo’s Pietà to the gilded mosaics of Byzantium, she is most often depicted as serene, youthful, and eternally pure. Yet behind the halo and icons lies a very different woman, one whose flesh-and-blood life has been obscured by centuries of theological patina. According to biblical scholar James Tabor, a respected archeologist and retired professor of Ancient Judaism and early Christianity at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, recovering the historical Mary could not only reshape our understanding of Jesus but also rewrite the origins of Christianity itself.
Tabor’s case, laid out in his recent book The Lost Mary, unfolds in five radical claims: He believes that Mary was a founder of Christianity, that she was descended from royalty and the first high priest, that she was deliberately erased from Christian memory, that she transmitted the core of Jesus’s teaching, and that she is best understood as a real Jewish woman navigating the violence of Roman-occupied Judea in the first century CE. Together these arguments are Tabor’s attempt to rescue Mary from pious abstraction and revolutionize our picture of her as one of the most consequential women in history.
In the traditional story, Christianity begins with Jesus and expands through the preaching of Peter and Paul. Mary appears in the margins: a quiet presence at the manger, at the wedding in Cana, and standing at the foot of the cross. But Tabor insists that such portrayals minimize her true role.
Mary, he argues, was not just the mother of Jesus but the matriarch of a dynasty. She was mother to James, who succeeded Jesus as head of the movement in Jerusalem, and kin to John the Baptist through her relative Elizabeth. These three men—John, Jesus, and James—shaped the first decades of the Jesus movement, and Mary linked them all. It was a “family affair.” At the crucifixion in the Gospel of John, Jesus entrusted his mother to an anonymous disciple known only as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Tabor argues that this beloved disciple was James, the brother of Jesus, and that from the beginning of his ministry to the end Mary and James were closely involved in leadership.
If so, then—far from a background figure—Mary would have been the movement’s anchor, providing stability, continuity, and inspiration in the wake of her son’s crucifixion. One reason that historians have not appreciated her role, writes Tabor, is that in the 19th century, when academics began to look for the historical Jesus, “women were largely marginalized from the academy, the church, and society at large.” The marginalization of women in the 19th century, he says, led scholars to project their own social structures onto 1st-century Galilee and, as a result, to ignore the role of Mary.
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Women were marginalized in 1st-century Galilee as well but there were influential women in antiquity. Bernadette Brooten, an Emerita Professor at Brandeis University, for example, has collected inscriptional evidence for Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue that shows the influence and power that women had in ancient Judaism. This does not mean that Mary herself was influential, and there are almost no early sources to suggest that she was, but in principle Tabor is correct.
Seen this way, Tabor says, Mary was not simply present at Christianity’s beginnings; she was its first founder—a matriarch whose wisdom and endurance would have made possible the rise of a new religious tradition.
Mary’s authority was not only maternal but genealogical. Tabor argues that Mary carried both priestly and royal bloodlines, making her, and her children, “doubly royal.”
The key evidence lies in Luke’s genealogy, which scholars have long assumed traced Joseph’s ancestry. Unusually, Tabor sees this list, stretching from David to Jesus, as an account of Mary’s lineage. Unlike Matthew’s genealogy, which follows Solomon’s royal line, Luke’s includes names associated with Israel’s priestly class: Levi, Eliezer, and Jannai. Mary, he suggests, was descended both from David, Israel’s iconic king, and from Aaron, the first high priest (According to Leviticus, all Temple priests were supposed to be descended from Aaron).
One difficulty with this argument is that while Luke’s account of Jesus’s birth focuses on Mary, the genealogy itself never mentions her and instead traces his lineage through Joseph. Tabor offers a compelling argument for why we might see an allusion to Mary in Luke 3:2, but other scholars who have considered this possibility––for example Raymond Brown, the author of The Birth of the Messiah––have disagreed.
If Tabor is correct, this heritage would have given Mary’s children a claim to leadership as legitimate heirs to both throne and temple (although presumably many others could have made similar claims, if they dared). There is no evidence for this in the New Testament but some early Christian writers like the late 2nd– and early 3rd-century writers Hippolytus of Rome and Origen even described Jesus as “tribally mixed,” combining Judah’s royal line with Levi’s priestly lineage. So, too, James, Mary’s second son, was remembered in the writings of the 2nd-century Christian convert Hegesippus as wearing priestly garments, which should only have been allowed if James was seen as a member of the priestly class. The 4th-century writer Epiphanius suggests that James wore priestly garments in the Jerusalem Temple itself. These sources are much later and theologically motivated, but they demonstrate an early Christian interest in establishing a priestly lineage for Jesus. This priestly lineage must come from Mary, argues Tabor, “since Joseph had no claim whatsoever to any priestly status.”
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If Mary’s role was so central, why would the New Testament so often relegate her to the sidelines? If Mary was descended from religious and secular royalty, then why is there no more than the most oblique hint of it in the Gospels? Tabor points to what he sees as a deliberate erasure.
In the earliest Gospel, Mark, Jesus is strikingly called “the son of Mary,” an unusual way to identify a Jewish man. Joseph is entirely absent from the narrative, leaving Mary as the family’s central figure. But competing visions of Jesus’s legacy pushed Mary to the margins. In the Pauline epistles, Mary vanishes almost entirely. Paul never names her; he refers only to Jesus as “born of a woman.” Later Gospels add Joseph back into the picture and elevate him as legal father, further pulling attention away from Mary.
This silence, Tabor argues, is no accident. By erasing Mary, Paul and later Christian leaders could redirect attention away from Jesus’s Jewish family and toward his cosmic identity as Christ. The theological emphasis shifted from a flesh-and-blood dynasty rooted in Judean politics to a universal message of salvation. Mary, James, and the rest of Jesus’s family were eclipsed by Peter and Paul, who became the official “pillars” of the faith.
Similar arguments about the erasure and marginalizations of women from and in the early church have been advanced by other scholars. In a series of publications, Elizabeth Schrader Polczer, an assistant professor of New Testament at Villanova, has shown that early Christian manuscripts removed references to Mary Magdalene. A recent article published in the Journal of Biblical Literature by Yii-Jan Lin, an associate professor at Yale Divinity School, demonstrates the way that Junia—who is named as an apostle by Paul—was demoted and re-gendered in Christian interpretation. Tabor makes a similarly strong and even more controversial argument: Mary was pushed aside in favor of Paul and his brand of discipleship. In this centuries-long process, Mary was recast as the ever-virgin, submissive Mother of God; holy, yes, but historically silenced.
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Yet what if Jesus’s radical message of justice and compassion came not only from divine revelation but also from his mother?
Mary lived through poverty, oppression, and loss. Widowed young, she raised a large family in a land roiled by revolt and Roman brutality. Her experiences, Tabor suggests, gave her a profound sense of justice. In Luke’s Gospel, she speaks words often called the Magnificat: “He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty” (Luke 1:52-53).
Whether or not these words are historically hers, Tabor argues, they reflect the ethic that Jesus himself would later proclaim: the Kingdom of God belongs to the poor, the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth. Mary’s voice echoes in her son’s most famous teaching, the Beatitudes found in the Sermon on the Mount. Her vision of a reordered world shaped not only Jesus’s preaching but also James’s leadership in Jerusalem.
After Jesus’s crucifixion it was James who assumed leadership of the cluster of followers in Jerusalem. This much we know from Paul, who refers to James and his terse relationship with those leading the church in Jerusalem. Tabor pictures Mary living with and leading the Jerusalem church with James and as “the nerve center of the entire Jesus movement.” He even identifies a 1st-century house, beneath the Crusader-era Church of the Apostles on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, as their home during this period. It’s a compelling picture that embraces the social realities of the time: widows like Mary usually lived with family members, like James. (It is worth noting, however, that the Bible is curiously silent on Mary’s life after the events of Easter.)
In this light, Mary was not merely the womb that bore Jesus; she was the wellspring of his message. Arguably, this aspect of Tabor’s argument is the least controversial and most instinctive of his arguments. Catholic tradition assumes that Mary would have shared the details of the annunciation (when the angel Gabriel told her that she would conceive a child) with the young Jesus. In an article for Catholic Answers, an online database of Catholic teaching, Michael Pakaluk argued that Mary also influenced the composition of the Gospel of John.
Finally, Tabor advocates for taking Mary out of the “glass case” of Christian tradition and remembering her as a historical figure: a Jewish woman of the 1st century, raising children under the weight of Roman rule. This should be obvious, but the heavy cloud of centuries of Christian interpretation and tradition have obscured both her original religious identity and the hardships that she faced.
This begins with her name. While we call her Mary, the New Testament refers to her with the Greek Mariam, a Hebrew name that connects her to Mariam, the sister of Moses and Aaron and might be better translated in English as Miriam. This Mary is a young mother who likely gave birth in precarious conditions, fetched water daily, and struggled to feed her children. She was likely to have been young, around fourteen, when she gave birth to Jesus.
Jesus’ parentage was shrouded in controversy. Though the Gospels make God Jesus’s father, Mary’s contemporaries are unlikely to have been as generous. There are later legends, Tabor explains, that claim that Jesus was the son of a Roman soldier, but, ultimately, “from our end of history we would have to say ‘father unknown’.” Joseph may have, as the Gospels attest, protected her from rumors and cruel gossip but his support was only temporary. It is likely that, sometime after her arranged marriage to Joseph, she was widowed and raised her sons and daughters with limited assistance. Joseph, Tabor notes, never appears in our sources after Jesus turns twelve. Instead, Mary is shown alone travelling only with her children.
According to the Gospels, she was also a Jewish woman who visited Jerusalem and the Temple for religious festivals and was deeply embedded in Jewish life. She lived through political terror, as Herod’s dynasty and Rome executed would-be messiahs. In 4 BCE, just as Mary was entering adulthood, Galilee erupted in revolt. A rebel named Judas the Galilean seized the royal armory at Sepphoris and declared himself king, igniting messianic hopes among the surrounding villages—including Nazareth, where Mary and Joseph lived. Rome’s response was swift and merciless. The Syrian legate Varus marched two legions (roughly 12,000 men) into Galilee, burning Sepphoris to the ground and unleashing mass terror. The Jewish historian Josephus records that the Romans crucified some two thousand rebels along the major roads, so that as far as the eye could see, crosses lined the highways, each bearing a writhing victim.
For villagers like Mary and her family, who could see the city’s smoke from nearby Nazareth, the spectacle was inescapable: the stench of charred ruins, the cries of the crucified, the sight of their neighbors’ bodies strung up only feet from the roads they traveled daily. It was, as Tabor observes, a formative trauma—an early lesson in the costs of empire and the price of messianic hope. But it was not the most harrowing experience. By the end of her life three of her sons (Jesus, James, and Simon) had been killed for their claims or leadership. Her life was defined by endurance, grief, and resilience.
Tabor believes that restoring Mary to history means seeing her not as an ethereal figure, but as a woman whose faith and courage were forged in suffering. Her Jewishness mattered: she lived and breathed Torah, temple rituals, and Israel’s hopes for deliverance. She belonged to a community waiting for justice, and she instilled that hope in her children.
For centuries, Christian tradition has celebrated Mary as the Virgin Mother while neglecting the woman behind the myth. Tabor’s reconstruction is not without controversy, and many will debate elements of his argument, but it invites us to see Mary anew: as founder, matriarch, visionary, and survivor.
In recovering her story, we discover not only the hidden roots of Christianity but also a model of resilience that speaks across time. Mary, Tabor shows, reminds us that behind every movement are women whose voices have been silenced, whose influence has been hidden in plain sight.
Two thousand years later, perhaps the most radical act is to call her what she was: not just “blessed among women,” but a forgotten founder of Christianity.