|
|
Home
> Editorial reviews
What the
reviewers say: |
| |
| Amazon
Booklist
Boston Herald
Jerusalem Report
|
Kirkus Reviews
Los Angeles Times
The OregonianPublishers Weekly
| Santa Cruz Sentinel
Seattle Times |
| |
|
Amazon.com |
This unusual biography blends imagination and fact in an exquisitely told tale about the most revered and admired woman of Christianity. Hazleton has been criticized for blurring the lines between research and fiction. (It's true--she does.) Nonetheless, she weaves an outstanding interpretation of this Palestinian girl, who probably went by the name of Maryam and gave birth to "the son of God" at the age of 13. At times Hazleton's style seems similar to that of Anita Diamant in The Red Tent-—fully imagining the everyday feminine details of biblical women: "Maryam learned early about childbirth. Since she was young, her grandmother has taken her along whenever there's a delivery. The old woman is in her fifties, but as alert and sharp as any shepherd girl; like all village wise women, she seems to defy age. Her name? The same as the midwife of apocryphal legend: Salome." Hazleton goes on to depict Maryam as an astute apprentice, mixing herbs and learning the craft of healing and midwifery from her legendary grandmother. Hazleton assumes that Maryam was a gifted faith healer and member of a resistance movement against King Herod--gifts and values that were obviously passed onto her son. She also offers a compelling discussion into the identity of Joseph, even questioning his existence. Hazleton sees him as a vague father-figure for Mary, more so than a father to Jesus. The main reason he exists in the Bible, she speculates, is to establish Jesus as a descendant of King David. Though purists and fundamentalists may cry blasphemy, many modern readers will find this a refreshingly feminine and respectful life study of a cherished woman, mother and icon. --Gail Hudson
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
Booklist,
February 15, 2004 |
With so many prayers, hopes, and legends surrounding the figure of Mary, mother of Jesus, is it even possible to come anywhere near the flesh-and-blood woman living in first-century Palestine? Hazleton not only helps readers to see who this Mary might have been, but also places her in a social and religious context, shows how she absorbed the goddess myths, and does it all in language that is thoughtful, evocative, and eminently readable.
"She is thirteen. Short and wiry with dark olive skin... Her shift hides the gentle bulge in her belly. She is unmarried and pregnant." So begins this "biography" of a woman representative of all. Hazleton, who has lived in the Middle East, calls upon her knowledge of the area and the people to help readers understand Mary's milieu. What did it mean to be pregnant and unmarried in Mary's time? Not much. Nor would talk of humans as gods or the idea of being born of virgins be considered especially surprising.
At times, Hazleton makes readily acknowledged speculative leaps -- e.g. Mary as a village healer who passes along her knowledge to her son -- and the text skims lightly over a few thorny points, including the fact that Jesus' tone in the Bible is often harsh when speaking to his mother and about his family. But Hazleton's musings on the Resurrection and on the meaning of Mary's virginity are dazzling to read and weighty to ponder.
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
Boston Herald,
April 11, 2004 |
by Rob Mitchell
How does a mother bear the crucifixion of a son? The Bible doesn't say. We don't know much about Jesus' mother, Mary, except that she lived in Nazareth and gave birth in the year 4 BC. She gets only cameo appearances in the gospels, and only once is she seen grieving at the foot of the cross. Lesley Hazleton, a journalist who reported from Jerusalem for 13 years, creatively fills in the blanks. Imagining a life Mary might have lived -- perhaps must have lived -- Hazleton describes her as unmarried and pregnant, a short and wiry 13-year-old with dark olive skin. She pictures Mary as the granddaughter of a midwife, listening to her grandmother's advice that "the sons of wise women can take the knowledge of women into the world of men and change it." Regarding virgin birth, Hazleton says that to dwell on the paradox is to miss the point. She suggests that to be human is to possess both reason and imagination, and she proposes that the power and endurance of biblical writing lies not in its textual precision, but in its poetic grandeur. Having given Mary expertise in contraception and abortion, Hazleton provocatively concludes that everything hinged on her decision to carry her pregnancy to term.
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
The Jerusalem Report,
May 17, 2004 |
Peasant, Healer, Teacher, Mother
by Amy-Jill Levine
A biography of the Virgin Mary? Lesley Hazleton’s compelling investigation successfully bridges a distance of two millennia
Biographies of Mary, even more so than those of her son, require leaps of faith. The New Testament -- itself compiled many years after she and Jesus lived and died -- offers surprisingly little information on the woman eventually hailed within the church as "Queen of Heaven" and "Mother of God": Paul, Mark and even Matthew generally ignore her; Luke -- after recording some splendid material concerning Mary’s encounters with the Angel Gabriel and her cousin Elizabeth -- contributes little else. Even in John’s Gospel, where Mary prompts Jesus to help cater a wedding and where she is explicitly present at the cross, she remains a shadowy figure.
How then does one create a biography of Mary? One approach is to turn to post-Biblical sources. Later legends about Mary, such as the second-century "Proevangelium of James" (yes, the book is attributed to that James, the brother, of ossuary fame), recount how she, like Isaac, was born to very elderly parents and, like Samuel, was raised in the Temple. Over time, new elements were added: In 1864, the Roman Catholic church made doctrine the long-held view that she was Immaculately Conceived (that is, conceived without the taint of original sin); in 1950, it proclaimed that upon her death, Mary was assumed bodily into heaven. But stories of her conception, death and assumption do not a biography make.
Another approach is to draw from one’s understanding of Jesus, since he must have learned something from his mother. But what image of Jesus should one use? Today, an increasingly popular image -- one that slides from romantic claims to anti-Jewish stereotyping -- is that of a peasant who rejects the legitimacy of the Jerusalem Temple; a healer who ignores ritual taboos by touching lepers, corpses and hemorrhaging women; a sage who emphasizes the feminine manifestation of the divine; and a theologian who replaces the distant, wrathful (Jewish) Deity with a benevolent, non-legalistic (Christian) "Abba." All this, despite the fact that Jesus’ followers continued to worship in the Temple; to follow Mosaic law; to worship the same compassionate Deity as other Jews. Thus, when I heard there was a new biography of Mary, I expected to find the female counterpart: a woman alienated from the "sexist" Temple and ossified Judaism; a healer who worships the Mother Goddess. We’d have another "Red Tent" or "Da Vinci Code": a good read, but one neither Biblically faithful nor historically credible.
A third approach, rarely seen but usually effective, is to combine historical investigation with explicit personal engagement. Gone are the days of so-called "objective" biography or history: The questions biographers ask, the material they choose to include, and even the tone they employ are necessarily subjective choices. Such subjectivity need not, however, make the biography incorrect (historical rigor and personal investment are not mutually exclusive); to the contrary, personal reflection by the biographer and cautious connections drawn between situations then and situations now can make the subject more alive. Moreover, when the biographer makes clear her own experiences, readers are better able to judge where personal fancy replaces historical credibility.
The author of this new biography, Lesley Hazleton, utilizes this third approach, something her literary track record would have presaged. Her numerous works, including "Israeli Women: the Reality Behind the Myth" (1978), "Where Mountains Roar: A Personal Report from the Negev and Sinai Desert" (1980), and "Jerusalem Jerusalem," her 1986 memoir of her life in Israel in the 1970s and 80s, reveal her psychological expertise and an understanding for the complexities of her subjects. Plus, this British-born psychologist and journalist is a splendid writer. Surely, this "Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi," "former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun," and "agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion," as she describes herself in the book’s introduction, would envision a Mary who would resonate with readers from diverse religious backgrounds; surely she would bring her knowledge of today’s Middle East to bear on recreating life at the turn of the Christian Era, but, given her historical care, would do so without sliding into anachronism. In large measure, she succeeds.
While Hazleton does not, and could not, present a definitive Maryam, as Jesus’ mother is known in Aramaic, her informed portrait (the bibliography runs to 12 pages) not only avoids the historical nonsense that marks so many studies of Jesus, but is also intellectually as well as aesthetically compelling. Offering less a classical biography than a detailed series of vignettes -- Maryam’s childhood, her only son’s birth and death, her fate -- and addressing such contemporary issues as women’s sexuality, Middle Eastern politics, and interfaith dialogue, Hazleton bridges a distance of two millennia without alienating the reader. To the contrary, her Maryam, "a peasant, a healer, a nationalist, a mother, a teacher, a leader," has something to say to the religious and the atheist, the theologian, the historian and the artist.
Maryam's world is alive with tradition, touched by the Divine, and soaked in blood. The peasant girl from Nazareth understood life’s hardships: the death of women, including her own mother, in childbirth; the sparse and mostly vegetarian diet; the desperate need to conserve water; natural disaster and human evil. She understood as well that she was part of a "house" or, in Arabic, a hamula, a localized identity encompassing both extended family and land, a legacy that treasured stories of Elijah, the Northern prophet able to provide food in a time of famine and to raise the dead.
And Maryam understood political realities. She knew of the Galilean hero Hezekiah, who in 53 BCE led the residents of Magdala in a revolt against Rome’s puppet-ruler Herod, and she knew of Herod’s retaliatory massacres. Maryam herself would have participated in the resistance led by Hezekiah’s grandson Judas in 6 CE, and her relatives would have been among those the Roman general Varus crucified in Sepphoris. Her very name, evoking not only Moses’ sister but also Herod’s Hasmonean wife Mariamne, served as a constant reminder that women, too, fought for freedom.
By comparing Maryam’s social situation, a daughter of Israel in a land ruled by Rome, to that of "any West Bank villager or Gaza refugee camp dweller today," Hazleton’s imagination gets the better of her historical rigor -- nevertheless, by means of this comparison and other remarks that seek to close the gap between antiquity and the present, she consistently binds past to present, Christian to Jew, Palestinian to Israeli.
Hazleton’s discussion of Mary’s pregnancy similarly traverses ideological divides. Detailing the availability of birth-control devices and abortifacients, she notes that Maryam, whom she imagines to be a healer trained by her grandmother, would likely have administered them. Thus, Maryam had a choice as to whether or not to bear a child: She can be icon for neither side in the abortion debate.
Hazleton’s Maryam is a virgin, but not in the biological, and fetishized, sense of possessing an otherwise useless membrane. Seeking to preserve the power of the paradox "virgin mother" and eloquently discussing the pernicious tendency of equating virginity with innocence and so sexual experience with a fallen state, Hazleton refuses to reduce "virginity" to biological detail. In antiquity, virginity was, as she correctly notes, "a social role, not a physical fact"; it embodied the "Untamed, untouchable…. The wild fecund source of creation." And it recollects the Great Virgin, the Magna Mater, Isis -- other mother goddesses who hold the power of fertility and whose paradoxical identifications as virgin and mother transcend the mundanely physical. The title "virgin" signifies power, not physical attribute. This biography does consider whether Maryam was raped, and one scenario has her raped by a priest and so serves to explain Jesus’ enmity toward the Temple. Although Hazleton eventually concludes that Jesus’ father is Mary’s husband, Joseph, (whom she, in line with a growing trend in New Testament studies today, posits was from Bethlehem of the Galilee, not Judea), her passionate insistence that "the idea of rape does no dishonor either to Maryam or to her son" should be required reading for all victims of sexual abuse.
As for the popular question -- made even more popular with the controversy surrounding the reputed ossuary of Jesus’ brother James -- of whether Mary had other children, Hazleton does propose that the "brothers and sisters" mentioned in the Gospels are not Mary’s children. Her reasons, however, have nothing to do with the theological claim that Mary remained a virgin pre partum, in partu and post partum, and everything to do with first-century life. The high infant mortality makes Jesus’ having numerous siblings unlikely at best; the extended family, rather than a concern to preserve Mary’s virginity, commends the view that the "brothers and sisters" are cousins.
Maryam will herself create such an extended family following her son’s death. In Hazleton’s reconstruction, Maryam does not, as tradition claims, move with the Apostle John to Ephesus. Instead, she establishes a home in Jerusalem, where she lives with other "virgins" who together form what might be seen as either a feminist kibbutz or a Jewish convent. The women combine social activism with contemplation; they stress justice and compassion; they support the needy and they heal the sick. The model may sound modern, but such communities are not unimaginable in antiquity, from Luke’s description, in Acts, of the early Jesus movement in Jerusalem, to the Therapeutae described by Philo of Alexandria, to the various voluntary associations, synagogues, house-churches and philosophical groups dotting the Mediterranean landscape.
So, what's not to like? This book cannot resist creating a bad Judaism characterized by a distant deity, corrupt Temple, and patriarchal culture and then preserving distinct from it the idealized Galilean peasant and, in this case, his mother. Hazleton’s "Yahweh" is "too grand and too remote to hear a peasant woman’s pleas." In fact, she insists, "There were no kind gods such as Jesus would become." No wonder her Maryam prays to Isis. Indeed, we even learn that Galileans would not have called themselves "Jews," since before 70 "Yehudi" referred only to residents of Judea. Notably, neither Pontius Pilate nor Paul recognized the point, as, respectively the titulus on the cross ("King of the Jews" [Mark 15:26 and elsewhere]) and Paul’s epistles (e.g., Romans 3:1) reveal.
Hazleton’s major target is the Temple. In her reconstruction, Galileans saw the Judean temple as a corruption of Israelite values and faith. The "real revolution of the Jesus movement" was the replacement of the Temple with the individual, the exchange of a system promoting hierarchy and wealth by one that drew no distinction between man and woman, sinner or saint, rich or poor. A glance at the Gospels corrects such reductionism: Joseph and Mary visit the Temple for sacrifice and pilgrimage, as did other Galileans. The Temple welcomed both saint and sinner, as Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and Tax Collector (Luke 18:9-14) demonstrates; it welcomed poor and rich, Jew and gentile. The leadership may have been corrupt, and Herod’s turning the Temple into a Hellenized tourist attraction an abomination, but even Galil-eans respected the institution, and Jesus’ followers, including his mother, continued to worship there.
The good news is that Mary can in fact be understood, and appreciated, apart from occasional anachronistic egalitarianism wishes or dualistic treatments of Galilee vs. Judea or peasant vs. elite. As with studies of Jesus, we will continue to debate the construction of Mary’s social context and how she fits within it. Ultimately, however, these details mar but do not destroy the picture Hazleton constructs. From the dark, muscular, pregnant 13-year-old of its opening to its final images of Maryam’s own resurrection by the women she loves and who love her, Hazelton’s "flesh-and-blood biography" captures in a unique and profound way why Luke’s Mary could rightly say, "all generations will called me blessed."
Amy-Jill Levine is professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School.
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
Kirkus Reviews,
January, 2004 |
"This Mary isn't the blue-robed icon painted by Fra Angelico or the young mother carved by Michelangelo, but throughout it all, Maryam remains full of grace. Sure to kick up some biblical dust."
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
Los Angeles Times, March 16, 2004 |
Bringing the Iconic Mary Down to Earth
by Bernadette Murphy
Much of the discussion surrounding Mel Gibson's controversial film 'The Passion of the Christ' centers on authenticity: Did Gibson stick to the gospel accounts as closely as he claims and if so, are they historically accurate?
With Gibson's film we have only to contrast what is on the screen with what is on the page to assess his declaration of biblical adherence. But in 'Mary,' a thoughtful, astute biography of the Virgin Mother, author Lesley Hazleton explores the possibility that events and people may have been other than what is recorded in the gospels.
The author's goal, she tells is, is to create a "flesh-and-blood" version of Mary (or Maryam as she would have been called in the Aramaic language she spoke), to "give her back to herself, starting with her real name. To... see her as the multifacted human being she was before she became an icon: a peasant, a healer, a nationalist, a mother, a teacher, a leader -- and yes, a virgin, though in a sense we have long forgotten."
Hazleton, who has roots in both Judaism and Catholicism, describes herself as an agnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery but no affinity for organized religion; she lived 13 years in Jerusalem.
As such, she brings a fresh perspective to the study of Mary, lending her background as both a psychologist and a journalist to her investigation.
She weaves historical facts with empathy and imagination to construct a plausible, visceral version of this celebrated woman. Released from the trappings of the iconic Virgin Mother (elegant blue veil, flowing light hair and pale skin, peace-filled countenance), the Maryam she constructs is a sentient Nazarene woman who lived and worked and birthed some 2,000 years ago, a woman who rejoiced with her community, healed those about her, passed on her knowledge of healing to her son, and suffered bitterly when he was crucified.
"When the gospel writers took pen to parchment to record the story of Jesus' life and death some three generations later, they did not set out to write fiction; but neither did they intend to record history. Their concern was theology, and their aim was to do what only theology can do: to create new life out of death. They wrote to inspire their readers by linking what had happened to what had been foretold."
Freed from theological constraints, Hazleton looks into the day-to-day life Maryam would have experienced as a peasant Galilean living under foreign rule -- the smells, sights and hardships of that life, along with the political tensions of the day. In considering Maryam's pregnancy, Hazleton posits that she may have been trained as a midwife and village healer and would therefore have been well-versed in the details of fertility.
Though some scholars have maintained that God needed Mary's "yes" to fulfill Jesus' conception and birth, Hazleton goes further. As a healer who would have known about the herbs used for contraception and abortion, Maryam had a choice in regard to pregnancy. "Her 'yes' was far more active than mere assent," Hazleton tell us, asserting that Maryam's role in the birth of Jesus may have been even more conscious than commonly believed.
To her credit, Hazleton is careful never to state emphatically what did or did not happen, leaving open the possibility of belief in the miraculous. Writing of the resurrection, for example, she says that "to say that it definitely did not happen makes no more sense that to say that it definitely did. For the real point of the resurrection is not literal, but metaphorical. Not physical, that is, but metaphysical." The same holds true, she tells us, for Maryam's physical virginity and the paternity of Jesus. "Maryam lived in a place and time when the metaphysical element in human conception was publicly acknowledged. All human birth was divinely empowered, and every child was thus a son or daughter of God."
The narrative follows Maryam from the age of 13, when she became pregnant, though the death of her son and into the land of her own grief. Instead of showing Maryam as placid and composed after the crucifixion, as has been depicted in Pieta art through the ages, Hazleton gives us a woman riven by sorrow, wailing as though "the whole earth is crying out in protest and despair." This is a depiction of a suffering Maryam as human and frail as the rest of us.
Readers who believe in the literal truth of the iconic Mary may have trouble with some of the more imaginative elements of Hazleton's narrative but will find fascinating the historical and earthly aspects she explores.
And those who are willing to suspend their disbelief may meet a woman even more admirable (because she's more human and real) than the statuette model of the Virgin Mother.
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
The Oregonian, March 14, 2004 |
A FEMINIST'S PROVOCATIVE VISION OF A LIVING, BREATHING MARY
by Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
Lesley Hazleton's "Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother" is simultaneously intellectual, fanciful, respectful and impious. In short: This is an original, contrary view, with something to challenge everyone who picks it up.
Hazleton's feminist view of this most famous of mothers -- revered or at least recognized by Christians, Muslims and Jews for thousands of years -- is a brave undertaking, to say the least. Who is her readership? Those ignorant or dismissive of the Marian canon will mistakenly assume from the title that there is only mythology inside. Traditional believers in the Virgin mother of a messianic Jesus may reel at the license taken. But still others (including, perhaps, many of the faithful for whom Mary provides a powerful personal comfort within a patriarchal church) will disagree with some fine points but delight in the warmblooded portrait pieced together from the very small bits of verifiable biographical history.
Was Mary (or Maryam, to use the version of her name most common to her time and place) a rape victim? Was she a midwife and healer, and did she pass her healing gifts on to Jesus? Does our modern, physical definition of virginity completely miss the point of an ancient, sacred understanding of a virginal woman giving birth to a messiah? These are just a few of the provocative notions raised by Hazleton as she blends facts, extrapolates from history, and imagines a life in Nazareth more than 2,000 years ago.
There's a great deal to be said for the intellectual exploration Hazleton encourages. A Jew educated in a convent school, she spent years as a psychologist and journalist in the Middle East and uses her far-ranging experiences and extensive knowledge of the region's faith traditions to create a backdrop against which a richer understanding of Mary can grow.
Hazleton's years as a reporter contribute to the book's cogent summaries of complex history: "The real revolution of the Jesus movement was that where the temple had once been seen as the center of all power and sacredness, that center could now be found within each person. This idea originally surfaced with the Essenes and early Judean gnostics, but John the Baptist was the first to bring it to a mass audience. . . . The temple was made of people -- the community of Israel -- not of stone . . . this was a radical notion."
Occasionally those journalistic sensibilities overtake the historian's pen, and the result is jarring. An explanation of the biblical euphemism "a hundred and twenty" for a long lifespan abruptly launches a contemporary editorial about the high rate of stillbirths in impoverished countries:
"To see how idealized this biblical number was, you don't even have to go back two thousand years. You need only to look at almost any peasant population today -- in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in all those countries that many Westerners barely register as even existing. . . ."
While such editorial points would be less disruptive if confined to a concluding chapter, they do not derail Hazleton's effort to transform the icon of the Blessed Virgin to a living, breathing girl, woman and mother. A careful reader will likely find herself contemplating a new paradigm after she closes this book. As Hazleton discovered, the provocative pastime of coming to see Mary as a real, flesh-and-blood individual is heady and relevant stuff indeed.
"I knew that the simplicity of asking who she was and who she must have been was deceptive," Hazleton writes early in the book. "Such questions lead straight into a minefield of deeply held beliefs, unwitting preconceptions, cultural assumptions, even vested interests. Yet, once I had asked them, they couldn't be unasked. I wanted to know."
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
| Publishers
Weekly, January 26, 2004 |
Readers who loved the phenomenally popular fictional chronicle of Jacob's daughter Dinah in Anita Diamant's The Red Tent will find this book about Mary, the mother of Jesus, just as enthralling.
Hazleton, who spent 13 years living in and reporting from Jerusalem, has clearly done her scholarly homework, displaying a solid knowledge of Jewish history, ancient religions, and the various Christian sectarian movements that sprang up after Jesus' death. She also knows how to write a page-turner, using vivid vocabulary and attention to detail to keep the audience on edge.
Her Jesus is akin to the peasant agitator described by many contemporary liberal biblical scholars, and her Mary is a healer, a villager whose birthright is Jewish resistance against Roman rule. This Mary sees no conflict between worshipping the virgin goddess Isis and the Jewish Yahweh. But Hazleton's willingness to move from the bare-boned New Testament references to her own feminist and anti-fundamentalist brand of speculation and assumption may be a real problem for readers who expect anything like a traditional biography. Others may disagree with her assertion that "a degree of polytheism is built into Catholicism in the idea of the Holy Trinity, for example, and in the vast panoply of saints to whom believers pray." While this book probably won't capture the hearts of theologically conservative readers, it certainly should have appeal for those tantalized and often frustrated by the great gaps of biographical detail in the New Testament accounts.
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
| Santa Cruz Sentinel, December 21, 2003 |
With Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code" posing the titillating question -- what if Jesus got married and had children? -- the time seems ripe for more wild suppositions about cultural icons. But make no mistake. "Mary: a Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother" by Lesley Hazleton (to be published March 2004 by Bloomsbury) is nothing like Brown's novel. "Mary" has the starch of real history to it -- history and archeology, cultural tradition, religious texts, and two millennia of thought.
Hazleton's writing flows like wine, and readers of fiction as well as history will enjoy it -- that is, as long as they are comfortable with the idea that imagination and empathy are necessary ingredients for such a work.
Those who revere Mary needn't worry that this book will de-mystify one of the world's great religious figures. Instead, Hazleton adds a layer to the Mary story that actual makes her more remarkable than ever.
Consider this: a 13-year-old peasant woman named Maryam gave birth, became a healer and teacher, and endured the excruciating death of her son. Just those few facts are enough to excite our imagination and spur anticipation.
Hazleton adds value to her book by looking at Mary's day-to-day life in a Middle East under foreign rule as well as at cultural issues surrounding her pregnancy, like midwifery and the meaning at that time of virginity.
Still, in her introduction, Hazleton anticipates the righteous indignation of some that she would write such a book. Her answer is as good an advertisement for this book as any dust-jacket blurb:
Perhaps my own biography is what gives me license: as a Jew who once seriously considered becoming a rabbi, as a former convent schoolgirl who daydreamed about being a nun, as an gnostic with a deep sense of religious mystery though no affinity for organized religion. Or perhaps I take my license as a woman for whom there is no heroism in "meek and mild," or as a psychologist seeking understanding, or as a journalist seeking out the real story. But if I had to point to one single motivating factor, it would be the old kabbalistic ideal of "tikkun olam," repairing the world.
This is what I want: to repair the world of Mary, and weave it anew into whole cloth. To give her back to herself, starting with her real name. To restore her strength and her intelligence, and see her as the multifaceted human being she was before she became an icon.
Given that this book won't be published until March, there is time for the idea of a historical Mary to percolate, gestate, and grow in popularity. When the book does finally hit the bookstores, it could be received in the same way the pregnant teen Maryam was received by her community: with joy and open arms.
|
| Top
of the page |
| |
|
The Seattle Times, March 7, 2004 |
Maryam: the Woman Behind the Icon
by Wingate Packard
Her name is said every day in prayer. She is the only woman whose name heads a chapter in the Quran. She is seen as a symbol of mediation between Christianity and Judaism and Islam. The year she gave birth is commemorated every time we mark a date.
Much theology is dedicated to explaining how the mother of Jesus ought to be understood, but little is known about who she was in the first century. Lesley Hazleton of Seattle has written
Mary: a Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother to discern that life. Hazleton begins by calling her Maryam, the name that the teenage Palestinian girl who bore the baby Jesus would have recognized as her own.
Look at the real Middle Eastern story, Hazleton urges. Maryam lived in Nazareth, had dark hair and dark skin, spoke Aramaic, the language of "all the peoples, tribes, and nations living under the far-flung rule of the eastern Roman Empire," and, according to the Roman Catholic Church, she was 13 when she gave birth to Jesus.
Those are the known 'facts.' Maryam left no writing and was not written about by her contemporaries. So what is a biographer to do? Hazleton's answer: "We have a wealth of knowledge about the societies, cultures, religions, and politics of the Middle East in the first centuries B.C. and A.D., all of it serving to open up our ideas of who Maryam was."
The author describes herself as a Jew educated in a Catholic convent school, an agnostic "with a deep sense of religious mystery," a woman "for whom there is no heroism in 'meek and mild'," and a journalist. She wants to see Maryam "as the multifaceted human being she was before she became an icon: a peasant, a healer, a nationalist, a mother, a teacher, a leader -- and yes, a virgin, though in a sense we have long forgotten."
The anodyne, passive images of the official Mary are jarring when you read Hazleton's passages on the reality of her people: Roman imperial occupation, repression, torture, and devastating taxation on peasants like Maryam and her clan. The author describes decades of guerilla resistance to King Herod, centered in Galilee. Maryam belonged to an oppressed, rebellious people, primed to rise up when Herod died in the year 4 B.C., the year of Jesus' birth.
Hazleton insists there is cause and effect, and connectedness between generations of ideas and people. Jesus didn't spring from nothing: the whole historical and personal context of his life gave rise to his teachings, and his mother must have had some influence. In brief fictional riffs, Hazleton imagines Maryam as a witness to Roman atrocities and as a healer. The author speculates that Maryam taught Jesus what she knew of healing, a natural way for such knowledge to be transmitted, at a time when faith healing already had a long tradition. Roman excesses would have produced a mother who nurtured his revolutionary teachings.
To discuss the possibility that Maryam became pregnant by rape, or more simply by Joseph, Hazleton recalls the stories of Greek gods impregnating humans with the aid of mortal men; the stories of Theseus, Hercules, Asculepius and Dionysus all describe conception when the hero's mother lay with a god and a human the same night. Accustomed to these myths, early Christians would have 'expected' joint human and divine paternity for Jesus, as a way to rationalize their faith.
Many virgin goddesses of the ancient world were also fertility and healing goddesses. The notion of virginity suggested "the mystery of fertility." Hazleton sees this sense of Maryam's virginity as pervading the Mary worship that came about in the very temples where Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, had been worshipped for 2,500 years.
Hazleton posits a leadership role for Maryam in a women's spiritual community after Jesus' death, as she continued his teachings. The finding of the lost gnostic gospels about Jesus in l945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt show that for the first several hundred years after Jesus' life, many gospels were written, illustrating a variety of spiritual experiences in the revolutionary Jesus movement, writings that encouraged a "democratization of religion" and included prominent roles for women.
So how do we evaluate Hazleton's work? It is not quite biography but an intelligent, trenchant puzzling over the details of history and culture, as well as a reclamation project. Readers who protest that this approach is feminist and reactionary, too far-fetched and wild in its assumptions, might consider that both the establishment of the early Christian church and the destruction of non-conforming gospels were reactionary to popular spiritual movements of that time. Her fictional accounts sometimes run too seamlessly into historical facts, but Hazleton's historical grasp of the Middle East over 2,000 years and her willingness to imagine details of the life of a mortal woman-made-goddess make Mary a tremendous accomplishment.
|
| Top
of the page |
(c) Lesley Hazleton, 2004
|