Mary Read online

  Nothing was wasted, nothing thrown away. Water used to wash hands and feet was poured onto vegetable plots or sprinkled onto dirt floors and roofs to keep the dust down. The residue of the olives after the last press was used as fertilizer. What remained of the wheat after threshing was packed into sleeping pallets and bolsters. Even animal dung was valued: the hard-packed fibrous pellets burned slow and even, an ideal fuel for cooking.

  Like all peasant peoples, the Galileans lived lean, and you could see that leanness in them. They were thin and wiry, with the dust of the land in their nostrils, their mouths, even their skin. Etched deep into their pores, the dust traced spidery diamond-shaped patterns on the backs of their hands and on their feet.

  It was hard living on a hard land. Even if you survived birth and infancy, you grew old quickly in such a place. And so you gave birth early.

  Pregnancy at thirteen sounds scandalously early to the modern ear. It brings to mind stories of inner-city girls who have sex in desperation for love and attention, then treat their newborns as though they were living toys—barely out of adolescence, children bearing children.

  It can't be, says the western mind, "not Mary." Except for the collective mind of the Vatican, which retains a less sentimental and—ironically—more realistic view of human physiology. The official Roman Catholic celebration of Mary's two thousandth birthday was in 1987, thirteen years before that of her son.

  Never mind for now that the Vatican reckoning is off, since calendars have become more precise through the intervening centuries. Whether you reckon the year of Jesus' birth at the academically agreed if peculiar date of 4 B.C.—Christ born four years before Christ—or at the simpler and popularly accepted stroke of midnight between 1 B.C. and 1 A.D., or, as we shall see, at the more likely date of 6 A.D., one fact remains: Maryam was thirteen.

  Why should we be shocked at the idea? In much of the world today, girls are still married off at puberty. And Maryam lived seventeen centuries before what Philippe Aries would call "the invention of childhood" in the west. Children were seen simply as small adults. Their ages were figured not by numbers, but by what they could do: "the age of chasing stray sheep" or "plant gatherer" or "plower."

  This is how things still were in many small Palestinian villages as late as the 1960s. There was no electricity. No running water. No indoor plumbing. No plastics, no batteries, no cars, no phones. It was still possible to sit under an olive tree and gaze out over terraced hillsides, watching a peasant farmer urge on a mule pulling a single-prong wooden plow over the parched, rocky ground. You could think romantically—and for once, the romantic view corresponded with the facts—that what you were seeing was like a scene straight out of biblical times. Even down to the deceptive peacefulness of it all.

  Young girls shepherded goats and sheep with sticks and the occasional throaty yell floating up into the dry, dusty air. Barefoot or in thin leather sandals, they picked their way over the rocks and thorns with an agility learned from their wards. By the very fact that they were out there herding the flocks, you knew that they were adolescents, just shy of puberty. Because at puberty, they would be married.

  This too was biblical. As in the life of a peasant girl in the twentieth century, so too two thousand years ago, marriage came early. It had to. When life is short, you need to grab at every opportunity to reproduce it. And life two thousand years ago was very short.

  True, there is the biblical reckoning of a long life, still echoed in Israel with the birthday toast "to a hundred and twenty." But nobody does live to a hundred and twenty, not today and not in biblical times either. Long before records of births and deaths were kept, it was an idealized lifespan, an image of being a patriarch or matriarch looking on in satisfaction at four or five generations of offspring, the visible proof of having been fruitful and multiplied. And it rolls as resplendently off the tongue in English as in ancient Aramaic and Hebrew: not just the abrupt ending of "a hundred," but the fullsome continuity of "a hundred and twenty"—the plenitude of a hundred, and then some.

  To see just how idealized this biblical number was, you don't even have to go back two thousand years. You need only look at almost any peasant population today—in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in all those countries that many westerners barely register as even existing, let alone recognize on a map of the world, until some form of military intervention suddenly brings them into the brief and fickle spotlight of world attention.

  The numbers are chilling. One stillborn per five live births. One in ten of those born, dead in the first year of life. A third dead by age five. Less than half of those born make it to puberty. And even for the survivors, life expectancy in many parts of Asia and Africa is under fifty.

  Not that the western world is far removed from such lifespans. Go back a mere couple of centuries to eighteenth-century London, and records show well over half of those born dying by age sixteen. Only ten percent made it beyond age forty-five—the same number as in ancient Rome. In nineteenth-century Massachusetts, more than a third of all women died by age twenty. It wasn't until the twentieth century, once the germ theory of disease had been accepted, and especially with the introduction of penicillin and vaccination, that lifespans began to increase to what we now take for granted in the west. In the ancient Middle East, as many as half of all children died before age five. Infant mortality was so high that Aristotle noted in his Historia Animalium that newborns were not named until a week after birth because many wouldn't live that long.

  Childbirth was almost as dangerous for the mothers. Miscarriage was common, usually due to malnutrition or disease. Of those who carried an infant to term, about one out of three died in childbirth from uterine hemorrhage or infection, often with their first delivery. Five or six live births would be high for any one mother, and since so many died in infancy or early childhood, the effective birthrate was lower than it is today in the industrialized world.

  This is why the number of siblings given for Jesus in Matthew—four brothers and an unstated number of sisters—sounds peculiarly high. To preserve the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity, the Vatican maintains that Matthew refers to cousins, not biological brothers and sisters. And it may well be right, if for the wrong reasons. Peasant families of the time were not nuclear but extended families. First cousins considered themselves brothers and sisters, and distant cousins were as first cousins are today. Whatever the state of Mary's hymen—a question we will come to later, where the answer is by no means as obvious as either the faithful or the cynics might suppose—it would certainly have been quite normal for any woman to have only one child survive into adulthood.

  The other famed biblical lifespan, three score years and ten, was the sole preserve of the fraction of one percent who were wealthy and sheltered, and even then of very few of them. The second-century philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius, raised by his grandfather after his parents died when he was young, saw nine of his twelve children die in infancy or childhood, and that was with the best hygiene, nutrition, and medical attention available in Rome.

  Such figures applied only to "normal" times, when death was caused by disease, or by the kind of gross accident familiar to farmers worldwide, or by infection; even a cut or a rotten tooth could kill you. Death by human violence shortened lifespans still further. Political upheavals sent foreign armies roaming and killing at will, with no distinction between military and civilian targets, while internecine conflicts spiraled out of hand as they still do two millennia later (think of Hutus and Tutsis, Serbs and Bosnians, Irish Catholics and Protestants, to name just a few literally mortal conflicts). At such times, death rates surge beyond predictability with, depending on the place and the century, firing squads, "disappeared" people, massacre by machete, torched villages, mass crucifixions, marketplace bombs, unmarked common graves.

  Imagine, then, the idealism with which one could even conceive of someone living to three score and ten, let alone a hundred and twenty. Imagine the power of the biblical command
to be fruitful and multiply when being fruitful and multiplying was so rife with risk, the odds so loaded against success. Who needs such a command, after all, except those for whom it is in doubt?

  When life is so short, there is no such thing as "youth." In a sense, there were no teenagers two thousand years ago, as there are none in many parts of the world today. To be thirteen when the average lifespan is so short is equivalent to being a young adult in modern western society. Westerners are shocked at thirteen-year-olds toting Kalashnikovs and shoulder missiles in African and Middle Eastern warfare, but that is because we take for granted the idea of childhood, and of the teen years as a kind of older childhood, a slow adaptation to adulthood. We forget that to be a teenager is a luxury afforded only those with good nutrition and health care. For nearly the whole world two thousand years ago, there was no such luxury. And so a social economics of demography took place. Together with the short life-span, the high risk of maternal and infant death in childbirth made early marriage and pregnancy essential to survival of both families and peoples.

  A thirteen-year-old girl was considered a woman. Menstruation had begun. She was fertile, and fertility meant maturity. What we now celebrate only as ritual—the passing into adulthood marked by rites such as confirmation or bat-mitzvah—was fact two thousand years ago. A thirteen-year-old would be a mother. A woman of forty would be a great-grandmother. By her fifties, if the survival odds worked in her favor and left at least one surviving child in each generation, she would be a great-great-grandmother. She would be truly ancient.

  Most of the Galilee villages of Maryam's time would not survive much longer than their inhabitants. Any that sheltered rebels against Roman rule would be reduced to rubble within a few decades, when the Romans suppressed all opposition with ruthless efficiency. Their remaining walls crumbled and filled in with wind-blown topsoil and dust, and are now so overgrown with two thousand years of thorns and shrub oak that you'd have no idea anything was ever there unless you happened to trip on a hidden hand-hewn stone or to catch your ankle in the top of a collapsed cistern. You need to literally stumble over them.

  The few villages that have been excavated do not attract attention as do the far more impressive ruins of Sepphoris, the garrison town a few miles north of Nazareth that would grow into a thriving city in the fourth and fifth centuries. There, you can sit in the amphitheater, tour elaborate mosaic-floored mansions, stroll marbled walkways. As always, the buildings of the wealthy are the ones that last through the centuries; peasant homes disappear back into the land.

  At least Nazareth survived, though not in any form Maryam would recognize. As it emerged from insignificance with the spread of Christianity, it was built over, again and again, and whatever remained of the village that once existed sank deeper and deeper into the ground.

  A small city now spreads out from where the village once was. Some sixty thousand people, an uneasy mix of Christian and Moslem Arabs, live under the shadow of a newer Jewish city, Upper Nazareth, built along the top of the ridge. Arab Nazareth's economy is based almost entirely on pilgrim tourism; tour buses park by the dozen near the Basilica of the Annunciation, an unmistakably 1950s edifice with echoing marbled walls built over the excavated remains of what was purportedly Maryam's house.

  Pilgrims tend to go quiet when they descend to the basement of the basilica and peer down into the darkness. They move back upstairs so quickly that their silence seems due not to awe, but to disappointment. There's not much there, after all. Just a few excavation ditches revealing crude stone walls and the outlines of a couple of small, cramped rooms. It is nothing at all like the Italianate palaces in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation. In fact it looks more like a hovel.

  But to focus on the physical remains of a house, let alone one that may or may not be as old as claimed, is to misconstrue the essence of Maryam's life. She was a peasant villager, deeply bound to the land. The very word "peasant" comes from the French paysan, meaning "of the land." And this peasant identity was central not only to her life and her son's, but also to his teachings. There is no real understanding the philosophy of the New Testament gospels—"the salt of the earth" raised up to inherit the kingdom—without understanding the depth and breadth of the peasant bond between people and place.

  Maryam would certainly have been puzzled at the idea that anyone would think of calling stone walls a house. In her world, a house was not stones, but people. It was what is still called in modern Arabic the hamula: the extended family and everything it owned, including land, livestock, and produce. Just as the Hebrew Bible talks of the House of David or the British refer to the royal family as the House of Windsor, so too peasant villagers thought of a house as something far larger and far more lasting than a dwelling.

  There were no "single-family houses" since there were no single, nuclear families. Children were raised communally, by kin. Aunts and grandmothers acted as mothers, while the one they called father— abba—was the patriarch, the oldest man to whom all the others were related either by blood or marriage.

  Of course we have no record of who Maryam's immediate parents were, and the New Testament gospels never mention them. They may well have died when she was young; her mother may even have died in childbirth, and Maryam may never have known her. This was common enough. What we do know is that the legend of the infertile Anna and the priest Joachim came into being only some three hundred years later, nurtured by a spate of novelistic "infancy gospels." These apocryphal accounts filled in the vast gaps in the earlier gospels of Matthew and Luke with vivid imagination. They became immensely popular, and helped transform Maryam into the sacred image of Mary.

  If you had told the Nazarene girl that she would be given not only a mother old enough to be her great-grandmother, but a miraculous conception of her own, a priestly background, and a privileged childhood, she'd have collapsed in giggles. Or perhaps simply taken pity on you as a fabulist. This wealth of later fictional detail was calculated to appeal to newly converted Christians in the urban centers of Turkey, Greece, and Rome, far removed from the reality of peasant life in Galilee. In that reality, you were defined not by your individual parents, but by your hamula, your village, your people. You were, in short, where you came from.

  This bond between land and people persisted through the centuries, to the extent that Maryam and her son are often cited by modern Palestinians as "famous Palestinians in history"—a claim that is, as most points made for political purposes, both right and wrong.

  Though the use of the name Palestine today is highly charged, emotionally and politically, there was no such problem two millennia ago. By the first century, the name was in regular use for the whole area between the Jordan River in the east and the Mediterranean Sea in the west—the area now covered by the State of Israel and by the Palestinian Authority, which in principle covers the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Aristotle, Ovid, and Herodotus all used the name this way. So too did the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria, and the Judean general turned Roman historian Josephus, a.k.a. Joseph benMatthias. By the time the emperor Hadrian suppressed the last gasp of Judean revolt in 135 A.D. and declared the province Syria Palaestina, he was merely ratifying existing usage. Among the conquerors, that is. Not among the people who actually lived there.

  Maryam certainly did not think of herself as Palestinian. The name itself was foreign. It was the one used by the rulers, by the Greeks and then the Romans. It rode roughshod over local distinctions between Judea, Samaria, Idumea, and Galilee, with their separate histories and ethnic backgrounds. It bound them together as Palestine for the administrative convenience of empire.

  She might be considered a Palestinian hundreds of miles away in Athens and Rome, but in her own world she was a Galilean and an Israelite, a daughter of Israel. She was a descendant of the great Kingdom of Israel that existed some eight hundred years before she was born, and that was for a time greater, richer, and more powerful than its southern neighbor, the Kingd
om of Judea. And though she could neither read nor write, she knew the history of her land as well as she knew the sound of her own heart.

  On long winter evenings, Maryam hears that history. Wedding and nativity feasts always take place in the winter months, when the harvests are all done and there's time to celebrate, and the storytelling at the end of the feast is as essential a part of the celebration as the food.

  Most of the year, the villagers are sparse vegetarians. Not out of principle, but out of necessity. The sheep and goats are needed for milk and wool. Meat is a rare treat. One of the boys might get lucky with his slingshot and bring down a rabbit or a pair of migrating quail. Or occasionally, if someone has walked the fifteen miles down to Magdala on the Sea of Galilee—and another fifteen miles back uphill—there'll be dried fish, tough and salty, with the stink of the town it comes from. Maryam won't taste fresh fish until years later, when her son joins the fishermen, and then she'll laugh at the moist softness of it, and learn to crunch the tastiest parts: the head and tail and fins. Not the eyes, though. Fishermen never touch the eyes, lest the evil eye descend on them.

  But to roast a whole sheep or a goat? That's the mark of a big event. The whole village feasts. And as the darkness closes in, they gather close around the fire. Bellies sated with the unfamiliar richness of animal fat, with cakes drenched in grape syrup and rough new wine made palatable by cutting with water, they give themselves over to the chanting of the story-teller.

  Branches of pruned olive wood burn in the open fire, scenting the night air. In the flickering light of the flames, their minds soothed by the familiar lines and rhythms, the listeners can forget the thorns and the rocks and the relentless summer dust. The broken limbs and blinded eyes and wasted bodies of the sick. The deformities of children born to die young. The families dispossessed from their land. The men working as day laborers in the garrison of Sepphoris over the ridge, or for months or even years at a time in Jerusalem or Caesarea, so that children grow up with only a vague memory of their fathers, as Palestinian children still do, their fathers away working in the oil-rich Gulf states, sending home remittances.