MARY, THE VIRGIN (Mapzdp). Two great prophecies were to be fulfilled in the birth of the Messiah : the one that he was to be in a peculiar and emphatic sense the seed of the woman,' the other that he was to be the Son of David. The former, first uttered by the Almighty in the sentence pro nounced upon the tempter (Gen. iii. 15), was more widely developed by Isaiah (vii. 14) and Jeremiah (xxxi 22), and received its full accom plishment in the event foretold by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary (Luke i. 35). But how was the other prophecy fulfilled ? That the Messiah was to be the son of David we have the concurrent testimony of the O. and N. T. in a great number of passages. Moreover, we have the concurrent belief of the Jewish nation, ancient and modern, and of the church of Christ in all ages. And yet in those two documents which profess to give us the genealogy of Jesus Christ there is no notice whatever of the connection of his only earthly parent with the stock of David. On the Contrary, both the genealogies profess to give us the descent of Joseph, to connect our Lord with whom, by natural generation, would be to falsify the whole story of his miraculous birth, and over throw the Christian faith.
Two opinions have been entertained in reference to this difficulty. The one most favoured by modern writers on the genealogies (Lord Arthur Hervey, Wordsworth, Alford, etc.), is that Mary's connection with the line of David though real was purposely passed over in silence by the sacred writers, and that the combined effect of the two genealogies of the N. T. is to establish Joseph's right to the throne of David, as shown in Matthew, in virtue of his lineal descent from David, as given in Luke, and, consequently, the right of Jesus, his legal and acknowledged, though not natural son, to the same honours. The other, which is ably maintained in the article on the Genealogy of Jesus Christ in this work, and which has also the support of the learned Dr. Hales, following Light foot, of Bengel, and other authorities, is that the genealogy of St. Matthew gives the lineal descent of Joseph, while that of St. Luke gives the lineal descent of Mary, and that we are to understand this latter genealogy as stating Joseph to be not the actual son but the son-in-law of Heli, in virtue of his marriage with Mary, the daughter of Heli.
One thing is certain, that our belief in Mary's descent from David is grounded on inference and tradition, not on any direct statement of the sacred writers. Had she not been of the royal line, the adversaries of the gospel could easily have proved it by showing her actual parentage. The
carelessness of the evangelist to substantiate her descent from David, while they so unmistakeably assume that her son proceeded from his loins, appears in the incidental statement of St. Luke that Elizabeth was her cousin. This would natu rally lead to the inference that Mary, like Elizabeth, was a daughter of Aaron (Luke i. 5). Indeed it is broadly asserted by Gregory Nazianzen, and other Christian writers, that she was of the tribe of Levi. This descent, according to the flesh, would give to our Lord, it might be thought, a claim to the priestly office in virtue of his descent from Aaron. But the words of St. Paul are express on this point He of whom these things are spoken pertaineth to another tribe, of which no man gave attendance at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord sprang out of Juda, of which tribe Moses spake nothing concerning the priesthood' (Heb. vii. x3, 14). And may not this remarkable conceal ment of the very line by which he descended from David amidst the blaze of light which proclaims him to be David's son, afford an illustration of the peculiarity of his priesthood as being of the order of ?felchizedec, of whom it is said that he was without father, without mother, without descent, or, as the margin reads, without pedigree, having neither beginning of days nor end of life. But Melchizedec and Mary must both have had a line of ancestors, though their names nowhere appear in the sacred genealogies ; and there has been a ceaseless endeavour, both among ancients and moderns, to gratify the natural craving for know ledge on this subject. According to the traditions of Christian antiquity, Mary was the great-great grand-daughter of Levi who is named in St. Luke's genealogy as the great -grandfather of Joseph : it is generally agreed that her father's name was Joachim, and her mother's Anna, and the names of Panther and Barpanther are given as those of her great-grandfather and grandfather. It is said that the records of this genealogy were destroyed by Herod, but its substance kept in memory by the Desposyni or brethren of the Lord. There are, however, grave reasons against this tradition, which are discussed by Lord Arthur Hervey in his Genealogy of our Lord, and also by the writer of the article on that subject in this work. Having made these remarks on the descent of Mary, we may now turn to the history of her life.