Every decade or so, we have a book by a scholar but written for a general audience that attempts to tell the big story of the mother of Jesus in a way that is faithful to history, biblical text, and Jewish tradition, but perhaps not to the creeds of Christian churches. This is one of those books. Others have included Marina Warner’s amazing Alone of All Her Sex, 1976, and Miri Rubin’s remarkable Mother of God from 2010. What’s special about Tabor’s is how succinctly he achieves this goal.
James Tabor may, in fact, be the most-listened-to expert on the first-century Jesus movement that you haven’t heard of. He’s written previous books, appeared on TV programs and in documentaries, and his YouTube channel has dozens of short teaching videos and more than 82,000 subscribers. He’s also an active archaeologist, which informs his book about Mary in every chapter. He includes black-and-white photographs of ancient sites.
It is the historical Mary who Tabor is after here. This is in contrast to the Mary of centuries of myth and lore, which is more the focus of those previous classics mentioned above. Tabor, for instance, claims to have unearthed new material for understanding Mary’s family background and genealogy. Also, he dives deeply into the meaning of her Jewishness. This is most important in chapter 6, “Mary’s Secret,” that offers a better understanding of what the Church has long called the “virgin birth.” (See the excerpt accompanying this review.) In this chapter and elsewhere it becomes clear how it’s impossible to understand Jesus without first understanding his mother.
