Mary B. Cunningham: From the House of David? The Genealogy of the Virgin Mary in the Early Christian and Byzantine Traditions

The genealogy of Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ, preoccupied Christian writers from an early date, especially in response to Jewish and pagan questioning of her personal status and virtue. This was a Christological issue since it concerned the background of Jesus Christ, who took on his mother’s human nature in the incarnation. The problem was complicated by the fact that the genealogies that appear in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke deal only with the lineage of Joseph; that of the Virgin Mary could only be inferred on the basis that, according to Jewish marriage law, she must have belonged to the same tribe as Joseph. Eusebius of Caesarea suggested this solution in his History of the Church and influenced later exegetes including the eighth-century Byzantine preacher, Andrew of Crete. Nevertheless, some polemical, doctrinal, and hagiographical texts, dating roughly from the seventh through ninth centuries, began to propose genealogies for the Virgin Mary herself. It is likely that such speculation (the sources of which remain obscure) arose in response both to new questioning of Mary’s legitimacy from Jewish critics and to her growing importance in Byzantine ritual and devotion. Another interesting aspect of this process is the idea, attested in some texts, that the Virgin was descended from both royal and priestly tribes of Israel. Genealogies, which served to place both Christ and his mother, Mary, within the history and fulfilment of God’s dispensation for salvation, thus remained as significant within the Byzantine theological tradition as they had been for the evangelists and their audiences. Focus on the Virgin Mary’s own genealogy reflected her growing prominence in the cultural and religious life of the Middle Byzantine period.