Mary, mother of Jesus

Mary is the mother of Jesus in the New Testament and an important figure in Christian tradition. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke associate her with Jesus’s birth, while Luke includes the Magnificat, a hymn in which she speaks of the powerful being brought down and the humble raised.

Mary’s place in the Gospel narratives and later Christian devotion made her one of the most influential women in religious history. The historical importance of Mary, mother of Jesus also reflects the institutional and political setting of religious authority, where doctrine, patronage and public power were often closely connected.

In Doug Peterson’s Swords in the Desert, The five intertwined protagonists from Thrones in the Desert follow the final twelve chapters of Luke as Jesus travels towards Jerusalem. In Doug Peterson’s Thrones in the Desert, Eliana, the daughter of a Zealot, is joined by a tax collector, an enslaved woman, a palace guard and a Pharisee whose ambitions and loyalties are disrupted as John the Baptist preaches and Jesus begins his ministry. Norah Lofts’s How Far to Bethlehem? makes Mary one of the human centres of its Nativity retelling, following her journey with Joseph through Roman Judaea as several separate stories converge on Bethlehem.