Mary in Early Christian Faith and Devotion by Stephen J. Shoemaker (review)

Stephen Shoemaker’s excellent book makes an important contribution to our knowledge of Marian devotion in early Christianity. Indeed, he is probably the first to undertake the academic task of recreating the development of Marian piety and cult up to the fifth century with a clear sense of timeline and the incorporation of a diverse range of sources.

Shoemaker uses the historical evidence convincingly to dismiss two over-simple answers to the question. The first, which may be a popular Roman Catholic or Orthodox viewpoint, is that devotion to the Virgin Mary extends back unbroken to her lifetime. There is simply no evidence for this. The gospels of Luke and John honor Mary in their different ways, but there is no indication of underlying cultic practices in the early period (such as prayers or hymns invoking her, pilgrimage to her shrines, feast days in her honor, and reports of apparitions). The second-century Protoevangelium of James and the writings of the apologists Justin Martyr and Irenaeus extend the belief in her personal holiness and special place in the divine plan of redemption, but once again, these are textual rather than material pieces of evidence. Prayers and feast days do not appear until at least the third century.

The second and diametrically opposite viewpoint, which Shoemaker relates to a Protestant-based critique of the cult of Mary, is that devotion to her did not arise until the Council of Ephesus in 431, which declared her to be the Theotokos due to the campaigns of Cyril and Proclus in opposition to Nestorius. Shoemaker argues—and I think his evidence brings to an end any doubt on the matter—that Ephesus’ designation of Mary as Theotokos was made possible by widespread Christian Marian devotion in the Roman Empire by this date and was not the cause of it.

Shoemaker’s scope is comprehensive; he draws upon a range of sources that help to strengthen our knowledge of the development of early Marian veneration. First of all, he cites texts that appear in his previous work, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (2002), in which Mary’s death is remembered through ritual and story, dating from the third century. Secondly, he puts more emphasis than previous authors on the apocryphal, heterodox corpus in which “Mary” is named as a teacher of the divine mysteries because of her special intimacy with Jesus. While many of these references are regarded as referring to Mary Magdalene, Shoemaker feels, with much justification, that where Mary is not designated specifically as Magdalene or Mother, then a conflated figure results whom early Christians could have understood as either. Finally, Shoemaker considers Mary within the more general context of the devotion to non-martyr saints, especially Thecla.

There is a lacuna in Marian doctrinal sources between the second-century apologists and the fourth-century establishment of Christianity as the state religion, when Mary became the ideal virgin and intercessor in the writings of Church fathers. Shoemaker offers two answers to this, which he considers equally plausible and could both be true in some measure: first, that devotion to Mary emerged in heterodox and esoteric circles, and was ignored for a time by orthodox theologians; second, that popular devotion to Mary, as it often does, preceded doctrinal development.

This is a well-written and valuable book which will be enjoyed by the general reader as well as the scholar, as Shoemaker takes great pains to summarize and clarify the content of each chapter. Both general reader and scholar will embrace it as a definitive account of the development of devotion to Mary from first to fifth centuries.