The Blessed Virgin and the Prophecies

The Blessed Virgin Mary

The Blessed Virgin Mary is the mother of Jesus Christ, the mother of God .

In general, the theology and history of Mary the Mother of God follow the chronological order of their respective sources, i.e. the Old Testament, the New Testament, the early Christian and Jewish witnesses.

Mary in the gospels

The reader of the Gospel is at first surprised to find so little about Mary; but this obscurity of Mary in the Gospel has been studied at length by Blessed Peter Canisius , Auguste Nicolas, Cardinal Newman, and Very Rev. J. Spencer Northcote . In the commentary on the "Magnificat", published 1518, even Luther expresses the belief that the Gospel praise Mary sufficiently by calling her (eight times) the Mother of Jesus. In the following paragraphs we shall briefly group together what we know of Our Blessed Lady's life before the birth of her Divine Son, during the hidden Life of Our Lord, during His public Life and afterHis resurrection.

The Blessed Virgin Mary prophesied even in the Old testament.

Genesis 3:15

The first prophecy referring to Mary is found in the very opening chapters of the Book of Genesis (3:15): "I will put enmities between thee and the woman, and thy seed and her seed; she shall crush thy head, and thou shalt lie in wait for her heel." This rendering appears to differ in two respects from the original Hebrew text.

The second prophecy referring to Mary is found in Isaias 7:1-17. Critics have endeavoured to represent this passage as a combination of occurrences and sayings from the life of the prophet written down by an unknown hand . The credibility of the contents is not necessarily affected by this theory, since prophetic traditions may be recorded by any writer without losing their credibility. But even Duhm considers the theory as an apparent attempt on the part of the critics to find out what the readers are willing to bear patiently; he believes it is a real misfortune for critism itself that it has found a mere compilation in a passage which so graphically describes the birth-hour of faith.

A third prophecy referring to Our Blessed Lady is contained in Micah 5:2-3 : "And thou, Bethlehem, Ephrata, art a little one among the thousands of Juda: out of thee shall be come forth unto me that is to be the ruler in Israel, and his going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity. Therefore will he give them up till the time wherein she that travaileth shall bring forth, and the remnant of his brethren shall be converted to the children of Israel ." Though the prophet (about 750-660 B.C.) was a contemporary of Isaias , his prophetic activity began a little later and ended a little earlier than that of Isaias . There can be no doubt that the Jews regarded the foregoing prediction as referring to the Messias. According to St.Matthew (2:6) the chief priest and scribes, when asked where the Messias was to be born, answered Herod in the words of the prophecy, "And thou Bethehem the land of Juda . . ." According to St.John (7:42), the Jewish populace gathered at Jerusalem for the celebration of the feast asked the rhetorical question: "Doth not the Scripture say that Christ cometh of the seed of David , and from Bethlehem, the town where David was?" The Chaldee paraphrase of Micah5:2 , confirms the same view: "Out of thee shall come forth unto me the Messias, that he may exercise dominion in Israel". The very words of the prophecy admit of hardly any other explanation; for "his going forth is from the beginning, from the days of eternity ".

A fourth prophecy referring to Mary is found in Jeremias 31:22; "The Lord has created a new thing upon the earth: A woman shall compass a man". The text of the prophet Jeremias offers no small difficulties for the scientific interpreter; we shall follow the Vulgate version of the Hebrew original. But even this rendering has been explained in several different ways: Rosenmuller and several conservative Protestant interpreters defend the meaning, "a woman shall protect a man"; but such a motive would hardly induce the men of Israel to return to God. The explanation "a woman shall seek a man" hardly agrees with the text; besides, such an inversion of the natural order is presented in Isaias 4:1 , as a sign of the greatest calamity. Ewald's rendering, "a woman shall change into a man", is hardly faithful to the original text. Other commentators see in the woman a type of the Synagogue or of the Church, in man the type of God , so that they explain the prophecy as meaning, " God will dwell again in the midst of the Synagogue (of the people of Israel)" or "the Church will protect the earth with its valiant men". But the Hebrew text hardly suggests such a meaning; besides, such an explanation renders the passage tautological: " Israel shall return to its God, for Israel will love its God ". Some recent writers render the Hebrew original: " God creates a new thing upon the earth: the woman (wife) returns to the man (her husband)". According to the old law ( Deuteronomy 24:1-4; Jeremiah 3:1) the husband could not take back the wife once repudiated by him; but the Lord will do something new by allowing the faithless wife, i.e. the guilty nation, to return to the friendship of God. This explanation rests upon a conjectural correction of the text; besides, it does not necessarily bear the Messianic meaning which we expect in the passage.