Exploring Mary’s Birth Story: What the Debate About Jesus' Delivery Can Teach Us
By Abigail Jorgensen,
Have you ever wondered what Mary’s birth story was like?
I have. As a researcher who studies families and as a doula/childbirth educator, I’ve read and reread the Nativity story wondering what it was like for Mary.
The doula side of me wants to know more of Mary’s experience. What did she feel when she realized that she would have to give birth in a structure made for animals? Was there a phrase or prayer she repeated as she gave birth? Did she hold Joseph’s hand as she pushed?
The researcher side of me wants to know the details of the birth. How long did she push? Did she tear, as more than half of women do? Did a midwife turn Jesus (perhaps even performing an external cephalic version, which had been practiced for centuries before his birth), or unwrap His umbilical cord from around His neck?
Theologians don’t have answers for many of my questions, but they have actually spilled a lot of ink on the topic of Mary giving birth, for reasons I’ll explain. But one of the main points of contention in this discussion over the course of Church history actually relates to a question that fascinates me.
Did Mary have a vaginal birth?
It might be easy for you to see why I wonder that, since I am someone who watches videos of both vaginal and cesarean births in her spare time. But you might be thinking, “Really? Theologians wonder whether Mary had a vaginal birth?!”
Actually, this was a very hot-button issue in the early church. But it’s not actually so much about the birth canal as it is about Jesus’s conception. Let me explain.
One of the important theological clarifications the early Church had to make was that Mary was ever-Virgin. For what are probably obvious reasons (including the fact that, other than this one incident, abstinence has a pretty good track record at preventing birth), the ever-Virgin having a child was confusing. Yet, because the Church taught that Jesus was the Son of God, it was very important to clarify that He was also not the biological son of Joseph. Rather, as Isaiah prophesied and the angel told Joseph, “the Child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 1:20; c.f., Isaiah 7:14 and CCC 496).
The early Church talked about this a lot. Some of the discussion was about whether Mary remained a virgin after Jesus’s birth (see this article for details). The Fifth Ecumenical Council (553) settled things and declared that Mary was a virgin. Later (in 649), the Council of Lateran clarified Mary bore Jesus “without any detriment to her virginity, which remained inviolate even after his birth.” That Council also declared, in no uncertain terms, “If anyone does not, according to the holy Fathers, confess truly and properly that holy Mary, ever virgin and immaculate, is Mother of God, since in this latter age she conceived in true reality without human seed from the Holy Spirit, God the Word Himself, who before the ages was begotten of God the Father, and gave birth to Him without injury, her virginity remaining equally inviolate after the birth, let him be condemned” (emphasis added). Even as recently as Lumen Gentium, the Church has declared, “This union of the mother with the Son in the work of salvation is made manifest from the time of Christ's virginal conception…then also at the birth of Our Lord, who did not diminish his mother's virginal integrity but sanctified it” (Par. 57).
You might be wondering, “Okay, Mary is ever-virgin, why all this fuss?” Well, the Catechism explains why the dogma that Mary is ever-virgin was so important: “because her virginity is the sign of her faith ‘unadulterated by any doubt,’ and of her undivided gift of herself to God’s will. It is her faith that enables her to become the mother of the Saviour” (CCC 506). So, of course, the early Church talked about Mary’s virginity a lot since people’s understanding of Jesus’ nature depended on it.
So, how does this doctrine relate to Mary’s birth story?
Well, it all has to do with the hymen. While our questions about Mary’s experience of birth may focus on the emotions she felt or the experience she had, Church teaching focuses more on biological principles and what they mean for our understanding of the faith. So, let me explain the theological significance of hymens.
The hymen is “a thin membrane of tissue that surrounds and narrows the vaginal opening.” For a long time, doctors and scientists thought that virgins had intact hymens and women who had experienced sex had broken hymens. Thus, intact hymens became synonymous with virginity.
Keep in mind that the vaginal opening can expand to 10 centimeters or more while a baby is being born (about the diameter of a bagel); so hypothetically, if a person with an intact hymen were to give birth, the baby’s head would rupture the hymen. This posed a problem for Church Fathers claiming that Mary was ever-virgin: How could she deliver Jesus vaginally and still be a virgin (have an intact hymen)?
We know now that hymens are a terrible standard for virginity. In fact, doctors cannot reliably tell anything about someone’s sexual activity based on an examination of their hymen. Further, some females are born without a hymen entirely; this is actually so common that it isn’t considered an abnormality. Further, there are plenty of types of sexual activity that would go against the Church’s norm of chastity that don’t involve hymen-breaking activity (such as lust––see CCC 2351). So a woman’s chastity/virginity doesn’t necessarily correlate to the presence or absence of the hymen.
But, again, this scientific knowledge wasn’t available to the early Church (though Thomas Aquinas hypothesized a bit about it in Summa, Question 152, Article 1). So theologians had to explain how Mary could have been ever-virgin––by the standard of having an intact hymen––and given birth (recall that quote from the Lateran Council: Mary “gave birth to Him without injury, her virginity remaining equally inviolate after the birth”). As you might imagine, this was tricky to explain away.
Theologians came up with an impressive explanation: that Mary gave birth to Jesus through divine c-section.
Keep in mind that c-sections were probably happening in 0AD. But c-sections were often usually reserved for cases in which the mother was clearly dying or already dead; they were seen as a last-chance attempt to save at least one life (the baby’s). So, in medical terms, it’s very unlikely that Jesus was born by traditional c-section. However, the Council of Trent (in the 1500s) posited that this c-section was a miraculous, bloodless version.
The Council stated, “just as the rays of the sun penetrate without breaking or injuring in the least the solid substance of glass, so after a like but more exalted manner did Jesus Christ come forth from his mother’s womb without injury to her maternal virginity.” This thinking echoed centuries of hymns and poems that used glass as a metaphor for Mary, applied from the Conception of Jesus to His Nativity (which, as this article argues, is not necessarily the correct application–––as most people who have conceived a baby and given birth will probably tell you, those are very different experiences).
The Council’s statement is not an infallible teaching, so you can disagree with it and still be Catholic, but it does show how the Church (at least at the time of the Reformation) was approaching these questions. And if you disagree with it, you’ve got company. Other patristics, including St. Ambrose and St. John of Damascus, take a more straightforward approach to the theology underlying our understanding of what happened to Mary’s hymen during birth.
In the fourth century, St. Ambrose was battling Manichaeism, a major religion at the time which argued that the physical world was bad and the spiritual world was good. Christians who heard these arguments struggled with understanding Jesus’s nature as both God and man, and in clarifying this teaching for his flock, St. Ambrose wrote a lot about Mary being ever-virgin as proof that Jesus was the child of God and Mary. In one of his letters, he explained the teaching of Mary’s virginity combined with the reality that she gave birth:
But why should it be incredible that Mary, contrary to the usage of natural birth, should bring forth and yet remain a virgin; when contrary to the usage of nature, the sea saw and fled, and the floods of Jordan retired to their source. It should not exceed our belief that a virgin should bring forth, when we read that a rock poured forth water, and the waves of the sea were gathered up like a wall. Nor need it, again, exceed our belief that a man should be born of a virgin, when a running stream gushed forth from the rock, when iron swam upon the waters, and a man walked upon them. If therefore the waves carried a man, could not a virgin bring forth a man? But what man? Him of Whom we read, The Lord shall send them a Man Who shall deliver them; and the Lord shall be known to Egypt. Wherefore in the Old Testament a Hebrew virgin led the people through the sea, in the New Testament a royal virgin was elected to be a heavenly abode for our salvation.
In other words, God is God. What’s stopping God from keeping a hymen intact during a birth?
St. John of Damascus took the same approach, throwing foreshadowed shade at the Council of Trent’s later argument: “While the conception was by ‘hearing’, the birth was by the usual orifice through which children are born, even though there are some who concoct an idle tale of His being born from the side of the Mother of God. For it was not impossible for Him to pass through the gate without breaking its seals. Hence, the Ever-Virgin remained virgin even after giving birth and never had converse with a husband as long as she lived.” (Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, Bk. 4, Ch. 14)
So, in conclusion, we don’t know if Mary had a vaginal birth. As far as Church teaching is concerned, you can believe whatever you want on the topic as long as you believe that Mary is the mother of Jesus and that she was ever-virgin.
Some of you might be wondering why I would spend all this time writing a blog post about Mary’s hymen, but I’d like to remind you that the Church Fathers wrote far more about this than I have. Birth is a transformative event that speaks volumes to how we understand ourselves, God, and the world around us. The theological implications of the details of Mary’s birth story shed light on who we are and who God is.
For me, questions about Mary’s virginity and/or hymen reflect the complications of a God who takes on flesh. For Jesus to be divinely conceived in and by a fully embodied human female, to become a fully embodied human male, boggles my mind and contorts my imagination. And while I fully believe that this occurred, I wonder and marvel at how it occurred. I like to think that this curiosity is the same that drove Mary’s question to the Angel at the Annunciation: “How can this be?” When I consider the practicalities of the Incarnation, I’m reminded of a mother’s face when she first holds her newborn, a father’s wonderment at a toddler who has learned to hug, a parent’s pride as their child displays virtue: “How can this be?”
I often wonder what these early Church Fathers would say now that we have a more specific scientific understanding of the hymen and its distinction from the concept of virginity. Would they simply say that Mary, ever virgin, gave birth vaginally and, if she had one, her hymen probably broke? Would they say that Mary, ever virgin, gave birth as light through glass for other theological reasons? As our religion provides us with opportunities to bring together Faith and Reason, I am eager to see what the St. Ambroses and Councils of tomorrow will write. As the Church increasingly promotes the voices of women theologians, I am eager to follow where they––you?––take this conversation.
God as God Incarnate means that every detail of Mary’s birth story can reflect to us God’s design and nature. Mary’s perpetual virginity and centuries of Christians thinking about her hymen reflect our wonderment at God.
