Mary, Founder of Christianity: Views and Reviews

My book Mary, Founder of Christianity was published on the 7th of April this year by Oneworld Publications. It was an exciting moment; I had been planning a book on this topic for some time, and lockdown presented me with the opportunity to get on with the writing. Things progressed quickly after Natalie discovered Oneworld as a possible publisher and the script was sent off at the beginning of February 2021. The book was aimed at a general audience although a list of academic sources is given at the back for those who want to follow it up.

So far, there have been some sales but it is too early to tell how it is doing. What has happened since publication are reviews of the book that give me an impression of what people think about it.

There are three types of reviews:

1. Endorsements made by people whom the publisher approaches because they have some expertise in the area. The author can make suggestions as to who might be suitable. The point of these reviews is that they are meant to be positive, and to encourage people to buy the book. Of course, if someone was approached for an endorsement and they didn’t rate the book, they would have to turn down the request (no one would know that the approach had been rejected except for the people involved). An endorsement may also be refused if the potential reviewer felt that they did not have the time to read the book and give feedback. Of course, if the book received no endorsements, potential readers may notice the lack of one.

Fortunately for me, the people approached for an endorsement all gave one, at least to my knowledge. These were three feminist biblical scholars: Ally Kateusz, Mary Ann Beavis, and Jo-Ann Badley, all from the U.S. or Canada. Given the subject matter of the book, this gave me some confidence that I had written something worthwhile. You will find brief excerpts from these endorsements on Amazon and other booksellers’ sites, along with snippets from other reviews.

2. Reviews that are commissioned by a periodical or magazine. Just before publication, the publisher asks as many periodicals as possible (and the author is asked for suggestions) to include a review. This will bring the book to the attention of the periodical's readers. The periodical editor seeks reviewers with subject knowledge. Clearly, a positive review will help, but in this case the reviewer is under no obligation to provide one. They may give critical feedback. Their interest is in informing people as accurately as possible.

For me, the reviews in this category varied between all positive and a mixture of positive comment and some critical remarks. I was pleased with Nicola Barker’s review in the Spectator, which acted as an endorsement in a periodical with wide readership. She wrote with approval that I was bucking the trend in which Mary is side-lined in the modern world, even by the Vatican. Yes, I think she has a point. Pope Francis, for all the encouraging aspects of his papacy, does tend to downplay the role of Mary when put on the spot.

The reviewer in Publishers’ Weekly credited me for ‘boldness’ and ‘originality’ while taking me to task for ‘lengthy digressions’. I am happy enough with that. I thought that the ‘digressions’ were necessary, but I can see how they might cause a reader to feel that I had strayed too far from talking about Mary. Emily Wade, for Booklist, felt that I had helped the non-academic reader understand the importance of Mary, and I thank her for that, as that is exactly what the book set out to achieve.

Positive reviews in Catholic publications came as something of a surprise, given that the book denies some central tenets of Catholic doctrine. Nevertheless, the review in the Catholic Herald by a priest, Christopher Colven, recommended buying the book; I found his feedback open-minded and constructive. I could also have done a lot worse with a review in the Anglican Church Times by Henry Wansborough, a Benedictine monk from Ampleforth Abbey whom I knew when York St John had a partnership with Ampleforth. His review is mixed, but as Henry is the foremost Catholic translator of the Bible into English, I might have anticipated a bit of a battering. One thing that Henry did criticise me for I felt was inaccurate (it is difficult to know how to respond without resorting to a rather whingey letter to the Church Times!). He criticised me for not saying that Mary’s supposed descent from David does not appear in the New Testament – it arrived in later tradition – but actually I had covered this in reasonable detail. I had to scan through the book to check! Probably he was confused by my speaking of Jesus' family’s claim to Davidic descent, and I was following the gospels in regarding this as coming through Joseph. Never mind, there was enough here to recommend the book to a potential reader.

Mark Fox, for Reaction, was not so sure. He praised the book for ‘fluency’ and ‘energy’ but finished on a negative note. I sense that he is coming from a doctrinally conservative position, for he argues that, while Mary’s place in the Christian story is very important, ‘it just isn’t the one Chris Maunder would like it to be’. OK, my version of the story is not the traditional one, but the point is that we cannot prove any particular approach to be the historically definite one. We can either follow the Church line, Catholic or Orthodox, or we can be the ‘free thinkers’ whom the book refers to as its likely readers, those who seek something more satisfying that has some foundations in the hints in the New Testament. The women in the gospels have a shadowy presence which I argue can be presumed to be dramatically greater than the mainstream Christian tradition suggests. And, of course, there are many feminist Christian works that inform my view, hence the endorsements by Kateusz, Beavis, and Badley, all of whom work in this area.

Finally, given that the book tries to push beyond traditional boundaries, it was no surprise to receive a positive review from Progressive Voices, published by the Progressive Christian Network, many of whose readers I would imagine hold views that might make me seem a little conservative!

3. Reviews that are written by the general public on sites like Amazon or other booksellers. These are placed in a section separate from the endorsements and published reviews, and include star ratings between 1 and 5. They can come from people knowledgeable in the area or not. One presumes that they have read the book. These are the least predictable!

For my book, Amazon UK records a star rating of 4.4/5 and Amazon US is a little lower at 4.1. Not too bad. Yes, of course, a couple of ratings come from friends who read the book. If someone tells me that they enjoyed it, I do ask them to record the fact on Amazon. I also received two messages from total strangers who thanked me for the book, and I asked them to post a review as well, which they did. One was a postgraduate, and the other a member of the Unification Church, better known as Moonies. While I do not share his enthusiasm for the Rev. Moon, it seems that we are both seekers after the truth in our own way.

There was one really negative review from an American, clearly someone who knows the biblical studies tradition well. The review is highly critical and very long! Natalie found that this person has a fondness for long and negative reviews of a range of purchases. It is a shame that his review, being the first, rather dominates the page, especially on the American Amazon. This is frustrating as it is written with an air of authority which may put people off buying the book in financially difficult times, yet it is unrepresentative of the feedback in general. Interestingly, he gave 3 stars rather than the 1 you might expect from what he writes. He awarded them because ‘it is clear that Maunder worked hard on this project and his premise is indeed more than worthy of discussion and quite exciting’. It is a shame that this sentiment did not lead him to engage in a more constructive discussion elsewhere. He chastised me for accepting theories that had been discredited, but it depends where you do your reading; the theories that he refers to (such as identifying Mary the mother of James and Joses as the same person as Mary the mother of Jesus) can never be proved or disproved. It is a matter of opinion, and the interpretation that I put forward (the one identifying the Marys which was first recorded in the fourth century) is possible and therefore worth exploring.

Beneath all the long detail of his review, one can discern his main frustration. He is not happy with my denial of the more sensational miracles in the gospels, the virgin birth in particular, which of course one must tackle in any attempt to understand the Mary of history. My own reading is that such miracles are metaphors for something more wonderful and indeed achievable in our own times: the building up of communities, empathy and relief for the poor and vulnerable, inclusion of the outcasts, and a steadfast belief in a God who gives meaning to every human life, no matter how incidental to the political and social forces in the human world. So I don’t deny the miracles simply because of a rationalist and modern superiority complex. In my mind, these metaphors were part of folk culture, and originated in symbolic thinking that is intelligent and sophisticated, not at all simplistic and credulous. Quite apart from the discovery of DNA, there are good biblical reasons to doubt the virgin birth as history rather than metaphor: the traditions of Paul, Mark, and John show no knowledge of something so sensational. And one can easily locate the belief as it appears in Matthew and Luke in the ideas shared in the culture of the time, as well as in interpretations of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Nevertheless, that is the major sticking point for this reviewer, and it surprised me to find this reservation also being held among some of the members of the Centre for Marian Studies, which is an academic and not a denominational institute. I can see possible loopholes in some of my other arguments, but disagreeing over the historicity of the virgin birth gets one nowhere, as ultimately it comes down to a question of faith. Yet much of the seminar that the Centre for Marian Studies held at the time of the publication of the book got stuck on this very topic. And that is the fourth area of review: the non-published feedback one gets from associates and friends. One Catholic friend who disagrees with me on miracles at least understood that my book was written from a position of deeply held faith and respect for Mary. There would be no other reason for me to be involved in opening a Marian chapel to the public and serving on the trust that maintains it.

For most people, there are two contrasting positions to be held concerning the Virgin Mary. One is that all the passages referring to her in the gospels are literally true. This would be the position of conservative Christians in all three mainstream traditions, the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant (although the Protestants would not conclude from this that Mary was due special devotion). And some of these stories are to be found in the Qur’an too, so we can also include Muslims.

The second main position is to believe that all the references to Mary in the gospels are simply legends about miraculous happenings, sincerely held but in a more superstitious age. They tell us nothing about the person. This I guess is the majority view in a country like the UK, with an increasingly areligious post-Christian culture.

My book tries to find a ‘third way’ in interpreting the passages about Mary. They are not literally true as historical happenings, but they are nevertheless accurate metaphorical descriptions of the person who was Mary the mother of Jesus. As the book’s title states, Mary was an initiator of what we know now as Christianity, at least in its more positive aspects, those mentioned above about the poor and the outcasts, for example. Along with other women, Mary understood that Jesus’ Messianic destiny was not one in which he would lead an army to eject the Romans with violence, but rather one which encouraged among the oppressed Jewish population the three great gifts included in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians: faith, hope, and love. Jesus and his community practiced what we would now call non-violent resistance, and this would lead to his death.

Of course, the book is as much and more about my hope for the present-day world as it is about the Israel of two thousand years ago. It will do us no good to sit and marvel that a virgin once conceived, or that a Messiah walked on water. We need to attempt the building of what the early Christians called the kingdom of God. And I think that Mary as much as Jesus (and chronologically before him!) inspired the undertaking of this work all those years ago, and she can inspire us to renew that task again in our own time.