Life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Mother of Christ;
FROM THE NEW TESTAMENT SCRIPTURES, AND THE BEST TRADITIONS OF THE EAST, AS ACCEPTED BY THE GREEK AND LATIN FATHERS
BY
BERNARD O'REILLY, D. D., L.D.
(Graduate of LAVAL UNIVERSITY, Quebec.)
Copyright 1864
I.
Of Mary the Mother of our Lord and of His reputed father, Joseph, the Gospels only make such mention as connects them with His personal history. But when He had ascended mto Heaven, and when the religion which He had founded spread throughout the East and the West, filling not only Palestine but the surrounding countries with flourishing Christian churches, it was both natural and inevitable that Every follower of His should feel a deep interest in knowing all about these revered parents of His and their entire family. And this inquiry was stimulated by the misstatements and calumnies of the Jews regarding Mary and Joseph.
We need only recall the names of a few of the early Christian writers who record the traditions collected in Judsea itself, in the very places where the Mother of Christ and her family had lived — traditions coming down to us from the age of the Apostles, put in writing by their disciples, and repeated by the most enlightened and saintly scholars of the four succeeding centuries. Foremost among these names stands that of S. Jerome; not, as everybody knows, that he is first in the order of time, but because, in the opinion of all who believe in Christ, he labored most successfully in tne native land of Jesus and Mary and Joseph, to gather and transmit to all coming generations the inspired writings of the Old and the New Testaments, together with all the historical knowledge which could throw light on them. After S. Jerome come S. Justin Martyr, the great Origen, S. Epiphanius and S. John Damascene (both natives of Palestine), S. Gregory of Nyssa and S. Gregory Nazianzen, natives of Asia Minor, like Origen; S. Cyril of Jerusalem, S. John Chrysostom (a native of Antioch); S. Ambrose and S. Augustine, both contemporaries of S. Jerome. Such are a few of the sainted names which vouch for the existence and the authority of the traditions relating to the parentage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, to lier birth and early life lip to the point where S. Luke and S. Matthew take up the thread of the narrative in their Gospels. The same respected authorities supply the facts of Mary's life after the Ascension of our Lord. She was too dear to the heart of the early church, to the grateful veneration of the last and best beloved disciple of the Lord, John the Evangelist, not to be cared for reverently and tenderly by all these fervent followers of the Master; so that the details of her latest life and of her blessed death must have been remembered and recorded by the first generations of Christians — her own spiritual children all of them — most of them her own countrymen, and many of them her blood-relations.
With these preliminary remarks we may confidently enter upon
