ABSTRACT
The Mother of God is addressed and described with many vivid images. Did these originate in the mind of the liturgist, the hymnographer, the storyteller? Or did all of these draw on an oral tradition about Mary? There is a remarkable correspondence between the titles and imagery used for her and those used to describe Wisdom in earlier biblical and pseudepigraphical texts. In this chapter, I note some of these links to older titles, and then, using three sample texts only, refer to the Akathistos Hymn and the Kanon of the Akathist2 and the Protevangelion of James,3 to show that Mary was portrayed as the Holy Wisdom, one of the titles given to the Mother of the King in the ancient royal cult in Jerusalem.4
