ABSTRACT
Mary's son Jesus is the most important figure in canonical Christian scripture, and Christian believers would eventually come to accept him as their God. Mary herself is a different matter altogether. She has a minimal role to play in the New Testament, even if she is the mother of the Messiah. Mary, then, is historically real, if infrequently mentioned by name and included in few events that have historical credibility. Mary was no more a docetist phantom than was Jesus himself – who was real enough to die and who, therefore, must have been sufficiently real to be born, as Tertullian insisted in his polemic De Carne Christi. In a brief 1911 paper, Freud characterizes Mary as "the new mother-goddess of the Christians." The old mother-goddess in this instance is Artemis, whose cult was thought by historians to have been particularly strong in ancient Ephesus.
