‘Born from a Woman’: Unveiling the Marian Mystery beneath Paul’s Allegory in Galatians 4

Introduction: Paul without Mary ¹

Paul supposedly has no Mariology. Since Mariology, or the theological study of Mary of Nazareth, concerns itself with the Biblical sources testifying to her role in the salvific economy of the Son of God, it would seem that Paul has nothing to offer to this science. If Mary has such a prominent place in Catholic thought and piety, then why does she escape St Paul’s notice, who though he writes much says little to nothing about the Virgin Mary? The one time he writes about Mary, in Galatians, one hardly notices the exalted Virgin Mother of dogmatic Mariology. In other words, if Mary is so important, how could Paul have missed that?

Yet, the Church has not hesitated to incorporate the Galatians text into her Marian feasts. I offer my own translation here, but this text should be quite familiar to Catholics.

. . . but when the fulness of time came, God sent forth his Son,

born from a woman, born under the law,

so that he should ransom those who were under the law,

so that we should receive the sonship.

And because you are sons, God sent forth the Spirit of his son into your hearts, crying, ‘Abba, Father!’ So that you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then also an heir through God. (Gal 4:4–7) ²

The Church reads Galatians 4:4–7 in the second reading on the solemnity of Mary the Mother of God. She also does so in Year B on the Feast of the Holy Family. The reading is optional for the solemnity of the Mother of God. ³ Galatians 4:4 is the entrance antiphon for Christmas eve morning Mass. But have liturgical architects exaggerated the Marian significance of Galatians 4? In other words, are we to take Galatians 4 as Marian with an asterisk? If we read the ‘woman’ of Galatians 4 as a passage of consequence for Mariology, is our piety driving us to commit an exegetical sin by imposing a meaning onto Galatians that Paul did not intend? After all, as Peter said, Paul is ‘hard to understand’ (2 Pet 3:16). Some contemporary exegetes argue that Marian readings of Galatians 4 are unfounded. Though their exegesis attempts to create distance between Paul and Mary, this essay will show that such artificial measures cannot withstand the place Mary has in the mystery of Christ and also do not do justice to Paul’s subtle recognition of that place. I argue that the key to understanding what Paul means by ‘woman’ in Galatians 4:4 is the allegory he develops between Sarah, Hagar, and their sons in the subsequent verses; when one reads these texts together, one sees a noticeably rich Mariology that Paul conceals beneath the letter. But before we search out the ‘woman’ of Galatians, it is appropriate to consider the argument against a Marian reading.

Born of a Woman: Circumlocution for ‘Human Being’?

The late James Dunn, for example, develops the argument against a Marian reading of Galatians in his work. Of the phrase, ‘born of a woman,’ he writes:

It needs to be remembered that ‘born of a woman’ was a typical Jewish circumlocution for the human person. So it refers not to the process by which God’s Son became a man (his birth), nor does it contain any reference to a virgin-birth tradition (as is now generally recognized), but simply describes his human condition—one ‘born of woman.’ ⁴

Dunn cites other occurrences of this phrase elsewhere in Scripture and in the Qumran documents. For example,

Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble (Job 14:1).

What is man, that he can be clean? Or he that is born of a woman, that he can be righteous? (Job 15:14). ⁵

Born of a woman, how can he dwell before you, he whose kneading (is) from dust and whose corpse (is) food for maggots? (1QS 11.21) ⁶

Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than John the Baptist (Mt 11:11).

Dunn is not alone in his analysis. Daniel Arichea and Eugene Nida prefer to translate γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός (‘born from a woman’) as ‘the son of a human mother.’ They explain, saying,

In the Bible this is an idiomatic expression referring simply to what is human (see Job 14:1 and Matt 11:11). The emphasis, therefore, is not on the human mother, but on the fact that the Son took upon himself human nature; in other words, he became a human being. The closest equivalent of the son of a human mother may in some languages be simply ‘his mother was a human being,’ ‘a woman gave birth to him,’ or even ‘he had a mother just as other people do’; but often a more appropriate rendering would be ‘he became a person’ or ‘he came as a man.’ ⁷

It must be admitted from these examples that ‘born from woman’ could function as a periphrasis for ‘human being.’ ⁸ At the same time, good exegesis recognizes that the words are both human and divine. Hence, it must be observed that the common origins of the human beings in question have something of an ironic literary force in their respective Biblical contexts. We hear from Luke that John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth was the recipient of no small sign concerning the arrival of the great herald prophesied by Malachi and Isaiah. ⁹ Indeed, Jesus’ mention of those ‘born from women’ has the effect of implying the miraculous birth from a womb that once was barren.

Further, Job’s mother figures prominently throughout his trials, in that she is guilty in a sense for having brought him into the world in the first place. Though his birth is the same as all, his suffering among other human beings is not. When he first receives news of the deaths of his children and loss of his property, he laments, ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return’ (1:21). After the trials touch his flesh, Job then pronounces a lengthy curse upon the day of his birth (3:1–26). It is in Job’s very coming forth from the womb that his sufferings have commenced. It would have even been better for him to have never been born or for his mother to have miscarried him (10:18–19). His present sufferings are so great as to transform—retroactively—the joy of his arrival into misery.

In a way, we might even add Paul himself to this list. He writes of his conversion,

But when he who set me apart from the womb of my mother, and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I should announce him among the nations, I did not immediately consult with flesh and blood, nor did I go up into Jerusalem to those who were apostles before me, but I departed into Arabia, and I returned to Damascus. (Gal 1:15–17) ¹⁰

Here, too, Paul is not saying that he is a human being, but magnifying the providential plan at work in his life in his very coming into the world, setting him in motion toward an apostleship he would not come to understand until its revelation from the Lord. And because the blessedness of a son is a blessing upon a mother, Paul’s mother shares in the providential mystery of his commission. ‘Let her who bore you rejoice’ (Prov 23:25).

Let us not get too carried away by the idea of circumlocution. Several factors challenge this interpretation. Though the notions be similarly linked to childbearing, there are two key lexical differences between the examples Dunn, Arichea, and Nida cite and Paul’s own words in Galatians. In Septuagint Job and in Matthew, we find different Greek for ‘born,’ γεννητός, a word that comes from γεννάω (‘to beget’) rather than γίνομαι (‘to become’). Secondly, Paul uses a preposition (ἐκ) where neither Job’s Greek translator nor Matthew do. In other words, Paul departs from ordinary idiomatic Greek that we see elsewhere, saying something that could just as easily be rendered ‘he came to be from a woman.’ It is as though Paul wishes to declare that there is something different about this child’s birth. Crucially, in the allegory of the two women that would follow, Paul uses a form of γεννάω three times, each grammatically yoked to Hagar or Ishmael. ¹¹

It is worth focusing a little more on the phrase Paul uses, γενόμενον ἐκ γυναικός (‘born from a woman’), rendered factum ex muliere by the Vulgate. Latin patristic readings likewise attest to the epistle’s significance for the mystery of the Incarnation, especially by a careful focus on the words in 4:4. St Jerome, for example, points out that something particularly anti-Marcionite can be detected in the phrase ‘made from a woman.’ When it comes to human generation, γίνομαι can carry the notion of being born. ¹² But this more commonly means ‘become,’ as it does in ‘the Word became flesh’ (ὁ Λόγος σάρξ ἐγένετο/Verbum caro factum est, Jn 1:14). This is all to say that, in support of Latin readings, the semantic notion beneath Paul’s phrase has a greater range than some readers might like. ¹³ But more than that, Christ’s being ‘born from a woman’ is an action of the salvific economy, and congenial to Paul’s last Adam Christology. ¹⁴ It is for us, as we are also ‘born of woman.’ Jerome explains,

Take note that he did not say ‘made through a woman’—phrasing opted for by Marcion and other heresies which pretend that the flesh of Christ was imaginary—but ‘made of a woman,’ in order to support the belief that Christ was born of a woman and not through her. As for his calling the holy and blessed mother of the Lord a woman instead of a virgin, this same thing is written both in the Gospel according to Matthew, where she is referred to as the wife of Joseph, and [in the Gospel according to John, where] the Lord himself scolds her as a woman. It was not necessary always to use the term ‘virgin,’ as if being circumspect and cautious, for the word ‘woman’ denotes gender more than it does union with a man, and the Greek γυνή can be translated as either ‘wife’ or ‘woman.’ But let us leave all of this aside. Just as Christ was put under the Law to redeem those under the Law, so also did he want to be born of a woman for the sake of those who had also been born of a woman. ¹⁵

Similarly, St Basil the Great, a Greek-speaking Cappadocian Father, argues that Paul carefully uses his prepositions—‘from’ (ἐκ) and ‘through’ (δία) in 1 Cor 11:12—in order to indicate the communication of nature.

But here he at one and the same time demonstrates the difference in use [of the expressions] and along the way corrects the mistake of those who think that the body of the Lord is spiritual, when he prefers a more emphatic expression to show that the God-bearing flesh is compounded from the mass of human substance. For ‘through a woman’ brings to light only briefly the thought of engendering, while ‘from a woman’ sufficiently makes clear the communion of nature between mother and offspring. Paul is not somehow contradicting himself; rather, he is showing that the expressions are easily interchangeable with each other. ¹⁶

At the very least, from these observations, we should be able to conclude that the phrase ‘born of a woman’ is sometimes used to magnify the consequence of the arrival into the world of a particularly significant child. Some of the challenge lies in our biases as modern readers, preventing us from understanding the ancients’ esteem for childbearing. ¹⁷ ‘Born of a woman’ in that sense could particularly accentuate the blessedness of such women, although ironically so in the book of Job, for he is eager to return to the womb from which he came, that is, to die.

Returning to Galatians, is Mary truly inconsequential for Paul? No. As in the Gospel of Matthew, the Virgin Birth signifies the divine origins of the Messiah. Martin Luther noticed the implications, observing that the absence of the mention of a human father is significant. ¹⁸ Michael Gorman, a more recent commentator on Paul, though he does not explore the Mariological implications, locates this passage deeply within the gospel of Paul. Gorman offers that Christ’s being born from a woman ‘was more than simply a human birth; it was, from one perspective, God’s sending of the pre-existent Son into the world.’ ¹⁹ Paul’s proclamation here in Galatians is centered in the very mystery of the Incarnation, which itself is inseparable from the Marian mystery. ²⁰ Why mention ‘woman’ at all? The soteriological nature of the passage, where every word is important, suggests strongly that she is central to the redemptive economy.

Before exploring the nuances of the allegory in Galatians, it ought to be noted that ‘born from a woman’ is embedded in the ‘new Adam’ Christology we find in Paul’s other especially allegorical letter, First Corinthians, where he says that man comes ‘through the woman.’ ²¹ Finding this notion in First Corinthians further drives home the point that ‘born from a woman’ is no circumlocution for Paul, especially because in First Corinthians he emphasizes that the original order was the other way around. In Eden, woman was, in a way, born from man. He writes, ‘For a man was not made from a woman, but a woman from a man. For also a man was not created because of the woman, but a woman because of the man’ (1 Cor 11:8–9). ²² There is something unique about the present time, however. He continues, ‘nevertheless, a woman is neither apart from a man nor a man apart from a woman in the Lord, for just as the woman is from the man, so also the man is through (δία) ²³ the woman, but all things are from God’ (1 Cor 11:11–12). Paul elevates this reflection on Eden to the kerygmatic in First Corinthians 15, when he contrasts ‘the first Adam’ with Christ the ‘last Adam.’ In a way, this makes his failure to contrast the ‘first Eve’ and the ‘last Eve’ explicitly there all the more an argumentum ex silentio that Paul has no regard for Mary’s role in the salvific economy. But must we wait for Irenaeus to make this leap? ²⁴

Excursus: De allegoria

One of the most striking elements of Galatians is the allegory of the two women in chapter four. Allegory is included among the spiritual senses of Scripture, along with tropology (the moral sense) and anagogy (the upward leading sense). An allegory is a veiled meaning in Scripture whereby one discovers ²⁵ future realities hidden beneath the literal sense of a text. While theoretically possible in any text, religious or profane, allegory is a particularly fitting consequence of the doctrine of dual authorship. As Paul himself emphasizes, to stop at the letter would mean to be cut off from the mystery of Christ. ‘The letter kills; the Spirit gives life’ (2 Cor 3:6). ²⁶ The divine and human natures of the Sacred Scriptures allow the divine author—and, mysteriously, the human too—to have infused ancient texts with hidden meaning. Allegory is what enables Paul to say, ‘the rock was Christ’ (1 Cor 10:6). On the one hand, the rock was a rock though no ordinary rock, rather a moving rock that quenched thirst—all at the level of the literal sense. But Paul goes yet further in suggesting that the rock was more than a mobile, water-giving, thirst-quenching sign of divine providence on the literal level, but in the spiritual sense via allegory the mystery of Christ was hidden in that rock of salvation.

At the outset, especially because allegory is an underappreciated mode of Biblical interpretation both in the popular and the academic domains, a brief excursus on Christian allegory is in order. Paul is not ashamed of allegorical readings of the Old Testament, though contemporary exegetes often are. But they are mistaken in their aversion. Allegory does not run afoul of contemporary magisterial teachings on Biblical exegesis. It does not neglect but rather presupposes the literal sense. On the other hand, the opposite danger is more of a threat in our day—namely that of exclusively literal sense readings, which run the risk of degenerating into Biblical fundamentalism. ²⁷ Paul lays out key principles for allegory in Second Corinthians 3, which became the pattern for both eastern and western Church Fathers’ developing their own allegorical readings of the Old Testament, and in First Corinthians 9–10 when he discusses the anti-muzzling law and the rock in the wilderness. ²⁸

Patristic allegorical readings have been historically unpopular in the contemporary Biblical academy. In Robert Louis Wilken’s words, ‘for generations, indeed centuries, biblical scholars have scorned allegory.’ ²⁹ For example, Raymond Brown regarded ‘patristic exegesis as exegesis a failure.’ ³⁰ For Brown, the worth of patristic exegesis is not in allegory but in its ability to develop doctrine ‘beyond the understanding of the biblical authors’ (e.g., the doctrines of the Trinity and of original sin). ³¹ Never mind that the allegorical mode is already present in Paul and the Gospels; they maintain that patristic sources disregarded the literal sense. But that is not the case: allegory is revealed as method. ³² Later patristic and medieval allegory only works because the method was, in a sense, already authorized by the inspired authors, canonized by the canon. ³³ It is Christ in the Gospel of John who says that Moses ‘wrote of me’ (Jn 5:46), Christ who says that Abraham ‘rejoiced to see my day’ (Jn 8:56), and Christ who drew Christological and ecclesial meaning from the cornerstone passage in the Psalms (Mt 21:42–45; Ps 118:22–23). Further, his parables themselves are quite allegorical. In other words, the parable of the two brothers is not meant to merely be a story extolling repentance, forgiveness, and sharing its related joy, perhaps not even primarily. Instead, considering that the immediate context is the Pharisees’ and Scribes’ complaints that he eats with sinners (Lk 15:2), Jesus means the brothers in the story to signify the listeners (Lk 15:11–32). The state of their condition is hidden from their view in the same moment that it is revealed in the parable, something that Jesus explains concerning parables when the disciples question him about them (Mt 13:8–17). The mystery of Jesus’ speech, and that of his disciples—Peter, Paul, the evangelists, and all the divinely inspired human authors from New and Old—is that letter is suffused with Spirit.

The Allegory of the Two Women

The coherent unity of the epistle to the Galatians can be grasped more easily by an uninterrupted reading, or, better, listening. The entire letter is something of a commentary on the Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar episode of Genesis as a means of centering the community in the one covenantal family, so to speak, and eliminating the factions between Christians of different ethnic backgrounds. Paul’s central purpose of Galatians is to rebuke the community for falling into the temptation to return to the ceremonial practices of the Mosaic law.

Judaizing Christians attempted to persuade the community that they had to adhere to the legal demands of the covenant with Moses. Paul emphatically resists this notion. Indeed, one finds a very colorful Paul in this brief letter, one who opposed Peter ‘to his face’ for trying to please ‘the circumcision party’ over the gentiles (2:11); one who scolds his audience saying, ‘O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you . . .?’ (3:1); and one who links the covenant of Moses with the Egyptian Hagar and Ishmael (4:21 ff.). Throughout, as pointed out above, the key thrust is to demonstrate that Christ came to save all who believe in him from the legal bonds of the law. ³⁴ This is why he was ‘born from a woman, born under the law.’ I contend that it is simply impossible to read ‘born from a woman’ apart from the allegory developed more thoroughly below. In order to understand ‘born from a woman,’ I present my translation in full of Paul’s allegory.

4:21 Tell me, you who wish to be under the law, do you not hear the law? 22 For it has been written that Abraham had two sons, one from a slave woman and one from a free woman; 23 but the one from the slave woman has been born according to the flesh, while the one from the free woman through the promise.

24 These things are allegorical. For the women are two covenants, one from Mount Sinai, birthing into slavery, which is Hagar; 25 and Hagar, Mount Sinai, which is in Arabia, corresponds to the present Jerusalem, for she is in bondage with her children. 26 But the Jerusalem above is the free woman, which is the mother of us all. 27 For it has been written,

‘Make merry, infertile woman who does not give birth!

Break forth and shout, who have not been in labor!

Because many are the children of the desolate one

more than she who has held a man’ (Is 54:1).

28 Now you, brothers, are children of the promise, corresponding to Isaac. 29 But just as then the one born according to the flesh persecuted the one born according to the spirit, so also it is now. 30 But what does the Scripture say?

‘Cast out the slave woman and her son, for the son of the slave woman shall never inherit with the son’ of the free woman (Gen 21:10).

31 Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman but of the free woman. 5:1 Christ has set us free for freedom. Stand firm, therefore, and do not be subject to a yoke of slavery again (Gal 4:21–5:1).

The challenge, as stated, is to read Galatians as a whole. Immediately, there are several obvious connections that grow our understanding of Paul’s notions of ‘law,’ ‘slave,’ ‘woman,’ ‘son,’ ‘promise,’ and ‘heir.’ Right away, we notice that Paul utters the phrase ‘under the law’ (ὑπὸ νόμον) at the beginning of the allegory, which he now repeats a third time.

4:4–5: born under the law, so that he should ransom those who were under the law . . .

4:21: Tell me, you who wish to be under the law, do you not hear the law?

The verse at the beginning of the allegory sets up the problem in the community. Paul asserts that Christ means to save us from a law that was not meant to abide in perpetuity. The difficulty Paul is addressing is a soteriological one—by wishing to remain under the law, they are rejecting Christ’s salvation, which is to say, adoption as sons. This is further bolstered by his likening the law to a ‘pedagogue’ (παιδαγωγός) in 3:24, and to ‘guardians’ and ‘housekeepers’ (ἐπιτρόποι καὶ οἰκονόμοι) in 4:2. If the Father has put that time to an end (4:2, 4), Paul wonders what folly would make them reject the freedom that comes with being elevated to the state that truly set them apart as heirs, that is the faith that comes through baptism, only to return to the ‘pedagogue’ that was meant to deliver them to Christ in the first place (3:24–27)?

Shifting to the mysterious women, the difficulty in establishing an implied Mariology, it would seem, is that the focus is not upon Mary but upon Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Interestingly, just as Paul does not mention Mary by name in ‘born from a woman,’ he does not at all mention Sarah by name in his complex allegory, though the free woman is thoroughly personified.

3:29: And if you are of Christ, then you are of the ‘seed’ of Abraham, [and] heirs according to the promise.

4:4: born from a woman

4:23: the one from the free woman [has been born] through the promise

This personification, moreover, of the free woman, I hold, is one of the primary reasons that the Church Fathers came to have a sort of interchangeable ecclesiology and Mariology. John Behr has written generally about the apparent conflation of Church and Mary, and what that personification means for both realities. ³⁵ Entering deeply into the patristic literature, one notices that it is at times nearly indistinguishable when certain Fathers are speaking of Mary and when of the Church. ³⁶ One could just as accurately describe this phenomenon as an ecclesial Mariology or as a Marian ecclesiology. ³⁷

Returning to Galatians, we would be remiss not to notice how extraordinarily provocative, even polemical, this would have been to any in his audience who considered themselves Jewish Christian. Children of Hagar? Yes indeed, Paul says, if one is following the ceremonial precepts of the Mosaic covenant! Not only would such a suggestion displace their national identity, it also disinherits them, and marvelously shows them that yoking their identity to Moses is a mistake; they should be fixated on Abraham. The message is clear: Not only must the community live its faith, it must also cast out its Judaizing practices in the same way that Sarah ordered that Hagar be cast out.

4:1: But I say that the heir, so long as he is a babe, differs in no way from a slave, even though he be the lord of all . . .

4:5, 7: so that we should receive the sonship . . . no longer a slave but a son and if a son, then also an heir . . .

4:30: ‘the son of the slave woman shall never inherit with the son’ of the free woman . . .

The verse at the beginning of Galatians 4 reminds the audience of the living situation between Ishmael and Isaac, which is of course why Sarah asked Abraham that Hagar and Ishmael be cast out. The development meant to take place in the Galatian church could not be clearer: they are to cast out their Judaizing ways. The passage from Genesis Paul cites in v.30, removing the names, is nothing less than the voice of Sarah to her husband. The original reads, ‘Cast out this slave woman and her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit with my son, Isaac’ (Gen 21:10 [LXX]). Paul regards this as authoritative and inspired, calling it ‘the Scripture.’ Now, this request may have seemed a little harsh (σκληρός) to Abraham, but God backs up the words of Sarah, saying to Abraham, ‘Do not let this saying be harsh before you concerning the child and concerning the slave woman; in all whatsoever Sarah should say to you, listen to her voice, because in Isaac shall your seed be called’ (Gen 21:12). What contemporary commentators take as jealousy on Sarah’s part, Paul reads—rightly—as a divine endorsement of the eviction. We may find this a harsh (σκληρός) saying with Abraham, but both Abraham and Paul come to see the spirit beneath the letter. ‘For whatsoever was previously written was all written for our instruction’ (Rom 15:4). Thus, the division between Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, was not really about the events that took place then, but it proves to spiritually signify the present-day reality of Paul’s Galatians. The promise’s being named ‘in Isaac’ is a point that Paul makes explicitly clear in Romans, too, where one sees that this allegory is in the background because the promises are ‘through Isaac’ (Rom 9:7–8). ³⁸

What is ‘the promise’ (ἐπαγγελία)? Promise is a remarkably significant word for Paul. ³⁹ ‘Promise’ (ἐπαγγελία) is organically related to the word ‘gospel’ (εὐαγγελία), and Paul is particularly apt to draw out the connections between these two notions. Promise nearly always pertains to the reception of the inheritance promised to Abraham which is to pass to Isaac, a particularly important moment in the salvific economy of the Old Testament. In fact, Paul uses a term, found before him only in Philo, ⁴⁰ to describe Abraham’s reception of this good news, προευαγγελίζομαι, which means ‘to announce beforehand’ or ‘to foretell,’ or, better yet, ‘to foretell the gospel.’ Προευαγγελίζομαι captures in a singular term—used only once in the New Testament in Gal 3:8—Paul’s thought concerning the place of Abraham in the salvific economy. Gospel promises that pertained to his seed, Christ, and to the Christian community (also Christ by participation) were announced to him in advance of their coming to be.

The reason this is so important for Paul’s thought is that he intends to anchor all Christians in the patriarchs beyond Moses in the one ‘seed’ that is Abraham’s son Isaac. There must not be an inclination to practice the ceremonial precepts of the law, but of finding oneself ‘in the family’ of Abraham. So, throughout the epistles, especially in Romans and Galatians, he connects believers with Isaac in order to link them with the promise. See, for example, these usages:

Rom 4:13: For the promise to Abraham or to his seed, the very inheritance of the world, was not through the law, but through the justification of faith.

Rom 9:6–9: For these members of Israel are not all from Israel, since it is not the case that all the children are the ‘seed’ of Abraham, but ‘in Isaac shall your seed be called.’ That is, these children of the flesh are not the children of God, but the children of the promise are considered as the ‘seed.’ For this is the word of promise, ‘about this time, I will come and there will be a son to Sarah.’

Gal 3:16–18: Now the promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. It did not say, ‘and to the seeds’ as over many, but as over one, ‘and to your seed,’ which is Christ. But I say this, the law does not, unto the voiding of the promise, annul a covenant ratified four hundred and thirty years in advance by God [unto Christ]. For if the inheritance is from the law, it is no longer from the promise. But God has freely given it to Abraham through a promise.

Eph 2:11–13: Therefore, remember that you were once gentiles in the flesh, being called uncircumcision by what is called circumcision in the flesh made by hands, since you were at that time apart from Christ, estranged from the citizenship of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, not having hope and being godless in the world. But now you are in Christ Jesus; you who were once far have become near in the blood of Christ.

Heb 11:17–19: By faith Abraham being tested had offered Isaac, and the one who received the promises offered his only-begotten; to whom it had been spoken that ‘in Isaac shall your seed be called’ (Gen 21:12), considering that God could even raise from the dead, whence he recovered him though in a symbol.

This word ‘promise’ is a key to any sort of veiled Pauline Mariology inasmuch as it is God’s fulfillment of incorporation into the Church through Christ, the true seed of Abraham who was born of a woman. Clearly these readings indicate that it was not the ceremonial act of circumcision that brought justification to Abraham but faith. Likewise, it can be so for Gentile converts to Christianity. Proof of this is that Abraham was uncircumcised when he first received the promise of a multitude of descendants (Gen 15:1–6). But this promise is given to the seed of Abraham, which is Christ (Gal 3:16).

It is striking that while Paul freely names Hagar, nowhere in the allegory does Paul name Sarah, but the woman corresponding to her he identifies simply as ‘the free woman’ and ‘the Jerusalem above.’ Just as Isaac disappears in Galatians 3 and Christ is the ‘seed’ of Abraham, so also Sarah vanishes in Galatians 4 and ‘the free woman’ or ‘the Jerusalem above’ is the mother giving life to all who believe. Now, one could argue that Paul has nothing Marian in mind in the allegory; when, however, one reads Galatians as a unit and notices the clear mention of the woman from whom Christ was made (4:4) in order to ransom those who are ‘under the law’ (4:5) in order that we should receive ‘sonship’ (4:6), and one’s status is meant to be transformed from that of a slave into that of a son, the heir (4:7), these elements are magnified in the allegory. Sarah is not under the law, nor is her son Isaac, but Christ and his mother are. Now, the Jerusalem above is the free woman, invoking the image of the assumed woman, crowned queen of heaven. John of Damascus makes this connection explicitly, Mary as Jerusalem—in conversation with Galatians, no less—when he says,

For the living city of the Lord God of hosts is lifted up, and kings bring a priceless gift from the temple of the Lord, the wonder of Sion (cf. Ps 68:30 [LXX]), to the Jerusalem on high who is free and is their mother (Gal 4:26): those who were appointed by Christ as rulers of all the earth—the Apostles—escort to heaven the ever-virgin Mother of God! ⁴¹

In my view, John Damascene has understood the ‘hard to understand’ Paul. For the Damascene, Mary is that ‘living city’ who is personally, or mystically, Paul’s Jerusalem above. In this sense, Mary assumed and crowned is more fittingly the ‘woman’ personifying the ‘new covenant’ (‘the women are two covenants . . . the Jerusalem above is the free woman, which is our mother,’ Gal 4:24, 26). Further, the free woman—again, not Sarah, as this is allegory—is the mother of many children (4:27) and is the mother of the Christian community (4:31) who participate as children of the promise in the sonship that is the seed, Isaac (4:28). Mysteriously, the Virgin-Mother shares in common with Sarah that each give way to the Virgin-Mother Church.

Economically, the multiplication of Mary’s seed begins at the foot of the Cross. In the adoption of the beloved disciple at the foot of the Cross. ⁴² This ‘adoption,’ as Paul puts it, is a reality meant for all believers, one that is both Marian and ecclesial. ⁴³ Thus, Cyril of Alexandria’s statement ‘let us praise with songs of joy Mary ever-virgin, who herself is clearly the holy Church’ is simply good exegesis. ⁴⁴

But the mystery of the Cross is also present in mystery in Paul’s Galatians allegory by way of context. The other Old Testament passage Paul cites in the allegory above is from Isaiah 54, immediately follows the Isaian suffering servant song. Paul addresses the ‘Jerusalem above’ woman, telling her in Isaiah’s words,

Make merry, infertile woman who does not give birth!

Break forth and shout, who have not been in labor!

Because many are the children of the desolate one

more than she who has held a man.

Again, Paul says more by what he implies. Imagine two kayakers braving furious rapids in their boats. After having passed through challenging rapids into relative calm, the one calls out to the other, ‘Life is but a dream!’ This verse does something similar. In the context of Galatians, it calls to mind, on the one hand, the suffering of Sarah’s infertility as she shared her husband Abraham with Hagar and her eventual joy in bearing the promise-bearer Isaac. This passage in the context of Isaiah calls to mind, on the other hand, the suffering of the mother of the suffering servant, none other than Mary at the foot of the cross, and the jubilation that is hers in Christ’s glorious resurrection and exaltation, knowing that she becomes the mother of all who believe in his name.

Conclusion—The Seed of Mary

If we read ‘born from a woman’ merely as ‘human being,’ that would erase Paul’s mysterious woman, whom he introduces to us at the ‘fullness of time.’ The thread Paul stitches between woman, law, sonship, and slavery in Gal 4:4 he weaves back into his famous allegory of the two women and the two covenants later in the chapter. The Mary–Church link is not such a radical proposal, as the identification of the Church as the body of Christ is a common thread in Pauline thought. ⁴⁵ Further, it seems fitting that Paul, much in the way that the Old Testament authors concealed spiritual mysteries in the carnal letter, should have concealed the Marian mystery in his literal words, as shown above. This is especially true considering his comparison of the relationship of Christ and the Church to that of husband and wife in Ephesians (Eph 5:23: ‘just as a husband is head of the wife [γυναικός], so also Christ is the head of the Church, and he is the savior of the body’). Paul is evangelizing, bestowing the ‘preaching’ (κήρυγμα) of Christ to the Gentiles, and so it stands to reason that New Testament epistolary style, ad hoc by nature, would not set out to develop a robust Mariology that explicitly accounts for Mary’s virginal fecundity, motherhood, and heavenly marriage any more than we would expect to find a doctrine of Christ spelled out there in post-Chalcedonian terms.

An interesting consequence of this reading of Galatians is that it suggests an awareness similar to what one finds in Revelation, wherein Mary is not only the mother of Jesus but a heavenly ‘woman’ who is mystically an ecclesial mother to the early Christian community. There we find the glorified woman ‘clothed with the sun’ in a vision filled with mystery, and John describes it as a ‘sign’ (σημεῖον), suggestive of a deeper reality. There, too, the singular ‘seed’ of the woman is significant, as the dragon, angered with the woman, ‘departed to wage war against the rest [pl.] of her seed [sing.]’ (μετὰ τῶν λοιπῶν τοῦ σπέρματος αὐτῆς, Rev 12:17). Paul’s Galatians reading likewise shows that the Church is not only personal and feminine, she is also spousal and childbearing. He who is ‘born from a woman’ (Gal 4:4) comes to lavish the promises bestowed on Abraham and on his seed—he himself is that seed (Gal 3:16), and he also is the prophesied ‘seed’ of the woman (Gen 3:15)—and to everyone who by faith and baptism becomes ‘seed’ of Abraham by participation in him (Gal 4:28). The ‘promise’ refers to a miraculously conceived (and miraculously born) child. In Sarah’s case, the old age conception and the old age childbearing led to a child of ‘promise.’ For Paul, the ‘promise’ of Isaac could only be fulfilled by Christ, who likewise entered the world through miraculous conception and a birth witnessed by the heavens. But what’s more, the original ‘promise’ to Abraham explicitly instructed to expect a host of descendants. This is why Paul does not place the focus on Mary when he could have done so. The allegory of Galatians 4 is undeniably anagogical, from Sarah, to the woman (4:4), to the Jerusalem above.

Just as Isaac is an archetype of Christ for Paul, so also Sarah, Isaac’s mother, is an archetype of Mary. This is not only so because she is the mother of the archetype, but also because she, like Mary, is in a real way the mother of all who believe. In fact, belief in Christ configures sonship in the ‘seed.’ Being configured to the family of Abraham is for Paul the very mystery of adoption, υἱοθεσία, that is at the heart of the life of faith. ‘Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I,’ Paul boasts (2 Cor 11:22). Paul is the child of the mystical Sarah. ⁴⁶ He boldly claims the mystical Sarah, the heavenly Jerusalem, as his mother (Gal 4:31). ⁴⁷

In very different ways both in Sarah and in Mary, God innovates the law of nature, to use a favorite phrase of Maximus the Confessor. The fecundity of Mary’s youth stands in stark contrast with the first Isaac’s aged parents, whom Paul considers ‘as good as dead’ (Rom 4:19). But the marvelous similarity can be found in the praiseworthy faith of the elder Sarah and that of the ‘woman’ from whom Christ came to be. Besides the first woman Eve, is there any greater figure of Mary than aged Sarah, conceiving more by faith than by nature the most longed-for ‘seed’ of promise? In Mary’s case, the promise is obtained as she bears in her womb the redemption of the world and the very city of God.