Unlike biographical narratives of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammed that developed within an oral tradition with written versions long delayed, Marian narratives developed within the literate culture of Europe and its colonies. As an initial observation, we can say that there is little foundation for the Virgin Mary we have today; as Marina Warner puts it, the sum total of her appearances in the New Testament “is startlingly small plunder on which to build the great riches of Mariology” (1976, 18–19). Every step in her development occurs in doctrinal pronouncements recorded in the extended catechism of the Roman Catholic Church. In most cases, however, doctrinal developments were new narratives that followed popular sentiment, ratifying, sometimes centuries later, what people have come to believe. The cover story of the December 2015 National Geographic calls her “the most powerful woman in the world.”

In Mark, the earliest gospel, Mary is mentioned only five times and appears simply as the mother of Jesus. The story of Mary as the virgin mother of Jesus appeared late in the first century in Matthew and Luke. Two explanations are possible for her omission in Mark. First, the author of Mark either knew nothing of the birth of Jesus (or the Teacher of Righteousness) or what he knew was ordinary, mundane, and not worthy of mention. Chronologically, this means that the story of the virgin birth did not exist until after the Jewish–Roman War that ended in 70 CE. From our perspective, a virgin birth was not and never could be an historical event; the only form it could possibly take was story, in this case, a creative fiction that emerged between Mark's gospel (70 CE or later) and Matthew's and Luke's (80–90 CE).

Where did this story come from more than 80 years after the alleged date of his birth, or two hundred years after the second-century BCE birth of the Teacher of Righteousness who, as we have suggested, may be the Essenic original in disguise as the first-century CE Jesus? Matthew 1:23 answers these questions succinctly when he claims the virgin birth was a fulfillment of what was “spoken through the prophet […] Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son,” words taken from the eighth-century BCE prophet (Isa. 7:14).