Roman Catholic scholar, John McKenzie, wrote the following under the heading of “The Real Mary and the Fictional Mary”:
The real or the historical Mary is at least as elusive as the real or the historical Jesus, and not quite for the same reasons. The genuine historical evidence about Mary is so slight as to impose upon the historian, were any one else concerned, an embarrassed silence. We know as little about her as we know about the mother of Abraham Lincoln, about whom Lincoln is credit with a remark that all he had he owed to his angel mother. Jesus did not even say for the record that much about Mary. But this has left the imagination of Christian devotion entirely unrestrained by information.
The Mary of Christian legend, art, poetry, hymnody and even theology is a fictitious character. I am not sure that we can say of her that the Mary of faith is as important as the Mary of history. Faith in the Mary of traditional Christian devotion is faith in something which is not true. (John McKenzie, “The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament" in Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann, eds. Mary in the Churches [Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1983], 3-11, here, p. 9; emphasis in original)
