Mary as the New Eve
The veneration of Mary as the new Eve begins even in
the Protoevangelium of James, though this motif is subsequently expanded upon
by such early Christian writers as Justin Martyr, and later Irenaeus of Lyons
and finally Jerome in the West and Gregory of Nyssa in the East. This interpretative
tradition lives on in Catholic theology to the present day. Gisbert Geshake,
for example, talks about Mary as the new Eve: ‘In the same way that Christ through
his life and death made good the misdeeds of Adam, so Mary rehabilitated the
misdeeds of Eve through her obedience.’ This Adam-Christ typology, which was
first posited by Paul, is thus supplemented with an Eve-Mary typology—with all
the ramifications that this entails, even for the doctrine of salvation
(soteriology). . . . In the Christian tradition, there are two different ways
of understanding the Eve-Mary typology. The first more dynamic construction
proceeds from the assumption that although Mary is affected to begin with by
the consequences of the fall of man and therefore suffers from original sin, she
later frees herself from its grip by giving birth to Jesus. In this line of
thought, which represents the mainstream of the Syriac tradition, the typical
Christocentricity of the biblical viewpoint is preserved. This is the construction
that is clearly preferred by Ephrem the Syrian and Jacob of Serugh. The second,
more static reading conceives of Mary as the new Eve, who is spared all along
from the consequences of the fall. This understanding is nowhere to be found
among the earliest Church Fathers, nor have we been able to verify that it
appears anywhere in Syriac tradition. In the final analysis, both viewpoints
led to a blossoming of Marian veneration and to a more intense dedication to
the figure of Mary. (Muna Tatari and Klaus von Stosch, Mary in the Qur’an:
Friend of God, Virgin, Mother [trans. Peter Lewis; London: Gingko, 2021], 42-43)
