Markosian commissioned local artist Lisa Abbott, who she met in Medjugorje, to sketch the visions of people she photographed. Abbott worked on the sketches in the evening and would share them with Markosian the next day, even continuing to work on them after Markosian had left town. Overall, Markosian says creating the collaborative portraits ultimately helped turn something that felt abstract into something more real.
I wanted to show what these visions look like. Diana Markosian is an Armenian-American photographer whose images explore the relationship between memory and place. See more of her work on her website. All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.
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Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. She and her family members seem to have made frequent pilgrimage journeys to Jerusalem. Things had changed since his neighbors in Nazareth dismissed him. He had a large following now, of people from all over the country. Did Mary expect her son to be the catalyst that would tip Israel into the messianic age?
Both of them had their fears, but Jesus certainly expected something momentous to happen. Pontius Pilate was Roman to the core, and not about to take chances with state security. In the darkness, jostled by the crowds, Mary was probably only partly aware of what was going on. Whatever the events actually were — and there is much debate about what really happened — she knew her son was in deep trouble, arrested as a rebel against Roman authority and tried for blasphemy.
He was found guilty, and almost before she knew what was happening, she was standing on a hillside watching her eldest son being crucified. Crucifixion was designed not so much as revenge as a deterrent.
A site close to a crowded highway was preferred, with the victim naked and in full view of everyone traveling past. To humiliate him, his genitals were not discreetly covered as they are on traditional crucifixes. The crucifixion had three parts:. A notice on a piece of board, attached to the top of the wood, told the crime that had been committed.
The upright beam of the cross was already in place. Across it might be nailed a flat board, which could act as a sort of seat. The condemned criminal carried the cross section to the place of execution. The person to be executed was nailed through the wrist rather than the hand, as a nail through the palm could tear through the flesh when the body weight bore down on it.
It the person was nailed through the hand, ropes had to be tied round the upper arms to support the body weight. The crossbeam, with the person hanging on it, was lifted into place with Y-shaped poles, and dropped into a mortise on the upright. The feet were then nailed to the upright. They could breathe as long as they held their body straight, but this meant putting the full weight of the body on the flesh torn by the nails in their hands and feet. If they eased this weight by letting their body sag forward, it was difficult to breathe.
The muscles of their arms, legs and thorax went into spasm, and they were unable to exhale properly. Their lungs filled with carbon dioxide, their breathing became a ghastly asthmatic wheeze, and they eventually died.
This could take quite awhile, sometimes several days. Jesus was luckier than some. The beating he took beforehand at the hands of the soldiers must have been especially severe.
That, coupled with the loss of blood, sent his body into severe shock , and he had a relatively quick death. The Romans meant brutal business, and they made capital punishment as fearsome as they could. Death by crucifixion, in a public place, was as humiliating and ghastly a death as was ever devised. Most parents would go under, seeing such a thing. Mary did not. She survived the unimaginable ordeal of watching this happen to her son.
Her mental toughness and innate strength were extraordinary. No doubt it was the worst moment of her life, but her endurance put the lie to all those simpering modern statues of Mary.
She was there at his death, and she was there to bury him. It was the last act a loving mother could perform. The body was tenderly washed, and hair and nails cut. Then it was gently wiped with a mixture of spices, and wrapped in linen strips of various sizes and widths. While this was happening, the women prayed, wept, and talked to the dead person — all the things we still do when we mourn.
Afterwards, they would tell stories about the person, remembering him. This grew out of their ritual story-telling after his death. Normally, the body was then carried to a tomb and laid on a long shelf carved into the stone.
It could be wrapped in a shroud, but was otherwise uncovered. On the third day after death, the body was examined. This was to make sure that the person was really dead, for accidental burial of someone still living could occur. On this third day, the women of the family treated the body with oils and perfumes.
But he was in Jerusalem, far from home, so the procedure was different. Temporary graves were provided for pilgrims or executed people who died in Jerusalem. Usually, their bodies stayed there until they decomposed, and then their bones were taken home for permanent burial.
Jesus was placed in a temporary grave, lent to his family by a sympathizer. His body was meant to stay there until it could be taken back to Nazareth. This was the normal practice. But something else happened, something that ignited a fire rather than snuffed it out. The body of Jesus disappeared. Burial clothes in the empty tomb of Jesus of Nazareth. No-one is really sure what happened. Possibly the Roman authorities removed his body and disposed of it, hoping his followers would simply disperse.
They had soldiers guarding the tomb, and during the night they may have taken the body from the tomb and put it somewhere else — perhaps dumping it out in the desert somewhere.
This way, they reasoned, there would be no more trouble. They were convinced that Jesus was about to usher in a Messianic age, and that this had in fact happened, even though their Messiah figure was dead. At first disoriented by his death, which they obviously did not expect, the family and followers of Jesus began a fierce promotion of his ideas.
He had a vision of a perfect society and how it could be achieved and they intended, come what may, to keep talking about it to whomever would listen. They appealed especially to the lower classes and to disadvantaged people like women and slaves , because they promoted the idea, revolutionary at the time, that all people should be equal.
Embryonic Christian communities began to form. The story of his death was transformed by presenting Jesus as a sacrificial offering who had given his life for humanity. This was a familiar idea to ancient peoples, since they came into frequent contact with the sacrifice of animals in temples. Jesus was just such a sacrifice, the Christian groups argued, but on a much higher plane. His birth was transformed too , with some ingenuity.
There was a long tradition in the Greek world and in other ancient religions of human women giving birth to great heroes. Greek mythology is full of such stories. Ancient peoples imagined the sort of person who might result from the mating of a human woman of extraordinary beauty with some elemental energy force in nature — the power of the sea, perhaps.
The child that would be born from such a mating would be quite different to an ordinary human. It would have extraordinary powers, being something less than the deity who was its father, but more than a human being.
The idea gradually took shape that Jesus was just such a person. It explained the confusion surrounding his parentage, and lent status to his birth. It gave legitimacy not only to Jesus but also to his teachings and recorded actions. This idea was backed up by something else that happened around then. The Old Testament, known to every Jewish man and woman, had originally been in Hebrew. But well before the time of Jesus, Hebrew had ceased to be the spoken language of Jews.
In Palestine, Aramaic had taken its place. Large numbers of Jews lived outside Palestine, in countries fringing the Mediterranean. These Jews spoke neither Hebrew nor Aramaic. They were more comfortable in the language of the country where they lived. So in about BC the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek , the language spoken by most Jews living throughout the Mediterranean.
This meant that all Jews now had a common, Greek edition of their scriptures. This new edition contained a significant mistranslation, in Isaiah 7. The fledgling Christian communities used both the original Hebrew version, and the Greek translation. Confusion about the right meaning for the word arose. When this passage in Isaiah was applied to Jesus, the confusion was magnified.
What Mary herself thought of it, if she was still alive, is lost to us. In early life she had been forthright, if we are to believe the scenes described in Mark , Luke and Matthew , physically robust and apparently the leader of her family.
By that stage she was not there to pour ridicule on it, as any good Jewess would have done. After all, virginity was an alien idea to the family-oriented Jewish woman. It ignored the command of God, given to Noah, to go forth and multiply.
In fact, the idea may have originated with him. Certainly it sat very well with Hellenised Jews, who were steeped in Greek culture, and familiar with all the Greek stories about gods and mortal women. But as time went on the idea caught on for another reason. The ancient religions, in all their beauty and wisdom, were slowly disappearing.
Their complex view of the human psyche and the forces of nature were going out of style. The gods and goddesses were dying. What the early Christian communities were finding out was that people still yearned for a female image of God. It was not enough to have a male God with his male son Jesus. That might satisfy theologians, but ordinary people wanted someone who was female, with all the powers of the female — in particular, a mother figure , someone they could turn to when all else failed.
Mary of Nazareth, in her new incarnation, satisfied that hunger for a goddess. She acquired all the trappings of a goddess, her own churches, altars, devotions, miracles, art works.
As time went on, she sometimes seemed more important than her son Jesus. Mary as a sturdy peasant girl. In each century, images of her reflected the current ideal woman. Churches today are still prone to have images of Mary that reflect a 19th century idea of how a virtuous woman should be.
The peasant woman in Galilee, with her dirty feet and stocky figure, had been entirely forgotten. Over the centuries, another woman appeared in her place — benign, aloof and loving at once, gorgeously dressed, almost always with a single child in her arms. Impossible to think of this calm goddess as she had been in life, the disgraced girl who found herself the mother of a religious radical who was executed as a criminal.
The Christian world had made Mary a goddess, shaping her image to suit its own needs. Read about more fascinating women of the Old and New Testaments. Mary mother of Jesus. Mary in the gospels. Food in Bible times. Houses in Bible times. Families in the Bible. Young Bible People.
Top 10 Bible Movies. Work in the ancient world. Mary to the rescue at Cana. Meditation for Parents. Mary in Nazareth — the real woman. Who was Mary of Nazareth? There were two: a Jewish peasant girl living in a backwater province of the Roman Empire, and the semi-goddess Virgin Mary, in Christian churches all over the world.
This page describes the first one. What sort of house did Mary live in? Sepphoris is in the north of Galilee. Why did Joseph take responsibility? We get some clues from the same gospel. Tamar is the first. She was a determined Jewish woman who was refused her legal right to bear a child. She would not accept this injustice — the status of Jewish women was measured by their children, and without a child she is condemned to a bleak future.
She dresses as a temple prostitute. Disguised this way prostitutes at that time hid their faces behind a veil she had sexual intercourse with her father-in-law, Judah, and conceived a child.
When her pregnancy became obvious, she was sentenced by Judah, as head of the clan, to burn to death. Only when she was able to prove that he was the father was the sentence of death revoked. She bore twin sons, a clear sign that God was on her side. She is a prostitute in Jericho. At considerable risk to herself, she helps Joshua, the leader of the Jewish people after Moses, in his efforts to capture Jericho. When Jericho is captured, the lives of her parents and family are spared by the rampaging soldiers.
Joshua , Ruth , the third woman, has one of the great love stories of the Bible — a biblical Mills and Boone. The man Ruth wants, Boaz, cannot be brought to propose marriage, even though it is obvious he is in love with her. Boy meets girl, boy loves girl, boy will not propose. Ruth has to resort to some blatant sexual ploys to bring him into line, but she wins the day. Book of Ruth Bathsheba is the fourth woman mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus. She is the wife of Uriah, but King David sees her and lusts after her.
She may have been raped, or she may be complicit in the act, but through her eventual marriage to David she becomes wife of one king and mother of the next, King Solomon. She is an extraordinary woman whose illicit pregnancy eventually benefits the whole of Israel.
None were as respectable as you might hope. Taking into account the above, both Jesus and Mary should look like people born in Nazareth. Their clothing, customs and way of seeing society should also be similar to their compatriots.
A Methodist minister named Kelley made a physical description of the Virgin Mary on social media , taking as a reference the customs, clothing, and appearance that women in that region had at the time. She would have had much darker skin, not because of her beautiful pigmentation but because she spent all her days outside,» said the woman on TikTok. In this social network , artists began to make illustrations of what the Virgin Mary was like based on the description made by Kelley. Some results completely change the general image of this historical figure.
And not have a white dress, but one of the tribal patterns of her family. Although no one knows what the Virgin Mary really looked like, our users were satisfied with her nomadic appearance.
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