Yes, I am familiar with this as I am a trinitarian. However, I am trying to understand the Socinian perspective. I gather that they believe the word existed with God prior to the incarnation. They simply reject that it was a person prior to the incarnation.
Socinianism being a 16-17th century development theologically, would interpret scripture in their own manner, I think this study does not include Mariology and nor does it include the history of the Israelite's.
The first issue is that you cannot separate the Israelite's from the Canaanite's as that is where the Israelite's come from. Even now the Hebrew is defunct Canaanite language. Quick example, we see the Canaanite God Ba'al as a storm God, while we see Yahweh as also a storm God, so we see a connection among Godly figures in Ancient Near East cultures.
Secondly to get into Mariology, during the 16th century Reformation, Protestants accused the Roman Catholic Church of harboring ideas and practices which had been taken over from the Greco-Roman world. This was considered to be a serious charge, since the goal of Christianity, so the accusers claimed, was to replace paganism with the vera religio (true religion), not to continue it under a different name.
The often crude and aggressive attacks by Protestants, especially during the era when polemics was a favorite discipline, were strongly countered by Roman Catholic scholars. No area of Roman Catholic theology has received more attention in this debate than the role accorded and the devotion paid to the Virgin Mary. The literature on this topic is so extensive that it is nearly unmanageable, but even a casual acquaintance with Protestant criticism of Mariology reveals that it's in this particular area that the charge of "paganism" is most often heard.
Hence, in its veneration of the Virgin Mary, not only did Roman Catholic Christianity absorb many elements of the cults of Greek and Roman goddesses, but Mary in effect replaced these deities and continued them in a Christian form.
This is the view to which the Jesuit scholar Karl Priimm responded in his book Der Christliche Glaube und die altheidnische Welt. Prümm investigated the similarities between the ancient goddesses and Mary and quoted many scholars who asserted that in Mary the ancient "mother of the gods" had returned in new glory. After reviewing these mother goddesses and discussing extensively the philosophy of their cults, he concluded that the Marian dogma cannot be deduced from pagan precedents and, furthermore, it was not even encouraged, promoted, or sidetracked by them for one simple and obvious reason: the fundamental principle of Mariology is the motherhood of Mary and this is the greatest argument supporting the full humanity of Jesus. Consequently, Mary could never have been and could never become a goddess in the pagan sense because this would remove one of the two major pillars upon which all orthodox Christian theology rests. Prümm's logic is impeccable, and his statement that the basic principle of Mariology is the motherhood of Mary is undeniable: all later Mariological dogmas and theses are based on this principle. And yet one wonders why he found it necessary to research the history of the mother goddesses and to refute and deny any connection between them and Mary so extensively if he did not have reasons to believe that such connections might exist.
A similar view concerning the origin of Mariology was forwarded from an unexpected side. Leonhard Fendt, in his Gnostische Mysterien. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Christlichen Gottesdienstes, investigated the Gnostic communion feasts and compared them with Christian developments. In discussing the Gnostic Markos, he analyzed the role of Markos' "Charis," whom Fendt called "a Hellenistic form of the mother of gods." This led him to explore the role of Mary in orthodox Christian theology as contrasted with the female figures in Gnostic systems; he concluded that the cult of Mary grew out of Christianity quite independently. Fendt specifically rejected the possibility that the cult of Mary had anything to do with the syncretistic cult of the Great Mother. But he, too, was faced with problems: the Kollyridians, for example, about whom he could say only that they were an exception and an isolated phenomenon, identified Mary with the Great Mother. He also quoted a number of Ophite hymns from Origen, Contra Celsum 6.31, "which could be in a Catholic prayer book if one replaces 'Charis' with 'Mary.'" Fendt's book is so rich in insights that even now, sixty-five years after its publication, it is still widely read. In this book, Fendt concluded that while there is nothing new under the sun, new things can come into the world from above and this is exactly what happened in the case of Jesus Christ. Therefore, the cult of the Madonna is also something new and different from the pagan cults because of the Spirit of Jesus. That is the reason, Fendt said, why Catholics refuse to be called the revivers of the cults of the mother of the gods.
Modernly of course many authors would point to Marian piety as the natural outgrowth of the goddess-cults in the ancient world. But just what is the connection? Is it correct to say that the cult of the Virgin was merely "influenced by pagan practices," or that it simply "absorbed" and "assimilated" some ideas that were current among people who embraced Christianity? T o point out similarities, interesting parallels between the cults of fertility goddesses and the cult of Mary, would be a waste of time because it would not demonstrate anything that has not been known in the past.
The goal is to show that there were powerful causative influences from Greco-Roman religions that shaped the form of Mariology. The biblical roots of Mariology have been sufficiently analyzed; we could inquire into some extra-biblical sources of Marian piety, belief, and doctrine. I propose that there is a direct line, unbroken and clearly discernible, from the goddess-cults of the ancients to the reverence paid and eventually the cult accorded to the Virgin Mary. We can go onto this later about parallel’s in non-Christian roots versus Christian roots, but on to the more important topic if virgin birth. Also, we can see parallels in Old Testament literature as compared with New Testament literature, hence the Bible parallels itself.
Mary was impregnated by the creative word of God: this is what we call "virgin birth." The phrase means that Mary "did not know man," i.e., a male, prior to the conception and birth of Jesus. This point is important because her virginal condition means that Mary's unspoiled purity and innocence parallels the unspoiled state of creation when "the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters."
Accordingly, the gospel of Luke emphasizes that the angel Gabriel was sent to a virgin in Nazareth; the Spirit of God overshadowed her and entered into her as into pure soil; thus the new creative word of God was sown. The Christian recorder of the prologue to the Gospel of Luke thus established a parallel with Genesis 1 which would be more fully developed by later authors who would draw a parallel between the "virgin earth" and the virgin condition of Mary's body.
Neither did it escape their attention that both in Genesis 1 and in the conception of Jesus the "word of God" was the seminal agent.
A virgin, as someone who is not engaged in sexual activity either as male or female, is in a sense "neither male nor female," as the sayings of Jesus describe those entering the kingdom of God. Virgins are thus in that state of paradisaical innocence which existed before sin entered the world and man was separated from God. Not subject to the same limitations of the human condition as others, they are, in a manner of speaking, between humanity and God. A virgin stands "for continuity in its most pure state" because "she remain
as she had been first created." Her body is "a clear echo of the virgin earth of Paradise — untouched earth that bore within itself the promise of undreamed-of abundance."
The Virgin Mary was the "virgin earth," and thus a perfect choice for the female counterpart in the process of the "new creation."
What happened in the 'Virgin Birth"? Two elements — heaven and earth, spirit and flesh, holy and profane — commingled and a second creation took place: the "second Adam" was caused to appear, he "who has made us both one, and has broken down the dividing wall of hostility ... that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace." Without Mary, this could not have happened; here her figure reaches those cosmic proportions that will more fully appear in Revelation.
Protestants like to point out that the Virgin Birth is a statement about Jesus and not about Mary. That is only partly true. Those who wrote down the infancy narratives of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke may have had Jesus at the center of their attention, but they could not possibly ignore Mary. In Christian belief the conception and birth of Jesus is a cosmic event and Mary is a necessary part of that event.
The apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew reflects the popular belief in the importance of Mary's motherhood. Here the disciples ask her how she conceived and carried "him who cannot be carried or how she bore so much greatness." At first she refuses to answer and warns the disciples that such a mystery cannot be spoken of without great and dangerous consequences. When the disciples insist, Mary begins the story, but she can go only up to the point where the angel came to her. "As she was saying this, fire came from her mouth, and the world was on the point of being burned up. Then came Jesus quickly and said to Mary: 'Say no more, or today my whole creation will come to an end.'"
According to this passage, Mary conceived and bore more than the human side of Jesus; she bore the creator of the world. Her image is that of the divine mother, the female who is part of the cosmic creative process. And this is not far from the image of the "Great Mother of the gods" to whom our ancestors were so deeply devoted. Christianity did not add a new element to religion when it introduced into its theology such concepts as "virgin" and "mother"; rather, it sharpened and refined images that already existed in numerous forms in pagan mythology. If these images are archetypes, then they belong to the "collective unconscious" of humankind; each generation inherits them; they are permanent parts of the human species, biologically determined. Those who find this Jungian theory unacceptable would say that these images are learned and not inherited, but in either case it cannot
be denied that here we are dealing with universal human experiences.
Our earliest memories are likely to come from our mothers; our concept of life is inseparable from that of the womb; our concept of nurturance is female, and everybody has some understanding of the mother-child relationship. Whatever its source, a study of ancient history shows that goddess-worship has been an important aspect of human religion from earliest times. The diversity of pagan divinities must not be denied:
Sekhnet was goddess of plague and punishment, Bellona of war, etc. However, what those usually called "fertility goddesses" represented was the same in every age and every place.
Thus, it cannot be said that Isis and Cybele were historically identical; obviously they were not; functionally, however, they were in some respects equivalent. The best proof of this fact is the syncretism which was generally accepted by everyone during the early centuries of Christianity; if such functional equivalency had not existed among the goddesses, the later syncretism could never have happened. Already in the fifth century B.C. Herodotus identified the Greek gods with those of the Egyptians, and by the second century A.D., Apuleius could assertively make Isis identify herself with most of the major goddesses known at that time. Apuleius was a devotee of Isis. That his claim could have been accepted by those devoted to the other goddesses is unlikely. But at the least he shows us how syncretism could be used to claim for one or another cult far wider validity than it previously had been thought to have. For Apuleius, Isis is "the natural mother of all things, mistress and governess of all the elements." Only the names under which she is worshipped are different. So did Lucius invoke her help "by whatever name or fashion or shape it is lawful to call upon thee" until she came and restored his corrupted shape back to its original unspoiled form; from an ass he became a man again.
If we change the name Isis in the story of Lucius' conversion to Mary, we are already speaking in a Mariological context. Even though the dramatis personne clearly belong to the pagan world, the function of Isis is that of the great goddess through whom a "new creation" takes place, the effects of a "curse" are reversed, and Lucius is saved. When Apuleius wrote this tale, Christians were already comparing the Virgin Mary to Eve and were beginning to draw parallels between the woman who was the cause of mankind's fall and the woman who was the cause of redemption. Pagan and Christian concepts of the role of the "woman" here run side by side until the pagan concept converges with the Christian one and Mary emerges supreme.
T o demonstrate this development, to show how the pagan "queen of heaven" gradually became the Christian "queen of heaven," we must follow a chronological method of investigation to illustrate our thesis adequately.
A topical treatment of Mariology is a legitimate approach; in order to show the continuity of the reverence paid to the female aspect of God. This can best be done by proceeding along chronological lines. This procedure will also reveal that the goddess-cult of most decisive influence on the emerging Christian Church was that of Magna Mater, that is, Cybele, and therefore, that the geographic center of nascent Mariology was western Asia Minor. This does not mean that other goddesses, such as Isis, did not play a formative role in Christianity. The study of Christian iconography, to mention only one field, has shown how much we inherited from the pious worshippers of Isis. On the level of popular devotion Isis left many marks of the cult of Mary.
However, it seems to me that Mariology was more substantially determined by the theology of the Great Mother than by any other fertility goddess. It was the motherhood of Mary which became the point of connection between her figure and the pagan goddess concept, and I should like to recall once more that the basic principle of Mariology, from which everything else flows, is the fact that she was the mother of Jesus. I will, therefore, attempt to show how the early Christian theologians used the motherhood of Mary to connect her with the events described in Genesis 3 and how this then led to the use of such epithets for Mary as "the cause of salvation" which eventually raised her image into a cosmic perspective.
The vehicle by which many ideas connected with Magna Mater were transferred into Christianity was the Montanist movement. Obviously, there were other important movements in the second century. One of these in which the feminine element also played a significant role was Gnosticism, which, as has been shown, may also have absorbed ideas from the worship of Cybele.
The impact of the Gnostic understanding of the feminine element upon mainstream Christianity, however, would require another study
I will stop here and allow you to answer.