MARY OF NAZARETH

The purpose of this treatise is to find the Mary of Nazareth who has been hidden from modern eyes, occasionally by history disguised as myth but more often by myth passing itself off as history. The first section of the book studies the place of the ""Great Mother"" in the myths of Babylonia, Ugarit, and Egypt; the second analyzes the ""divine promise of Mary in the Old Testament""; the third examines the Mary who appears in historical documents; the fourth recounts the commemorative of Mary in the Church; and the fifth draws analogies between Mary's life and our own. The work is a bizarre mixture of scholarship, devotion, exhortation, and spiritually and the author shows a disappointing tendency to speak of ""mysteries"" and ""faith"" at times when research and reason world seem to have been more to the point. Predictably, the book's terminological abstruseness and scholarly format will discourage the devout reader, while the author's intellectual ambivalence will warn off the scholar.