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—Pope John Paul II, General Audience, September 18, 1996
First things first: what do we know about Mary?
Historically, not as much as we might like. That can be frustrating for us, accustomed as we are to modern biographies that tell us everything we want to know—and sometimes what we don’t—about historical figures. So it’s important to remember that our sources for information about Mary, the gospels, are not biographies. Biographies certainly were written during the first century—Plutarch was a first-century Greek who wrote the very famous Lives—so if biography had been the plain and simple purpose of these documents, that’s what they would have been called. But they weren’t. From the beginning, as far as we know, they were thought of as “gospels.” The word “gospel” is a derivation of an old English phrase “godspell,” which means “good news.” It was evangelium in Latin, and the authors of…
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