Who Was The Virgin Mary?
Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society
History Hit
4.8 • 2.1K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Despite virginity being a myth, why has Mary’s virginity been considered so important?
What does this tell us about the relationship between Christianity and sex? And what else do we know about this woman?
Joining Kate today to help her get to know more about Mary, her life and its influence is author and historian Sir Diarmaid Macculloch.
This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
All music from Epidemic Sounds.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello again, my lovely betwixters. It's me. Do you remember earlier this year when we went |
| 0:04.6 | completely mad and we did a betwixt live show? Well, it went so well that we are now doing it |
| 0:10.7 | again next year. Only we are doing two shows. We have one in Edinburgh on the 23rd of May and one in |
| 0:17.6 | London Town on the 25th of May. And tickets are available right now, just in time for Christmas. |
| 0:24.3 | Go to Fanefanef.com.com.uk and search for betwixt and we will see you there. |
| 0:30.3 | Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. How are you doing? Festive greetings. |
| 0:37.3 | Before I can let you go any further into this episode, I do have to tell you. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults, to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of other subjects, and you should be an adult too. Are you all of those things? Are you? Can you tick them all off? Because if you can't be off with you, you're letting everybody else down and holding up the show. |
| 0:56.1 | Right, have they gone? |
| 0:57.3 | Okay, let's crack on. |
| 1:02.7 | Strolling around Nazareth in the first century, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that, well, according to the Bible, at least, |
| 1:09.4 | something pretty seismic is about to go down. |
| 1:12.6 | It's just a sleepy village of a few hundred people and one of them happens to be this girl called Mary. |
| 1:18.6 | Hmm, she seems nice enough, but boy, oh boy, is her life about to change. |
| 1:24.6 | And what I want to know though is who was she? Who was she before the Bible? |
| 1:31.4 | And before we stuck teetals on our heads to play Mary in the school nativity, who was the real Mary? |
| 1:38.7 | What kind of woman did she grow up to be? And just how difficult would it have been to parent |
| 1:43.4 | someone who claimed to be the |
| 1:44.6 | son of God? Yeah, there's no mum's net for that one. I have got just the guest who's going to help us |
| 1:49.7 | get to know Mary a little bit better. |
| 2:20.8 | Music Hello and welcome back to thewixta Sheets, |
| 2:23.5 | The History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. |
| 2:25.5 | There is no denying it, betwixters, |
... |
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