Francois Lambert (A.D. 1528), Commentary on Revelation 12
“If Christ is her son, it is true that Mary is a portion of this woman, that is, of the most noble Church.
“For to devour the son means to remove the true faith in his name. And indeed, Satan literally did all he could so that Christ born of Mary would be killed by Herod. When he noticed that that plan did not work, he did not rest until Jesus was killed by the Jews. After Christ rose from the dead, he [Satan] stopped at nothing to suppress the faith in his Resurrection and so render Christ useless to us. When the holy apostles and other fathers taught this faith with total sincerity, thus giving birth to Christ in others, he and his own tried to take it away from the elect and are still trying to this day by every kind of subterfuge. Every time the church gave birth, the dragon tried to eat the offspring . . . what was it she gave birth to? A male son. Why add male? Is it not every son a male? Male is the symbol of courage and strength. … So when he adds male it is as if he were saying: This son will not be weak like the others. . . . His strength is shown by the following sentence: who will govern, etc. Christ’s iron rod is his unconquered Word. With this rod he was going to govern, together with his ministers, all his nations, as he had been told by the Father in Psalm 2: you shall break them with a rod of iron.”
Here is what Reformation studies scholar Dr. Irena Backus states in regards to Francois Lambert’s commentary:
“Francois Lambert (1528) Before the appearance of Luther’s 1530 preface, in the climate of general suspicion about the Apocalypse generated by Erasmus, there appeared what is nowadays considered the first major Protestant commentary on the Apocalypse.” (Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology) (Oxford University Press; 1st edition 2000), p. 11)
Heinrich Bullinger (Famous Swiss Reformer and successor of Zwingli), Commentary on Revelation 12, Cent sermons, 1565
“The Church therefore desired with great zeal and most ardent affection, that Christ should be engendered by the Blessed Virgin, who is a most excellent member of the Church. More Christ is begotten in his followers when they are regenerated by his virtue. For St. Paul says: My little children, which bear them again until Christ be formed in you.”
Leo Jud (Famous Swiss Reformer from the early 1500s), Commentary on Apocalypse XII
“Then the child was born; God’s word became man, truth was victorious, falsehood was laid low, the devil’s trick was found out by God in his wisdom and made known to the world. This child, Christ, the eternal word of God become man in the sacred bosom of the virgin Mary, was accepted by God the Father in his mercy for all the sins of the world.”
Cf. Carl Pestalozzi, Leojiida: Nach handschriftlichen undgleichzeitigen Quellen (Elberfeld: Friderichs, 1860); Karl-Heinz Wyss, Leo Jud, Seine Entwicklung zum Reformator, 1510-1523 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1976)
David Chyträus (Famous German Lutheran Reformer from the Mid to late 1500s), Explicatio Apoc. XII, 1564, 234-235
“She is tormented and tormented in order to give birth, this is with ardent longing since then and since the first promise issued he (the Serpent) has waited and wished, to crush the seed of the woman to be born of a Virgin.
Jean Gagny (Mid 1500s Prominent Reformer), Expositio Apocalypsis XII
“I will also explain how this is the story of the virgin & mother Mary.
A sign appeared in heaven. I say this sign is the Virgin Mary, of whom Isaiah the Prophet of the Lord once said, a Virgin will conceive and bear a son.
Therefore, the Lord will give you a sign: A virgin will conceive and bear a son. This is said to be both in mind and in body.
The woman was in labor and cried, being tormented to give birth. She was impregnated by the Spirit, it is a Hebraism that she was anxious and perplexed as to how she should give birth since she was afraid.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Here are some more protestant expositors who admit that the Woman in Revelation does refer to Mary in some sense, since she stands as a symbol for the church and/or Israel.
Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible – Unabridged (Robert Jamieson; A.R. Fausset; David Brown)
Woman fled. Mary’s flight with Jesus into Egypt is a type…
Wilderness – the land of the Gentiles; in contrast to Canaan, the pleasant and glorious land. God dwells there; demons (the rulers of the pagan world, 1 Corinthians 10:20; Revelation 9:20), in the wilderness. Hence, Babylon is called the desert of the sea, Isaiah 21:1-10 (referred to in Revelation 14:8; Revelation 18:2). Heathendom, being without God, is essentially a desolate wilderness (Jeremiah 17:6). Thus, the woman’s flight into the wilderness is the passing of the kingdom of God from the Jews to the Gentiles (typified by Mary’s flight with her child from Judea into Egypt). The eagle-flight is from Egypt into the wilderness. Egypt here is virtually (Revelation 11:8) Jerusalem become spiritually so by crucifying our Lord (Hebrews 13:13-14). Out of her the New Testament Church flees, as the Old out of the literal Egypt; and as the true Church subsequently is to flee out of Babylon (the woman become an harlot, the Church apostate) (Auberlen). (Chapter 12)
Philip Schaff’s Popular Commentary on the New Testament
Revelation 12:2. And she was with child. These words form the second particular of the vision; while the third represents her as at that moment suffering the pangs of childbirth, and the crieth out, travailing in birth, and in pain to he delivered. To the question, Who is this woman? different answers have been given. We need not dwell upon them. In one sense or another she must be the Church of God, yet not the mere Jewish Church, but the Church in the largest conception that we can form of it, as first indeed planted in Israel but afterwards extended to all nations. More will have to be said upon this point immediately. In the meantime, if it be objected that Christ bears the Church, not the Church Christ, it may be sufficient to reply that there is a sense in which Christ may truly be called the Son of the Church. He is the flower of the Chosen Family, as concerning the flesh He comes of Israel. So much is He one with His people that even His conception by the power of the Spirit and His birth of a virgin (who had no power of her own to produce Him) have their counterpart in them. They are born of the Spirit: they are the many children of a mother who was barren (Galatians 4:27). The Church, therefore, may properly be described by images taken from the history of Christ’s own mother and of His own nativity.
… Strictly speaking, the woman in Revelation 12:1-6 is neither the Jewish nor the Christian Church. She is light from Him ‘who is light, and with whom there is no darkness at all,’ light which had been always shining before it was partially embodied either in the Church of the old or the new covenant. Her actual conflict with the darkness has not begun. We behold her in her own glorious existence, and it is enough to dwell upon the potencies that are in her as ‘a light of man.’ In like manner the dragon is not yet to be identified with the devil or Satan. That identification does not take place till we reach Revelation 12:9. The former differs from the latter as the abstract and ideal power of evil differs from evil in the concrete. As the woman is ideal light, light before it appears in the Church upon earth, so the dragon is ideal darkness, the power of sin before it begins its deadly warfare against the children of God. Thus also we learn what is intended by the son who is born to the woman. He is not the Son actually incarnate but the ideally incarnate Son, ‘the true light, which lighteth every man, coming into the world’ (John 1:9). More difficulty may be felt in answering the question, whether, along with the Son Himself, we are to see in this ‘son, of man’s sex,’ the true members of Christ’s Body. Ideally, it would seem that we are to do so. All commentators allow that in the son’s being ‘caught up unto God and unto His throne’ there is a reference to the ascension and glorification of our Lord. But, if so, it appears to be impossible to separate between the risen, ascended, and glorified Lord and those who are in Him thus risen, ascended, and glorified. In a note on John 16:21 we have called attention to the use of the word ‘man’ instead of child in that verse, as showing that we are there invited to behold the new birth of regenerated humanity, that new life in a risen Saviour with which the Church springs into being. The thought thus presented in the words of Jesus meets us again in this vision of the Seer. Christ’s true people as well as Himself are made to sit down with Him in His throne, even as He sat down with His Father in His throne (Revelation 3:21). They not less than their Lord tend as a shepherd the nations with a sceptre of iron, even as He received of His Father (chap. Revelation 2:26-27). We cannot separate Him from them or them from Him. Everything then in these verses is anticipatory or ideal. The forces are on the field. We see light and darkness, their natural antagonism to each other, the fierce enmity of the darkness against the light, the apparent success but real defeat of the darkness, the apparent quenching but real triumph of the light God’s eternal plan is before us. We have a ‘pattern’ like that ‘showed to Moses in the mount’ (comp. chap. Revelation 4:11). (Chapter 12)
Hengstenberg on John, Revelation, Ecclesiastes, Ezekiel & Psalms
The woman, between whom and that described in ch. 17, as Bengel remarks, there is a mighty difference, is not the community of Israel in contradistinction to the Christian church; for what is said in Revelation 12:6 and Revelation 12:14-17, of the woman, can only be referred to the Christian church. Nor, on the other hand, does it denote the Christian church in contradistinction to the community of Israel; for the Christian church had not Christ born in it—an argument which the defenders of this view (Vitringa, Bengel, and others) escape from only by the violent supposition that it is not the first birth of Christ in Bethlehem that is here spoken of, but a mystical birth of Christ as the ruler of the heathen. But the woman, or Zion, which often appears in the Old Testament under the image of a woman, is properly the one indivisible community of the Old and New Covenant, the Israel perpetuated in the Christian church, out of which the false seed has been cast by its unbelief in the now manifested angel of the covenant, while the believing heathen have been received into it—comp. ch. Revelation 7:4, ss. That the church here was seen in the type of the virgin Mary, or that the Seer perceived in the virgin Mary an image of the church, is rendered probable by Revelation 12:4. (Chapter 12)
Cambridge Greek Testament Commentary for Schools and Colleges
1. a great wonder] Should be sign, as in the margin, both here and in v. 3.
a woman] Who is this? The two answers most commonly given are (1) the Virgin Mary, (2) the Church. Neither seems quite satisfactory. There can indeed be LITTLE DOUBT that the Son born of this woman is the Son of Mary: NOR OUGHT theological or ecclesiastical considerations to EXCLUDE the view that Mary is herself intended by the mother; the glory ascribed to her is no greater than that of a glorified saint (Daniel 12:3; St Matthew 13:43), and St John was not bound to suppress a truth for fear of the false inference Pius V. or Pius IX. might seek to draw from it. But it is not in harmony with the usage of this book for a human being, even a glorified saint, to be introduced in his personal character: if St John saw (see on 4:4, 5:5) himself, who was not yet glorified, sitting among the elders, it is plain that it is typical, not personal, glory or blessedness that this description indicates.
Who then, or what, is the typical or mystical Mother of Christ? Not the Christian Church, which in this book as elsewhere is represented as His wife: but the Jewish Church , the ideal Israel, “the daughter of Zion.” See especially Micah 4:10, Micah 5:3: where it is her travail from which He is to be born Who is born in Bethlehem. This accounts for the only features that support the other view, the appearance in her glory of the Sun, Moon, and stars of Song of Solomon 6:10, and the mention of “the remnant of her seed” in v. 17.
It may, however, perhaps be true that the ideal mother of the Lord is half identified in St John’s mind, and intended to be so in his reader’s, with His human mother: she embodies the ideal conception, just as the ideal of the false enemy of goodness in Psalms 109:0 received embodiment in Judas, or as the king of Israel who was to come is called “David,” by Hosea and Ezekiel. (Chapter 12)
Whedon’s Commentary on the Bible
1. And In the opening of this chapter three representative beings appear on the scene. The man child, Christ; the mother; and the dragon, ready to devour the child. The grouping at once suggests the source whence the symbolism is drawn. We at once think of the virgin mother, the infant Jesus, and the murderous Herod. Yet the subsequent wilderness history of the woman shows that the virgin is here introduced as a symbol of the Church; that as Herod is not actually named, the dragon is truly the literal Satan, and that the man child is truly Christ. Yet the habiliments of the dragon show that he is Satan as representative of pagan Roman antichrist, and the man child is Christ as representative leader in the battle against antichrist. As the woman is symbol, and the Herod is symbol, so the man child is here symbol. Alford is right in insisting that “the man child is the Lord Jesus Christ and none other,” (not Constantine, nor any other Roman emperor;) but he is wrong in ignoring the plain fact, that both Christ and the dragon are here representatives of Christianity and paganism in the Roman world; that the battle here is truly between the two great causes, and that the overthrow of the dragon is the downfall of paganism…
Sun In the gorgeous imagery investing the woman is TRULY to be seen a recognition of the unparalleled honour of the blessed virgin in becoming the mother of the Incarnate. Sad as is the error of the Romanistic adoration of her person, no reaction of thought should prevent our recognising the due honour which Scripture pays her. And one honour is, that she is clearly here the basis of the symbol of the Church in its struggle with paganism. Note on Matthew 1:18.
There is an apparent incongruity in the Church’s being here the mother of Christ and also, hereafter, the bride of Christ. But the two are to be separated in thought as different symbols. The maternal symbol of the Church is a specialty, terminating at a particular historic point. The bridal symbol comes from another region of thought, and extends into the final glorification…
14. Two wings of a great eagle… wilderness There seems to be a double allusion here: to Israel’s sojourn in the wilderness, and to the flight of the blessed mother of Jesus through the same wilderness to Egypt, as driven by Herod. Of the former, Jehovah said to Moses, approaching Sinai, Exodus 19:4, “Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles’ wings, and brought you unto myself.” The woman came down from her high place in heaven, but it was on Jehovah’s wings, in order to be borne to a place of security as well as humiliation. Not that she is carried by the eagle; but the eagle’s wings are put on her, and she flies with them of herself, eagle-winged. (Chapter 12)
FURTHER READING
THE WOMAN OF REVELATION 12: MARY OR ANOTHER?
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