Miracles of Mary Stories about Interfaith Relations
By Wendy Laura Belcher
January 6, 2025
Many Marian miracle stories depict members of various religious groups, including Jews, Muslims, Christians, and traditional religion believers. They also depict interfaith relations, with a heavy emphasis on the conversion of others to the Christian faith through the Virgin Mary. Quite a few of these stories are deeply offensive in modern terms.
Some stories of other faiths and interfaith relations in PEMM include:
Jews
- The Jewish boy who was thrown into the furnace by his father after he received Holy Communion with his Christian companions (perhaps the oldest Marian folktale in the world)
- The Jewish boy and cowherd who was thrown into the furnace by his father after he was baptized by his Christian companions
- A Jew is led to baptism by a dream about a lion and a monk; afterwards he curses a Jew at the latter's request.
- The priest from Cyprus who brought a particle of the Eucharist to a Jew.
- Archbishop Tilas, who was seized by Jews while carrying a golden chalice.
- The monastery near Alexandria whose trees were cut down by Jews.
- Armenian Christian villagers who had to buy their water from Jews
Muslims
- Patriarch Cosmas and his Christian flock in Alexandria, Egypt, who were persecuted by Caliph Jafar (Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil) and forced to wear indigo-dyed clothes
- A Christian of Nubia (also called Sire or Taʾaka Maryam) proves the worthiness of Christianity with fire and converts a Muslim.
- A Christian's lamp was blown out by the wind during the feast of Mary at the Meneta Diyaqonat and his Muslim servant is protected from the storm
- Two brothers were dyers from Dalga, Egypt, and one was tricked in a religious debate and imprisoned
- A Muslim who found an icon of the Virgin Mary in his house and converted after oil flowed from it
- Deacon Michael, who was a grocer, and his stolen ring that the Virgin Mary helped to retrieve from a fish
- A devout Muslim who mocked Christians for praying only once a day and became a Christian when the Virgin Mary appeared to him
- Nekwal, the deacon from Marg and Kem near Cairo in Egypt, who spent his Muslim master’s money on the poor
- The Muslim Egyptian ruler's son who insulted the icon of the Virgin Mary and saw a vision of Christ enthroned
- A Muslim merchant from Cairo who was imprisoned in Greece promised the Virgin Mary that he would convert if she helped him escape and he converted in Jerusalem
- A Muslim woman who entrusted her jewels to a Christian woman for safekeeping and converted after Mary revealed that the Christian woman had lied when she said they had been stolen
- Michael, the Christian scribe of Upper Egypt, who converted to Islam when his master beat him severely and then converted back, became a monk, and was martyred
- The Muslim Egyptian man who lived next to Saint Mark Church, the Saint Shenute Church, and a Muslim Mosque in Cairo and was left behind in the desert while on pilgrimage to Mecca
- The beautiful Church of the Virgin Mary in the Harat Zuwayla neighborhood, in Cairo, Egypt, that was closed by Muslim decree for over three years but reopened when the Virgin Mary and the Patriarch Matthew acted
- A Christian community is attacked by a neighboring Muslim community.
- A column falls and breaks the leg of the son of an official when Muslims destroy a church of the Virgin Mary in Homs, Syria
"Infidels"
- Dabra Qwesqwam's church is robbed of lumber by an infidel
- The Arabs who tried to plunder an Egyptian monastery during a famine in the time of the Patriarch Matthew and kidnap a monk when thwarted
- Rizqallah, a priest from Cairo, who vowed to the Virgin Mary that he would stop serving her if she did not help him recover, from Arab thieves, some pilgrims' stolen clothes
