After the gospels, mary disappears from explicit mention in the New Testament, though she appears at prayer with the other disciples in Acts 1:14. She is found again, however, in a plethora of hymns, sermons, polemics, legends, visual representations, and devotional writings in the emerging Christian church, in the Qur'an, and in Christian and Muslim scriptural and devotional reflections. In the Christian tradition, the pattern formed by her association with the theme of sacrifice begins to take stronger form, based in part on new understandings of the sacrificial work of Jesus on the cross and the institutional embodiment of this work in sacramental life, ecclesiastical order, priestly hierarchy and Eucharistic liturgical practice. Indeed, a whole set of typologies springs up around this association, in which Mary becomes not just the New Abraham and the Daughter of Zion, but the Temple of the Temple and, eventually, according to some ways of seeing her the Mother of the Church.

Mary is linked in these developments to the life of the ancient Israel temple cult, or rather that life as retrospectively conceived in the Christian imaginary.