The Woman of Revelation 12 Is Mary, the Mother of Jesus

Heiser's tell is simple and textual: there is no account anywhere in the New Testament of Mary being persecuted by a dragon and fleeing into the wilderness for supernatural protection, which is exactly what happens to the woman in Revelation 12:6 and 13-14. The woman's child is described as one "who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron" (Psalm 2 language), and the narrative jumps straight from his birth to his being "caught up to God and to his throne" (the Ascension), skipping his entire earthly ministry, death, and resurrection. That's consistent with the woman symbolizing the people from whom the Messiah comes, not a biography of one individual.

The woman is Israel, but because she's tied to the Messiah, the reference narrows to the people of God who follow Jesus specifically. Revelation 12:17 defines "the rest of her offspring" as "those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus," language that can't describe unbelieving ethnic Jews, so it points to the church, Jew and Gentile together: what Heiser calls "a new Israel, not the new Israel," rejecting both supersessionism (which he says overstates the data) and any reading that writes ethnic Israel's future out entirely, since Paul in Romans 9-11 still holds out hope for Israel's future.

The imagery itself also has deep Old Testament roots that have nothing to do with Mary: the woman-in-labor picture comes from texts like Isaiah 26:17-18, 66:7-9, and Micah 4:9-10, where Zion/Jerusalem in labor represents Israel's coming deliverance from exile: ultimately rooted in Genesis 3:15's promise of a seed who crushes the serpent's head. Revelation 12 is the apocalyptic payoff of that whole trajectory, not a snapshot of a first-century woman.