The Protoevangelium of James

A mid-second-century Greek infancy apocryphon — ancient title Genesis Marias, “the Birth of Mary” — that supplies almost the whole of the Church’s non-canonical Marian biography: the names of her parents Joachim and Anna, her miraculous birth, her Temple childhood, her betrothal to Joseph, and her virginity in the birth of Christ. The Church rejected the book as Scripture while receiving elements of its tradition into her feasts, hymns, and icons. This file reports its contents, pins each to the apocryphon per §3.5, labels the narrative [Apocryphal: ...], and weighs what the Church did and did not receive.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Text, Its Titles, and Its Date

The work known since the sixteenth century as the Protoevangelium (or Protevangelium, “pre-Gospel,” a title given by its 1552 Latin editor Guillaume Postel) bore in the manuscripts the ancient superscription Genesis Marias — “the Birth [or Genesis] of Mary” — and a fuller heading naming James as author, whence the modern Infancy Gospel of James or Gospel of James. It is a Greek narrative composed around 145–150, and no later than the mid-third century, since Origen already refers to “the Book of James” and uses its account of Joseph’s family (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 10.17; ANF 9). The scholarly consensus places composition in the second century, commonly c. 140–150 (Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 1993; Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, 1995).

Its earliest surviving witness is Papyrus Bodmer V, a Greek codex of the third or fourth century first published by Michel Testuz in 1958, which preserves the text under the title Genesis Marias, Apokalypsis Iakōb (“Birth of Mary, Revelation of James”). The critical edition of the oldest recoverable form is that of Émile de Strycker (1961). The book presents itself as written by James — traditionally taken to mean James the brother of the Lord — but the attribution is pseudonymous; the author betrays an imperfect knowledge of Palestinian geography and Temple practice, and writes as a Greek-speaking Christian steeped in the Septuagint and in Matthew and Luke (Hock, 1995; Ehrman and Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels, 2011). What follows are its contents, reported as the narrative of the apocryphon and not as history.

Joachim and Anna

The book opens not with Mary but with her parents. [Apocryphal: the names and story of Joachim and Anna are known solely from the Protoevangelium of James (c. 145–150); they appear nowhere in canonical Scripture.] Joachim, a rich and righteous man, comes to offer his gifts at the Temple and is rebuffed by a certain Reuben, “because you have not made offspring in Israel” — childlessness being reckoned a reproach (Protoevangelium of James 1; ANF 8). Grieved, Joachim withdraws into the wilderness to fast forty days and nights. His wife Anna, left at home, laments her barrenness in a garden, comparing herself to the birds and beasts that bear young (Prot. Jas. 2–3). An angel of the Lord then appears to each in turn: to Anna, “the Lord has heard your prayer; you shall conceive and bring forth, and your offspring shall be spoken of in all the world”; and to Joachim in the wilderness, announcing the same (Prot. Jas. 4). Anna vows: “If I bring forth either male or female, I will bring it as a gift to the Lord my God, and it shall minister to Him in holy things all the days of its life” (Prot. Jas. 4; ANF 8). The two meet at the gate — the scene of the embrace at the Golden Gate that would become a fixture of Christian iconography — and in due course Anna gives birth to a daughter and names her Mary (Prot. Jas. 5).

This narrative is the sole source for the persons of Joachim and Anna. From it, and from it alone, the Church’s calendar receives the Synaxis of Ss. Joachim and Anna (9 September), kept the day after the Nativity of the Theotokos, and the veneration of Anna as the mother of the Mother of God. [Apocryphal: the feast of Ss. Joachim and Anna rests entirely on the Protoevangelium; no independent or canonical attestation of these figures exists.]

The Nativity of Mary

The child’s birth is recounted with deliberate echoes of the Old Testament birth-narratives of Samuel and of Isaac, presenting Mary as the answer to a long barrenness and the fulfilment of a vow. Anna sanctifies the child’s bedchamber and allows nothing common to pass through it; at Mary’s first birthday Joachim makes a great feast and the priests bless her (Prot. Jas. 5–6). [Apocryphal: the Nativity of Mary is narrated only in the Protoevangelium of James; Scripture records nothing of her birth.] This scene is the narrative basis of the feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos (8 September), one of the Twelve Great Feasts and, in the fixed calendar, the first of the liturgical year. The feast is universally kept, East and West; its content, however, is drawn wholly from the apocryphon (see ../07-the-feasts-of-the-theotokos/the-great-marian-feasts.md).

The Entrance into the Temple

When Mary reaches the age of three, Joachim and Anna fulfil Anna’s vow. They lead the child, accompanied by the daughters of the Hebrews with lamps, up the steps of the Temple, where the priest receives her, sets her upon the third step of the altar, and blesses her; “and she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her” (Prot. Jas. 7; ANF 8). Mary remains in the Temple “nurtured like a dove, and received food from the hand of an angel” (Prot. Jas. 8). [Apocryphal: the Entrance of the Theotokos into the Temple has no canonical basis whatever and is first attested in the Protoevangelium of James; the detail of her being fed by an angel is part of that apocryphal narrative.] This scene is the entire narrative content of the feast of the Entrance (Presentation) of the Theotokos into the Temple (21 November), another of the Twelve Great Feasts. That so major a feast rests on a single apocryphal chapter is the clearest illustration of this section’s central point: the Church received the tradition and built the feast, without thereby certifying the narrative as history (see methodology.md).

The Betrothal to Joseph — and the “Brothers of the Lord”

When Mary turns twelve and can no longer remain in the Temple lest she defile the sanctuary, the priest Zacharias inquires of the Lord, and an angel directs that the widowers of the people be gathered, each bringing a rod, that God might show by a sign to whom the virgin should be entrusted. The priest collects the rods; from Joseph’s rod a dove comes forth and settles on his head, marking him as the chosen guardian (Prot. Jas. 8–9). [Apocryphal: the choosing of Joseph by the sign of the rod and dove is narrated only in the Protoevangelium of James.]

Crucially, Joseph protests his selection in these words: “I have sons, and I am an old man, but she is a girl; lest I become a laughing-stock to the children of Israel” (Prot. Jas. 9; ANF 8). Here the apocryphon depicts Joseph not as a young bridegroom but as an aged widower who already has sons. This is the textual root of what came to be called the Epiphanian view of the “brothers of the Lord” — that they were Joseph’s children by a former marriage, and thus stepbrothers of Jesus rather than sons of Mary. The view is not merely late invention: Origen already appeals to “the Book of James” for exactly this reading, that the brothers “were sons of Joseph by a former wife” (Origen, Commentary on Matthew 10.17; ANF 9), and it was defended by Epiphanius of Salamis in the fourth century. The Protoevangelium thus stands behind the majority Eastern solution to the brothers of the Lord, which safeguards the perpetual virginity of Mary (the full treatment, including the rival Hieronymian and Helvidian positions, is in ../04-ever-virginity/the-brothers-of-the-lord.md). It is worth marking precisely: the dogma of the perpetual virginity does not depend on the apocryphon; the specific narrative device by which the East accounts for the brothers — the prior marriage — does trace to it.

The Nativity of Christ and the Virginity in partu: the Salome Episode

The later chapters retell the Nativity of Christ with additions. On the way to Bethlehem Joseph and Mary stop in a cave; Joseph goes to seek a Hebrew midwife, and the narrative pauses on a vision of the world standing still (Prot. Jas. 17–18). The midwife arrives to find the cave overshadowed by a bright cloud and a great light, and the child already at Mary’s breast; she proclaims that a virgin has given birth (Prot. Jas. 19). A second woman, Salome, refuses to believe “unless I put forward my finger and test her condition”; when she does so, her hand is consumed as by fire. Repenting, she is told by an angel to touch the child, and is healed (Prot. Jas. 19–20; ANF 8). [Apocryphal: the midwife-and-Salome episode, and with it the explicit narrative assertion of Mary's bodily virginity in the act of giving birth, is peculiar to the Protoevangelium of James.] This scene is the principal narrative root of the tradition of the virginitas in partu — Mary’s virginity preserved not only before and after but in the birth itself — which later enters the Church’s confession of her as Aeiparthenos, though the dogmatic affirmation of the Ever-Virginity rests on conciliar authority (Constantinople II, 553) and not on the apocryphal scene (see ../04-ever-virginity/aeiparthenos-the-perpetual-virginity.md). The book closes with the visit of the magi, Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, the hiding of the infant John and the murder of his father Zacharias in the Temple, and a colophon attributing the work to James (Prot. Jas. 21–25).

A Sober Assessment: Rejected as Scripture, Received in Tradition

The Protoevangelium is not canonical and was never received as Scripture. In the West the judgment was explicit and sharp: the Decretum Gelasianum (6th c., c. 519–553) lists among the books “not received” by the Roman Church an infancy work commonly identified with the Protoevangelium — “the book of the Nativity of the Saviour, and of Mary or the midwife” — placing it among the apocrypha to be rejected (Decretum Gelasianum, ed. von Dobschütz, TU 38.4). The raw Greek text circulated little in the Latin West thereafter; its material reached the medieval West chiefly in a laundered and expanded Latin form, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (c. 7th c.), which itself was regarded with suspicion. [Disputed: the precise identification of the Gelasian Decree's rejected infancy titles with the Protoevangelium is debated among scholars, though the standard view treats the "Nativity of Mary / of the midwife" entry as referring to this text or its derivatives (Elliott, 1993).]

In the East the reception was different in mode but not in the decisive respect. The Byzantine Church never admitted the book to the canon or read it as Scripture in the liturgy; yet it received elements of its tradition deeply into worship, hymnody, and iconography. The feasts of the Nativity of the Theotokos, of Ss. Joachim and Anna, and of the Entrance into the Temple all draw their narrative content from it; iconographic types — the embrace at the gate, the three-year-old ascending the Temple steps, the child fed by the angel — are its scenes rendered in paint. The eighth-century festal homilists (Andrew of Crete, John of Damascus, Germanus of Constantinople) preach these events freely while grounding their authority not in the apocryphon but in the tradition of the Church (Daley, On the Dormition of Mary, PPS 18, for the parallel homiletic method).

The discrimination is exact and must be stated in the terms of the framework. Nothing in the Protoevangelium is dogma: neither the names of Mary’s parents, nor her Temple childhood, nor the sign of the rod is a defined article of faith. What the Church has dogmatically defined — that Mary is Theotokos and Aeiparthenos — rests on the councils, not on this book. What is liturgically received tradition are the feasts and the persons of Joachim and Anna: honored by the whole Church, celebrated on fixed days, yet resting on this single apocryphal source and therefore belonging to received tradition and not to dogma. What remains bare apocryphal narrative are the specific scenes as told — Joachim’s rejected offering, the angelic feeding, Salome’s withered hand — reported as what the second-century text narrates and labeled accordingly. The Church, in short, rejected the Protoevangelium as Scripture while receiving parts of its tradition: a single, coherent act of discernment, and the model instance of what this whole section means by layering what Scripture attests and what tradition adds.

References

The Protevangelium of James (Genesis Marias). Trans. Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers (ANF), vol. 8, “Apocrypha of the New Testament.” Cited by chapter.
de Strycker, Émile. La forme la plus ancienne du Protévangile de Jacques. Subsidia Hagiographica 33. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1961. (Critical edition of the oldest form; Papyrus Bodmer V.)
Hock, Ronald F. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. Scholars Bible 2. Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 1995. (Greek text, translation, dating, and introduction.)
Origen. Commentary on Matthew 10.17. ANF vol. 9. (The “Book of James”; Joseph as aged widower with sons; terminus ante quem c. 240.)
Elliott, J. K. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. (Dating; the Gelasian identification; the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew.)
Ehrman, Bart D., and Zlatko Pleše. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis. Ed. Ernst von Dobschütz, Texte und Untersuchungen 38.4. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912. (The Western rejection.)
Testuz, Michel, ed. Papyrus Bodmer V: Nativité de Marie. Cologny-Genève: Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, 1958. (Editio princeps of the earliest manuscript.)
Daley, Brian E., trans. On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies. Popular Patristics Series 18. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998. (The homiletic reception of Marian tradition.)