The Nativity of the Theotokos

The first Great Feast of the Church year (8 September) celebrates the birth of the Virgin Mary to the aged and childless Joachim and Anna. Its entire narrative — the parents’ names, their barrenness, the angelic promises, the birth — derives not from canonical Scripture but from the second-century Protoevangelium of James, a provenance the Church has never hidden and which this file marks with care.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The feast that opens the year

Because the Orthodox liturgical year begins on 1 September, the Nativity of the Theotokos on 8 September is the first of the Twelve Great Feasts to fall in the cycle (Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Feasts,” in The Festal Menaion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1969, Introduction). The Church opens her year with a birth — but not with the birth of Christ. She opens it with the birth of the one through whom Christ will be born, so that the whole year is set, from its first great day, under the sign of the Incarnation drawing near. The troparion states the logic exactly: “Your Nativity, O Theotokos, has proclaimed joy to the whole world, for from you dawned the Sun of Righteousness, Christ our God” (troparion, Tone 4; The Festal Menaion, p. 105). The birth of Mary is celebrated not for itself but as the near approach of the dawn; she is the dawn, Christ the Sun.

An apocryphal narrative, openly received

The narrative content of the feast has no basis in the New Testament, which nowhere names the Virgin’s parents or records her birth. It comes entirely from a single second-century source.

[Apocryphal: the whole narrative — the names Joachim and Anna, their long barrenness, the angelic annunciations to the couple, the vow, and the birth of Mary — derives from the *Protoevangelium of James* (c. 150), not from canonical Scripture.] The Protoevangelium (also called the Infancy Gospel of James) is a mid-second-century composition; its opening chapters supply the whole story the feast celebrates — Joachim’s offering rejected because he was childless, his withdrawal into the wilderness, Anna’s lament, the promise of a child, and the birth of Mary (Protoevangelium of James 1–5; Ronald F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas, Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1995, pp. 32–41; Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše, The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations, Oxford, 2011, pp. 31–71, dating the text to c. 150). The story is deliberately modeled on the Old Testament births of the barren — Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and above all Hannah and the young Samuel dedicated to the sanctuary (1 Samuel 1–2), from whom Anna even takes her name — so that Mary’s birth is presented as the culmination of the biblical pattern of miraculous, promised children (Hock, Infancy Gospels, pp. 21–27, on the Protoevangelium’s literary method).

The Orthodox Church has never treated this provenance as an embarrassment to be hidden, but neither does it present the Protoevangelium as documented history. It receives the narrative as venerable and theologically fruitful tradition — a “theological iconography” of the Virgin’s origins — while the historical claims remain what they are: the report of a second-century apocryphon (see the fuller treatment in The Great Marian Feasts, where the Protoevangelium feasts are handled in the Mariological context). The keeping of the feast does not commit the Church to the historicity of Anna’s lament; it commits her to the confession that the Mother of God was truly born of human parents, that the Incarnation had a real genealogy in time — which is itself a Christological affirmation against every docetism.

The history of the feast

The feast is considerably later than the text it draws on. It is attested in the Christian East from the sixth century: St Romanos the Melodist (d. c. 556) composed a kontakion for it, and a church of St Anne existed at Jerusalem by that period, traditionally on the site held to be the home of Joachim and Anna (ODB = The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Kazhdan, Oxford, 1991, s.v. “Nativity of the Virgin”). At Rome the feast was received later: Pope Sergius I (687–701), himself of Eastern origin, prescribed a litany procession for the Nativity of the Virgin as one of the four Marian feasts he singled out — Nativity, Annunciation, Purification, and Dormition/Assumption (Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I; ODB, s.v. “Nativity of the Virgin”). The kontakion now sung, attributed to Romanos, keeps the feast’s Christological centering: “By your holy nativity, O pure one, Joachim and Anna were freed from the reproach of childlessness, and Adam and Eve from the corruption of death” — the personal deliverance of the parents opening at once onto the deliverance of the whole race (kontakion, Tone 4; The Festal Menaion, pp. 98–108).

The theology of the feast

The Fathers who preached this feast — St Andrew of Crete and St John of Damascus above all — read the birth of Mary as the hinge between the old covenant and the new. Andrew of Crete’s homilies on the Nativity of the Virgin present her birth as “the beginning of feasts,” the door through which the promises of the prophets begin to be fulfilled, and John of Damascus hymns Anna’s womb as the place where “the temple of God” is prepared (Andrew of Crete and John of Damascus, homilies on the Nativity of the Theotokos, in Mary B. Cunningham, Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God, Popular Patristics 35, SVS Press, 2008, pp. 53–108, with introduction). The dominant image is the Temple: Mary is the living sanctuary, and her birth is the beginning of the building of the temple that will hold the Uncontainable — a theme that will be taken up at her Entrance into the Temple on 21 November (see The Entrance of the Theotokos).

The barrenness of Joachim and Anna carries a second theological weight. That the Mother of God is born of aged and infertile parents, by promise and grace rather than in the ordinary course of nature, sets her birth in the biblical line of grace-given children and underscores that salvation is God’s initiative from first to last: even the Virgin who will bear the Savior is herself a gift, given to those who could not produce her by their own power (Cunningham, Wider than Heaven, pp. 20–29, on the Temple and barrenness themes; the troparion and kontakion, The Festal Menaion, pp. 98–108). It is essential to note that Orthodox tradition does not read this miraculous birth as an immaculate conception in the Roman Catholic dogmatic sense — Mary is born of the promise, but the East does not teach that she was conceived free from ancestral sin, a divergence treated where the Dormition and the Mariological questions are handled (see St. the Theotokos).

The icon

The icon of the feast shows Anna reclining on a bed after childbirth — the same posture as the Theotokos in the Nativity of Christ icon, a deliberate visual rhyme — while attendants prepare to bathe the newborn Mary and Joachim looks on, often standing to one side in prayer (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, rev. ed., SVS Press, 1982, on the Marian feast icons; and see The Icon of the Feast). The domestic, human warmth of the scene — a real birth in a real household — is itself the theology: the Incarnation begins in an ordinary human family, and the Church’s first great feast of the year is a nativity in a home.

References

The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (Introduction; the propers of the Nativity of the Theotokos, pp. 98–108.)
Ronald F. Hock. The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas. Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge Press, 1995.
Bart D. Ehrman and Zlatko Pleše. The Apocryphal Gospels: Texts and Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
Mary B. Cunningham. Wider than Heaven: Eighth-Century Homilies on the Mother of God. Popular Patristics Series 35. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2008.
Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1982.
The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. Ed. A. Kazhdan et al. Oxford, 1991 (s.v. “Nativity of the Virgin”).
Liber Pontificalis, Life of Sergius I.
Scripture: 1 Samuel 1–2 (the pattern of Hannah and Samuel).