(a) Probably the earliest
text is the narrative called the Protevangelium
of James, with ‘protevangelium’ in the sense that it tells the story before
the gospel story. In ancient manuscripts, it was entitled ‘Birth of Mary,
Revelation of James’ (thus, e.g., in P. Bodmer V) or similar, pointing to the
birth of the mother of Jesus (cf. Pellegrini 2012b). Two thirds of the work
(chs 1–16) is about Mary’s life: her parents Joachim and the infertile Anna,
her birth, the purity of the child at home and her upbringing in the temple,
the miraculous divine election of the widower Joseph as husband to protect her,
Mary’s participation in weaving the temple curtain and the annunciation by the
angel, her pregnancy that causes Joseph to abandon her, the accusation of the
priests against Joseph, and the testing of both by the water of the ordeal. A
brief second part (chs 17–20) is about Mary’s giving birth in a cave, the
testimony of the midwife and the unbelief of Salome who investigates Mary’s
virginity, but is immediately punished: her hand is consumed by fire and only
healed when she stretches out to touch Jesus. The final part (chs 21–4) then
tells of the visit of the Magi and the murder of Zechariah, the father of John
the Baptist, who dies to protect his son. In the end, James the (step) brother
of Jesus presents himself as the author, so that the narrative appears as
family tradition that provides the prehistory of the canonical birth story.
Even in the second part, where Jesus’ birth is narrated, the christological
interest is very limited. Jewish piety and purity concerns are strongly
present, yet Mary herself functions as a symbolic temple sacrifice (Vuong
2011). Numerous biblical references shape the narrative, cf. e.g. the parallel
between Anna and biblical Hannah (1 Sam. 1), but there is also a ‘doubling’ of
Jesus’ miraculous birth by an earlier miraculous (though not explicitly
‘virgin’) birth of his mother.
The text is preserved in
numerous manuscripts and later translations and expansions. It was already
known (at least in its first two parts) to Origen and was probably composed in
Greek in the last quarter of the second century. Important motifs, such as Jesus’
birth in a cave, the virginity test, and the ‘brothers’ of Jesus as
stepbrothers, were adopted by early church fathers. Although the work was often
attributed to a Jewish Christian author, the text shows little knowledge of
Palestinian Jewish practice and can be sufficiently explained from a good
knowledge of the Old Testament and the canonical birth stories, so that a
composition in Syria or Egypt is more plausible. The text became very popular
and was widely received (and incorporated into larger compositions) in the
Christian East, so that it became influential for liturgy and Mariology (Van
Oyen 2013: 298–302; see also Chapter 3). In the West, instead, it was rejected
due to the debates about the status of Jesus’ ‘brothers’. Their interpretation
as stepbrothers (i.e. sons of the widower Joseph from an earlier marriage) was
later contested by Jerome (who interpreted them as merely cousins), so that the
Protevangelium was condemned in the Decretum Gelasianum (cf. Markschies
2012a: 133–8). Yet in spite of that condemnation, its motifs strongly
influenced later piety, and through a reworked version in the Infancy Gospel of (Ps.-)Matthew, which
was also adopted in the collection of the Golden Legend, the story also became
the legendary basis of the nativity cycle in the West (and in Western art).
(Jörg Frey, “Texts about Jesus: Non-Canonical Gospels and Related
Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha, ed.
Andrew Gregory and Christopher Tuckett [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015],
25)
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