When a Protestant is exposed to the Mary of the Catholic and Eastern churches he is left with a puzzlement, because the Mary of the Bible has little resemblance.
From where, then, the Protestant asks, does this Catholic Mary come.
We may give a limited answer by an introduction of the "Gospel of James". The ancient manuscripts that preserve the book have different titles, including "The Birth of Mary", "The Story of the Birth of Saint Mary, Mother of God," and "The Birth of Mary; The Revelation of James." It is also referred to as "Genesis of Mary", or "Protevangelium of James".
It is not my intention to give a critique of this gnostic document of the mid 2nd century, but only to draw attention to its existence and how it informed the Imperial Church of the 4th and 5th centuries on Mariology.
The gnostic writing called “Protevangelium of James” which dates to the mid 2nd century attempts to fill in the gaps created by the nativity narratives by both Matthew and Luke. This particular New Testament apocrypha is the source of much of the cult of Mary one finds in the Catholic and Eastern churches. E.g., the names of Mary’s parents and that they were extremely wealthy; Mary’s feet only taking seven steps on common ground before being delivered up to the Temple, as a temple virgin, at the age of three; of Mary being carried about by virgins (so her feet never touched the ground) until delivered over to the Temple; of Mary spending the next 9 years (until twelve years old) in the Holy of Holies of the Temple, being feed by an Angel; of Joseph being chosen by God from the widowers of Israel (through the miracle of a dove coming out of his staff) to be Mary’s guardian—this was done when Mary was twelve years old (the priests were concerned that if Mary remained in the Temple her menstrual cycle would pollute the Temple); of Mary conceiving Christ at sixteen years of age; of Mary’s trail before the high priest; of Jesus being born in a cave, attended by a mid-wife; of Mary's virginity attested to by Salome—this is the first written record of a gynecological examination; of Jesus being hidden from the soldiers of Herod in a feed to trough; of the murder of Zacharias (the father of John the Baptist) because Herod sought to kill John along with the infants of Bethlehem.
The Protevangelium of James is indeed an ancient document (mid-2nd century), but is not ancient enough to have been written by James, the Lord's brother, and certainly not canonical. This "Gospel" of James was first mentioned by Origen (A.D. 184-253) who says the text, like that of a Gospel of Peter, was of dubious, recent appearance and shared with that book the claim that the "brethren of the Lord" were sons of Joseph by a former wife.
Textual scholarship has indicated that the text is a work of pseudepigrapha (spurious or pseudonymous [written under a false name] writings, especially Jewish or Christian writings ascribed to various biblical patriarchs, prophets, apostles, or famous church-men) but composed within approximately 200 years of the person whose name is forged. What we call the Imperial Church (that was ruled over by the Roman emperors [includes Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy-because it was all one church until the Great Schism (A.D. 1154)]), from an apostolic viewpoint, was actually established by forged documents that claimed to have been written by apostolic persons. An impressive example of this cult of forgeries are the following documents: the Didache (claimed to have been completely written within the first century), the long version of the seven letters of Ignatius (claimed to have been written by Saint Ignatius of Antioch), the Nicene Creed (claimed to have been written by the 318 bishops present at Nicæa in A.D. 325), the Apostles' Creed (claimed to have been written by the Lord's apostles), the Athanasian Creed (claimed to have been written by Saint Athanasius), and Protevangelium of James (claimed to have been written by James, the Lord's brother).
A clear manifestation of pseudepigrapha is chapter XXV and verse 1 of the Gospel of James--Protevanglium, where the author gives his signature: "Now, I, James, which wrote this history in Jerusalem, when there arose a tumult when Herod died, withdrew myself into the wilderness until the tumult ceased in Jerusalem. Glorifying the Lord God which gave me the gift and the wisdom to write this history." Here the author not only claims to be James, but dates the writing in 4 B.C. One can understand the appeal of this document to early Christians. If the author was, indeed, James, the son of Joseph by a former marriage then he was a mature man at the time of the birth of Christ and his testimony would have been taken as an eyewitness account of the events. Alas, it just is not true.
The Gospel of James enjoyed wide readership and was translated into Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic, Georgian, Old Church Slavonic, Armenian, Arabic, Gaelic, and Vulgar Latin. However, it was relegated to the apocrypha in the Gelasian Decretal (Decretal of Pope Gelasius I, bishop of Rome 492–496.); Pope Innocent I condemned this Gospel of James in his third epistle ad Exuperium in 405 AD. Further, Thomas Aquinas , in his Summa Theologiae, rejects the Protevangelium of James teaching that midwives were present at Christ's birth, and invokes Jerome as contending that the gospels show Mary was both mother and midwife, that she wrapped up the child with swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. And thus concludes, "These words prove the falseness of the apocryphal ravings."
Apostolically Speaking,
☩ Jerry L Hayes
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