The Protoevangelium of James: My Mother’s Childhood

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Unknown. It closes by claiming to be written by James, my brother, in Jerusalem after the death of Herod.

When: Probably about AD 150. The oldest copy, on papyrus, is from the 200s or 300s.

Where it fits: Before and around my birth: my mother’s parents, her own birth and childhood, her marriage to Joseph, and my birth in Bethlehem, to Herod’s killing of the children.

Which Bibles keep it: None. But it shaped the Christmas story, the names of my grandparents, and three feasts the old churches still keep.

Where you hear it in your Bible: It fills out Matthew 1–2 and Luke 1–2, and explains why Mark 6:3 can name my brothers and sisters.

How close it stays to me: Close in God hearing a woman shamed in the Temple. Far in making my mother’s body a test of purity.

If you only read three chapters: Protoevangelium of James 3, Protoevangelium of James 18 and Protoevangelium of James 19–20.

Words to Know

Protoevangelium — a Latin-Greek name given in the 1500s, meaning first gospel: the story before the gospel story.

Joachim and Anna — the names this book gives to my mother’s parents. Your Bible never names them.

Perpetual virginity — the belief that my mother remained a virgin all her life, before, during and after my birth.

Midwife — a woman who helps another give birth.

The Book in Brief

Joachim, a rich man, is turned away from offering his gifts in the Temple because he has no children. He goes into the desert to fast for forty days. His wife Anna mourns in her garden, under a laurel, beside a sparrow’s nest. An angel comes to each of them: she will conceive. Anna gives birth to Mary and promises her to God.

At three, Mary is taken to live in the Temple, and is fed there by an angel. At twelve the priests decide she must leave before she defiles the sanctuary. They gather the widowers of Israel; a dove flies from Joseph’s rod and lands on his head. Joseph, an old man with sons, takes her unwillingly as his ward.

While Joseph is away building, an angel tells Mary she will conceive, and she spins purple for the Temple veil and visits Elizabeth. At sixteen she is pregnant. Joseph grieves, an angel reassures him, and both are tested by the priests with bitter water and found innocent.

Going to Bethlehem for a census, Mary goes into labor on the road, and Joseph finds a cave. As he goes for a midwife, all of nature stands still. A bright cloud covers the cave, and the child appears. A woman named Salome refuses to believe a virgin has given birth until she examines Mary with her hand, and her hand burns as if on fire until she holds the child.

The Magi come. Herod orders the children killed. Elizabeth flees with John into a mountain that opens to hide them, and Herod’s soldiers kill John’s father, Zacharias, in the Temple.

The cave in Bethlehem. Joseph as an old man. Mary riding a donkey. The names of my grandparents, Joachim and Anna. None of these is in your Bible. They come from this book, written about a hundred years after my death, and read so widely in the churches of the East that more than a hundred and forty Greek copies of it survive.¹

It is a tender book, full of wonder. It is also a book with a purpose, and the purpose is my mother’s purity.

The woman under the laurel

It begins with shame. My grandfather Joachim, as this book calls him, is a rich man who brings double offerings to the Temple. On a great feast day another man stands in front of him and says he has no right to offer first, because thou hast not made seed in Israel (Protoevangelium of James 1:2). He has no children. Joachim goes out into the desert and fasts for forty days.

His wife Anna is left alone. She sits under a laurel tree in her garden and sees a sparrow’s nest in its branches, and she cries out. Alas! who begot me? and what womb produced me? because I have become a curse in the presence of the sons of Israel, and I have been reproached, and they have driven me in derision out of the temple of the Lord (Protoevangelium of James 3:1). Even the birds have young, she says, and the beasts, and the waters, and the earth. Only she is barren.

And, behold, an angel of the Lord stood by, saying: Anna, Anna, the Lord hath heard thy prayer (Protoevangelium of James 4:1).

This is the oldest story in my people’s Bible: Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, Hannah. Luke tells it once more of Elizabeth. A woman shamed for having no child, laughed at, pushed out, and God hears her. The writer knew those stories well, and told one more.

I know who God hears. He hears the ones the Temple drives out.

A girl raised in the Temple

When Mary is three, her parents take her to the Temple to live. She dances on the step of the altar, and all the house of Israel loved her. … And Mary was in the temple of the Lord as if she were a dove that dwelt there, and she received food from the hand of an angel (Protoevangelium of James 7:3–8:1).

It is a lovely picture, and it could never have happened. No girl lived in the Temple of Jerusalem. Women could not go beyond their own court. The writer did not know the Temple, or did not care. He wanted to show my mother as pure from her first years: raised in the holiest place on earth, fed by angels, never touched by the world.²

And then he shows you why she must leave. When she was twelve years old there was held a council of the priests, saying: … What then shall we do with her, lest perchance she defile the sanctuary of the Lord? (Protoevangelium of James 8:2). At twelve she will begin to bleed, as women do. The priests send her away.

In this book even my mother, the purest girl in Israel, becomes unclean at twelve, for being a woman.

Go deeperFeasts from a forgotten book

The Protoevangelium was never part of any Bible. But the old churches took a great deal from it.

The names Joachim and Anna come from here, and so do their feasts. The Orthodox and Catholic churches keep the Nativity of Mary on September 8 and the Presentation of Mary in the Temple on November 21, the day the three-year-old was taken to live there. The Orthodox also keep the Conception of Anna in December.³

The cave comes from here too, though not only from here. The writer Justin Martyr, at about the same time, also said I was born in a cave near Bethlehem. When the emperor Constantine built the Church of the Nativity in the 330s, he built it over a cave, and you can still go down into it today.³

In the West, the book had a harder time. Jerome, the great translator of the Latin Bible, rejected its idea that my brothers were Joseph’s sons by an earlier wife, and argued instead that they were my cousins. A list of approved and rejected books from the 500s, the Gelasian Decree, put the Gospel of James among the rejected. But its stories spread anyway, through Latin retellings such as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, into the art and the Christmas plays of the West.¹

An old man with sons

When Mary must leave the Temple, the priests gather the widowers of Israel, each with a rod. From Joseph’s rod a dove flies out and lands on his head. And Joseph refuses: I have children, and I am an old man, and she is a young girl (Protoevangelium of James 9:2). He is afraid of being laughed at.

This is the book’s answer to a question my followers were asking. Mark’s gospel names my family: Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James, Joses, Judah, and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us? (Mark 6:3). If my mother remained a virgin all her life, who were they?

The Protoevangelium answers: Joseph’s children from an earlier marriage. Joseph was old. My mother was his ward, more than his wife.

But your gospels never say Joseph had been married before, or that he was old. They simply call them my brothers and sisters. Matthew says Joseph didn’t know her sexually until she had given birth to her firstborn son (Matthew 1:25). Many churches still hold to the Protoevangelium’s answer. You should know that it comes from here, from a book written a century after me, and not from the gospels.

The world stood still

Then comes the most beautiful page in this book, and maybe in all the books in this volume.

Joseph leaves Mary in a cave on the road to Bethlehem and goes to find a midwife. And he tells what he saw. And I Joseph was walking, and was not walking; and I looked up into the sky, and saw the sky astonished … and the birds of the air keeping still (Protoevangelium of James 18:2).

Workers sitting at a meal have their hands in the dish and do not lift them. A shepherd has raised his hand to strike his sheep, and his hand stays in the air. Young goats have their mouths in the river and do not drink. The whole world holds its breath.

And then it moves again, and a child has been born.

No one was there to see it, of course. It is a poem. But it is a true poem in one way: when God comes close, it is in a cave with animals, to a poor girl far from home, while the workers are eating and the shepherds are at their sheep.

Go deeperA defense against slander

Why would anyone write a book like this? Part of the answer is that people were saying ugly things about my mother.

Around AD 178, a Greek philosopher named Celsus wrote an attack on the Christians. He claimed to have heard from a Jew that my mother was a poor country woman who spun wool for a living, that her husband the carpenter threw her out for adultery, and that she gave birth to me by a soldier named Panthera. The Christian scholar Origen quoted the charge seventy years later in order to answer it.⁴

The Protoevangelium reads like an answer to stories of that kind, written before Celsus but in the same climate. Was she poor? No, her father was rich. Was she a common spinner? She spun purple and scarlet for the veil of the Temple. Was she unfaithful? She was raised in the Temple, fed by angels, tested by the priests with the bitter water, and found pure. Was her son illegitimate? A midwife saw the birth, and Salome examined her and found her a virgin even after it.²

That is why the book says so much about her body. It is defending her against people who were calling her a whore.

Where the Protoevangelium and I part

And so you come to the scene I cannot keep.

The midwife comes out of the cave and tells a woman named Salome that a virgin has given birth. Salome says: As the Lord my God liveth, unless I thrust in my finger, and search the parts, I will not believe that a virgin has brought forth (Protoevangelium of James 19:3). She examines my mother with her hand, and cries out that her hand is burning, dropping off as if burned with fire (Protoevangelium of James 20:1). She is healed only when she picks up the baby.

My mother has just given birth in a cave, far from home, and the book has a stranger examine her body to prove she is still a virgin.

I understand why the writer did it. People were calling her a whore, and he wanted to prove them wrong. But he answered them on their own ground: as if a woman’s worth is the state of her body, and must be proved by inspection.

Once, when I was teaching, a woman in the crowd called out to me: Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts which nursed you! And I answered: On the contrary, blessed are those who hear the word of God, and keep it (Luke 11:27–28).

My mother is not blessed because of her body. She is blessed because she heard God and said yes. The song Luke gives her is not about purity. It is about the mighty pulled down from their thrones: He has filled the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:53).

Check It Yourself

Look up: Mark 6:3 and Matthew 1:25.

You will find: my brothers and sisters named, and no earlier marriage for Joseph.

Then read Protoevangelium of James 18–20, the still world and Salome’s test, and Luke 11:27–28.

The Short Version

• The Protoevangelium of James tells my mother’s story from before her birth to mine. It was written about AD 150 and survives in more than 140 Greek copies.
• It gave the churches the names Joachim and Anna, the cave, the old Joseph, and three feasts.
• It begins with Anna, shamed and driven out of the Temple, and God hears her.
• It explains my brothers and sisters as Joseph’s sons by an earlier marriage. Your gospels never say so.
• It defends my mother against slander by having a stranger examine her body. I said blessed are those who hear the word of God, and keep it.