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JAMES, PROTEVANGELIUM OF

An account of the births of Mary and Jesus, arguably one of the most influential of all the apocryphal Gospels, having spawned any number of subsequent birth narratives. Mary is portrayed as the daughter of a formerly childless couple, Joachim, a rich man, and his wife Anna. Her miraculous conception and birth are based primarily on the story of Hannah (1 Sam. 1-2). The young Mary, a descendant of David, is dedicated to the service of God, and is left with priests in the Jerusalem temple at the age of three. When she reaches puberty, the priests arrange for her to marry the widower Joseph, a much older man with children from an earlier marriage. Mary then conceives while still a virgin, a fact confirmed to Joseph by an angel and demonstrated to the priests by the couple’s drinking of the “water of conviction” (Num. 5); she later gives birth to Jesus in a cave near Bethlehem. The midwife Salome doubts Mary’s virginal status. When she attempts to test Mary’s virginity physically, her hands are severely burned, but she is healed when she touches the child. The story concludes with the visit of the Magi, the infanticide ordered by Herod, and the martyrdom of John the Baptist’s father, Zacharias, in the Jerusalem temple.

The primary purposes of the book are clearly the glorification of Mary and defense of the virgin birth. The work also explains that Jesus is indeed of Davidic descent through Mary (not Joseph as in the canonical birth narratives), and that the siblings of Jesus mentioned in the NT are his half-brothers, children from Joseph’s previous marriage.

The Protevangelium was written in Greek in the latter half of the 2nd century, and the provenance is most likely Syria (although Egypt is also a possibility given the attestation by Clement of Alexandria and Origen). Though banned in the West, the book was very popular in the East, as witnessed by the numerous surviving Greek manuscripts (some as early as the 3rd century) and the translations of the document into Syriac, Ethiopic, Georgian, Coptic, Armenian, and Slavonic. Though the postscript claims that it was written by Jesus’ brother James, it is unlikely that the story was written by a Jew as there are numerous errors regarding Jewish customs and Palestinian geography.

Bibliography. R. F. Hock, The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas (Santa Rosa, 1995); J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, rev. ed. (Oxford, 1993), 48-67.

James R. Mueller

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

JAMES, PROTEVANGELIUM OF

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)