The Protevangelium of James

The depiction of the life and ministry of Jesus Christ in the earliest gospel tradition started with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the Jordan River (Mark 1:9-1 lpar). In the earliest Christian community this ‘beginning of the Gospel’ (as in the Gospel of Mark) was supplemented by material portraying the birth of Christ. Thus the two canonical birth narratives (in Matthew and Luke) are affixed to the life story of Jesus. Legendary traits are present in these infancy narratives, and this trend was continued and expanded in later Christian material. The motive for the development of many later infancy narratives was an interest in filling in the missing details of Jesus's life (often through use of highly legendary traditions, fantasies and fables) as well as a theological interest (e g among gnostics and docetists who found the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary and the ‘unrealistic’ portrayal of the child Jesus as a ‘small adult’ of particular value in denigrating the humanity of Christ). Perhaps the most well known of these early expansions of the nativity story was the second-century Protevangelium of James.

The Protevangelium of James was probably written in the early second half of the second century (not long after 150 CE), since early church writers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Origen show familiarity with some of the important themes from this narrative (the birth of Jesus in a cave and the descent of Mary also from the lineage of David). The ignorance about Palestinian geography and Jewish customs may point to a non-Jewish author. The Protevangelium is in reality a narrative about the miraculous birth of Mary, Jesus's mother. It recounts the annunciation of her birth (very much in analogy to the annunciation of John's and Jesus's birth in the canonical Gospel), how she is born to the rich Joachim and his wife Anna. It tells of her upbringing in the temple until the age of 12 years and how she is ‘given’ to Joseph, an elderly widower, through a divine sign.