Infancy Gospel of James

The narrative falls into three movements. In the first, the wealthy Joachim is turned away when he brings his offering, because he has fathered no child in Israel, and withdraws to the wilderness to fast for forty days. His wife Anna mourns in her garden, sees a sparrow's nest in a laurel and laments that even the birds are fruitful; an angel promises her a child, and she vows to give it to God. Mary is born, and at three years old is brought to the Temple, where she dances on the step and is fed by an angel's hand.

In the second, the priests decide at Mary's twelfth year that she cannot remain in the sanctuary. The widowers of Israel are summoned with their rods, a dove comes out of Joseph's rod and settles on his head, and he is given charge of her. He objects that he is an old man with sons and will be mocked. Mary is assigned the purple and scarlet thread for the Temple veil, and it is while spinning that she hears the annunciation, first at the well and then in the house. Joseph returns to find her pregnant, and both are put through the ordeal of the bitter water before the priests, which they pass.

The third movement is the nativity. On the road to Bethlehem Joseph settles Mary in a cave, and goes to find a midwife. What follows is the strangest passage in the book: the whole world halts. Birds hang motionless in the air, workmen sit with their hands raised to the dish, sheep stand still mid-step, and then everything resumes. The birth itself is veiled by a cloud of light. A midwife testifies to what she has seen; a second woman, Salome, refuses to believe without physical proof, tests Mary, and her hand withers until she touches the child. The book closes with the magi, Herod's massacre, Elizabeth and the infant John hidden by a mountain that opens for them, and the murder of Zechariah in the Temple.

The book is a piece of argument in narrative form. Its subject is the perpetual virginity of Mary, and it is the earliest surviving text to assert it in the full sense: virgin before the conception, virgin in the act of giving birth, and virgin afterwards. Salome's examination exists to establish the second of those, which is why an otherwise decorous text includes it. Mary's Temple upbringing establishes her ritual purity from infancy; the ordeal of the bitter water forecloses the charge of adultery; and Joseph's age and prior family dispose of the third point, since the brothers and sisters of Jesus named in Mark and Matthew are here his children by an earlier marriage and not Mary's at all.

That last solution had a long career. It is usually labelled the Epiphanian view, after Epiphanius of Salamis, and it remains the standard position of the Eastern Orthodox churches. The Latin West took a different route: Jerome, arguing against Helvidius in the 380s, rejected the older-widower story as apocryphal fable and held instead that the brothers were cousins, which became the usual Roman Catholic position. Most Protestant churches take the plain reading, that they were later children of Mary and Joseph. All three positions are live, and the differences between them begin here.

The text was written in Greek, probably between about 150 and 200; Origen in the early third century knows a Book of James and cites it for Joseph's sons. It survives in more than a hundred Greek manuscripts, far more than any other early Christian apocryphon, and in Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Ethiopic and Old Church Slavonic versions. The oldest witness is Papyrus Bodmer V, of the fourth century or possibly the third, identified in 1952, whose text is shorter than the medieval manuscripts at several points; whether it abridges an already long text or preserves something closer to the original is disputed.

Almost everything most Christians assume they know about Mary's early life comes from this book rather than from any gospel. Joachim and Anna are not named in the New Testament. The Orthodox feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos on 8 September and the Presentation of the Theotokos on 21 November both rest on its narrative, and the feast of Anna's conception, kept on 9 December in the East and developing in the West into the Immaculate Conception on 8 December, takes its scene from the same source, though the Latin doctrine attached to that date is a much later and separate development.

Its effect on art is larger still. The cave rather than a stable, the midwives washing the newborn, Joseph seated apart with his head in his hand, the ox and ass supplied later from other sources but placed in that setting: the standard Byzantine nativity icon is a picture of this text, not of Luke. Cycles of the life of the Virgin in Western churches, from Giotto at Padua onwards, narrate Joachim's rejection, the meeting at the Golden Gate and the presentation in the Temple, all of them scenes with no scriptural warrant.

Officially the West rejected it. Pope Innocent I condemned it in 405, and a Gospel of James appears among the rejected books in the Decretum Gelasianum, a sixth-century Latin list long ascribed to Pope Gelasius but not in fact his. There was no early Latin translation. It nevertheless returned by another door, through the Latin reworking known as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which carried the same material into the Golden Legend and into medieval preaching and painting.

One distinction is worth stating flatly, because it is the most common error made about this text. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is a different second-century work, about the boy Jesus between roughly five and twelve, in which he makes sparrows out of clay on the sabbath and brings them to life, strikes a boy dead, and confounds his schoolmaster. The two were often copied together in later manuscripts, which is how their contents came to be run together in popular memory.