Two Feasts, a Thousand Icons, and a Book the Latin West Would Not Have

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.