A Birth the Gospels Do Not Record

The Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on 8 September, celebrates Mary's birth. The New Testament says nothing of it; the names of her parents, Joachim and Anne, and the circumstances of her birth come from the second-century apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, a text the churches did not receive as scripture but whose narrative deeply shaped Marian devotion and art. The date fixes the wider Marian calendar: it stands nine months after the feast of Mary's Immaculate Conception on 8 December.

The feast is among the older Marian observances, kept in the Christian East by the sixth century and spreading west from there; a Jerusalem church associated with Anne is part of its background. It is one of only three birthdays the calendar celebrates, alongside the nativity of Christ and the nativity of John the Baptist, on the principle that these births are themselves salvific events rather than ordinary anniversaries. In the East it is a Great Feast opening the liturgical year; in agrarian Europe it long marked a turn of the season and carried harvest and Marian customs.