Proto-Gospel of James

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Guido Reni , St. Joseph with the Christ Child , around 1635. The iconographic representation of Joseph as an old man can be traced back to the Proto-Gospel of James.

The so-called Protoevangelium des Jakobus (also Protevangelium des Jakobus ) is an early Christian script, which was probably written around the middle of the 2nd century. The modern title is derived from the Greek πρῶτος ( prōtos , “first” or “beginning”) and can be translated as “pre-gospel”.

The Proto-Gospel of James does not depict the life of Jesus Christ , but is a life of Mary . It goes back to the birth of Jesus and tells in detail about the origins of Mary , the mother of Jesus. In this way it accommodates the desire for additional information about Mary - beyond the sparse passages in the four canonical Gospels .

The script was very popular throughout the Church but was not included in the canon of the biblical scriptures.

Author, time and place of origin

The presumably original name of the script is Birth of Mary , it is also called the Revelation of James in the subtitle of the oldest surviving manuscript . The title that has become naturalized today is a subsequent education from the 16th century that goes back to the French Jesuit and humanist Guillaume Postel . Postel, who rediscovered the book, translated it into Latin and had it printed in Basel in 1552 , considered it to be the lost prehistory of the Gospel of Mark .

Ecclesiastical tradition ascribed the authorship to the Lord Brother James , who the author claims to be. Pseudepigraphic author statements are not uncommon in early Christian literature. Since the content assumes the childhood stories of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the author was certainly not a contemporary of Jesus and is often mistaken for a Gentile Christian because of his unfamiliarity with Jewish customs .

The Proto-Gospel has long been considered relatively young and dated to the 5th or 6th century AD. Papyri finds in the 20th century have refuted this late dating. Today the writing is generally not put before 150 AD. However, it cannot have been created much later, since Clemens of Alexandria († 215) and Origen († 253/254) apparently already knew it. The formation of the canon was not yet completed at the time of writing. The oldest manuscript of the Protoevangelium is the Greek papyrus Bodmer 5 , which dates from the 3rd or 4th century AD.

The place of origin of the legend collection has not yet been determined. However, there is evidence that the text was not written in Palestine . The author lacks knowledge of the geographical conditions of Palestine (location of Judea and Galilee ) and he knows only poorly about the Jewish rules and customs.

content

Scripture has 25 chapters, each chapter an average of three verses. In terms of genre, it is not a gospel , but a wreath of legends about the life of Mary in the run-up to the events described in the New Testament, which the plot amounts to (in a sense a “ prequel ” of the canonical gospels). Among other things, the wonderful birth of Mary as the daughter of Anna and Joachim , her youth as a temple maiden in the care of the priests in the Jerusalem temple and her handover to Joseph are reported using motifs from the Old Testament .

Accordingly, the priests sought out a husband for Mary who was to protect her virgin when she had to leave the temple when she reached puberty. While the high priest Zechariah was praying, an angel appeared to him who asked him to call the widowers of Israel together. Everyone should bring a staff and God will send a sign of who will marry Mary. The priests then sent messengers to Judea and Joseph "threw down his ax in the middle of the work" and went to the temple. The high priest took the sticks the widowers had brought and prayed with them in the temple. When he returned it to the men, a dove hatched from Joseph's staff and sat on his head. This was the sign that God had chosen Joseph to be Mary's husband.

After a presentation of the Annunciation of the Lord , during which Mary was busy sewing the temple curtain , according to legend , it tells of the god-made defense of Mary and her fiancé against allegations of fornication by Jewish scribes after their pregnancy. The high priest gives Mary and Joseph "trial water" to drink, which proves their innocence.

An inserted poem in which Joseph reports in the first person about a vision of the standstill of nature before the birth of Jesus has complex references to the history of religion and a high literary quality . A midwife takes over the function of confirming the biological virginity of Mary and sings a song of praise reminiscent of the Magnificat . The inserted story of the unbelieving Salome , which is modeled on the apostle Thomas , affirms the preservation of Mary's virginity even during the birth of Jesus. After the description of the visit of the magicians and the rescue of Jesus from the murder of children in Bethlehem , an appendix reports on the death of the high priest Zacharias , who is equated with the father of John the Baptist .

A continuation of the life of Mary up to the death of Mary is missing in the Proto-Gospel of James and is supplied by later apocryphal literature.

reception

The Proto-Gospel of James was extremely popular and was quickly translated into numerous languages, such as Syrian , Georgian , Slavic , Armenian and Latin , but also into Coptic , Arabic and Ethiopian . The 169 Slavic versions of the text alone show the interest in it. In the Eastern Church it is recited in the liturgy ; the Ethiopian Church , which does not share the idea of ​​a binding canon, counts it to this day as part of the New Testament scriptures. In the West, on the other hand, the Proto-Gospel was condemned as spurious in the Decretum Gelasianum and included in the apocryphal scriptures. Nevertheless, much of the legends went into the pseudo-Matthew Gospel and from there into the Legenda aurea became an integral part of occidental education up to modern times. In the Middle Ages, writings such as the Proto-Gospel of James could for a long time be read at eye level with the canonical Gospels, before in the 16th century, in response to the Reformation criticism of the Bible and the stipulations of the Council of Trent that responded to it, the closed, also for the Roman- Catholic Church formed the binding New Testament Bible canon . In this sense, the Proto-Gospel can be counted on the margins of the medieval Bible.

The Proto-Gospel of James is the earliest and by far the most important apocryphal gospel with the greatest effects on theology and art in both the Eastern and Western Churches. Accordingly, motifs from the Gospel of James can often be found in Christian iconography (e.g. in Da Vinci's Maria in the Grotto ). The representation of St. Joseph as an older man goes back to the descriptions of the Proto-Gospel of James. In chapter 10: 2 Joseph says of himself: "I am an old man and have sons". Particularly influential were the reports of the Proto-Gospel for Mariology , especially the idea of ​​the perpetual virginity of Mary , as well as the general high esteem for virginity , e.g. B. also the marriage of Joseph , in Christian piety and art.

Motifs from the Gospel of James can be found - presumably mediated by the Arabic Gospel of Childhood  - in a modified form in the Koran . In particular, the emphasis on the virgin birth of Isa ( Sura 19 , 20; 3 , 47) and the defense of Maryam's virginity against defamatory accusations by the Jews are interpreted as a direct reflex of late antique Christian piety to Mary, which in turn was fed from the proto-gospel of James. While in the Proto-Gospel the hostility of a scribe is already successfully warded off by a divine judgment before the birth of Jesus (Chapter 15/16), in the Koran it is however the Jesus boy himself who begins to speak miraculously against his mother immediately after his birth to defend false suspicions (sura 19: 29–33). The figure of Joseph as the husband and protector of Mary is missing in the Koran.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacques Hervieux: What is not in the Gospel ... (= The Christian in the world. An encyclopedia. VI. Series, Volume 14). Aschaffenburg 1963, pp. 11-13.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Thomas Söding : The beginnings in the small. New Testament and Apocryphal Childhood Gospels. New Testament lecture in the winter semester 2013/14 (lecture notes). Online publication, Bochum 2013, pp. 81–84.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g Georg Röwekamp: Jakobus (d. J.) - Literature. In: Siegmar Döpp , Wilhelm Geerlings (Hrsg.): Lexicon of ancient Christian literature. Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1998, ISBN 3-451-23786-5 , p. 325.
  4. ↑ Jeff Morton: Two Messiahs. The Jesus of Christianity and the Jesus of Islam. Biblica, Colorado Springs 2011, ISBN 978-1-60657-095-1 , p. 143.
  5. ↑ Philip Kosloski: How did Joseph and Maria meet? In: Kath.net , February 25, 2019, accessed on February 25, 2019.
  6. ↑ Martin Bauschke: The son of Mary. Jesus in the Koran. WBG, Darmstadt 2013, ISBN 978-3-650-25190-9 , p. 35.
  7. ↑ Thomas Söding: The small beginnings. New Testament and Apocryphal Childhood Gospels. Bochum 2013, p. 77.
  8. ↑ Helmut Zander : The Word of God has a very earthly story: How the Bible came into being (Review of: Konrad Schmid , Jens Schröter : The Origin of the Bible. From the First Texts to the Holy Scriptures. Munich 2019). In: NZZ , October 27, 2019, accessed on November 2, 2019.
  9. ^ Geza Vermes : The Nativity. History and Legend. Penguin Books, London 2006, ISBN 978-0-14102-446-2 , p. 11.
  10. ↑ Thomas Söding: The small beginnings. New Testament and Apocryphal Childhood Gospels. Bochum 2013, p. 85.
  11. ↑ Martin Bauschke: The son of Mary. Jesus in the Koran. Darmstadt 2013, pp. 35–38.