INFANCY GOSPELS
Under this heading I have put together the narratives of the birth of the Virgin, and birth and childhood of our Lord.
The texts which may be called ‘original’ are two, the Book of James (Protevangelium), and the Gospel of Thomas.
The Book of James we have largely in its original form. The Gospel of Thomas seems to be the skeleton of the original, the stories retained, the speeches, which conveyed the doctrinal teaching of the book, almost entirely removed. It is in fact an expurgated edition.
All the other texts are variants and embroideries upon these: some contain details which probably are derived from the original text of the Gospel of Thomas.
BOOK OF JAMES, OR PROTEVANGELIUM
The latter of these names is a modern one: it was given to the book by Guillaume Postel, who in the sixteenth century introduced it to Europe.
Origen mentions the Book of James (and the Gospel of Peter) as stating that the ‘brethren of the Lord’ were sons of Joseph by a former wife. This is the first mention of it, and shows us that the book is as old as the second century. To collect later references to it is unnecessary.
It is generally agreed that the story of the death of Zacharias (chs. xxii–xxiv) does not properly belong to the text. Origen and other early writers give a different account of the cause of his death: it was, they say, because, after the Nativity, he still allowed Mary to take her place among the virgins in the Temple.
Difficulty is also caused by the sudden introduction of Joseph as the narrator in ch. xviii. 2 sqq. We cannot be sure whether this means that a fragment of a ‘Joseph-apocryphon’ has been introduced at this point; or, if so, how far it extends. We are sure, from a sentence of Clement of Alexandria,[1] that some story of a midwife being present at the Nativity was current in the second century.
We have the book in the original Greek and in several oriental versions, the oldest of which is the Syriac. But, oddly enough, there is no Latin version. The matter is found in an expanded and altered form in the ‘Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew’, but we have yet to find an old Latin translation of the present text. Such a thing seems to have existed, for a book identifiable with ours is condemned in the Gelasian Decree.
In the early chapters the Old Testament is extensively drawn upon, and imitated; but the author is not familiar with Jewish life or usages.
The best recent edition of this book is a French one, by Amann. There is as yet no really critical edition of the text, in which all manu-- ↑ Strom. vii. 98, ‘for after she had brought forth some say that she was attended by a midwife, and was found to be a virgin’.
