The Annunciation to Mary as presented in the Protevangelium of James is an early account of Mary’s childhood and the Virgin Birth that flourished in both Western and Eastern Churches. This Annunciation account, distinct from versions found in the canonical gospels of the New Testament, successfully migrated beyond its Christian milieu, where it had traversed primarily by textual means in late-antiquity. The account’s widespread influence is attested to by its entry into the oral milieu of Arabia, the account being the basis by which the Qurʾān vindicates Mary and corrects Christological error amid a seemingly polemical environment. This article will evaluate qualities of the selected passage Q. 3:42-7 that elucidate the Annunciation’s gain of a new identity as it became adopted into the Qurʾānic corpus while considering how the Annunciation as presented in the passage provides further clarity as to the polemical and political circumstances surrounding the proto-Muslim community.
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Stephen Gero, ‘Apocryphal Gospels: A Survey of Textual and Literary Problems’, ANRW 25/5 (1988) 3979.
Mary Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary in Anglo-Saxon England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 12. Clayton writes, “In Syria there were constant contacts between Jews and Christians, and the way in which Mary’s relationship with Joseph is described makes her very similar to the uirgines subintroductae who were common in Syria. These were women who, in the period when there were yet no monasteries, took refuge in the houses of male ascetics in order to live as virgins.”
Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary, 11. Stryker attests that the Bodmer V papyrus underwent revision, particularly a shortening process (Stryker, La forme, 377-92). Bodmer V is published by Michel Testuz in Papyrus Bodmer V:Nativité de Marie (Cologny-Geneva: Bibliotheca Boderiana, 1958).
Clayton, The Apocryphal Gospels of Mary, 11. Martin McNamara provides that the portions of the pej are preserved in an Irish work known as Leabhar Breac. He argues that the pej was known in the twelfth century and possibly the ninth century (Martin McNamara, The Apocrypha in the Irish Church [Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1984] 46-7).
Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 48; Cullmann, ‘Infancy Gospels’, 425.
See Marcos Daoud, trans., The Liturgy of the Ethiopian Church (London: Kegan Paul, 2005) 108. The reception of the pej among Abyssinian Christians is evident not only by its influence on Ethiopic liturgy. Several manuscripts of the pej as well as commentaries, both written in the Gəʿəz language (early Ethiopic), contain names for the Magi that occur in Gəʿəz copies of the pej, but not its Greek or Syriac copies (Roger W. Cowley, Ethiopian Biblical Interpretation: a Study in Exegetical Tradition and Hermeneutics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)] 47).
Cornelia B. Horn, ‘Intersections: The Reception History of the Protevangelium of James in Sources from the Christian East and the Qurʾān’, Apocrypha 17 (2006) 145-6; Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne, Iconographie de l’Enfance de la Vierge dans l’Empire Byzantin et en Occident (Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique, 1992) 35, plate 1.
Ann van Dyck, ‘The Angelic Salutation in Early Byzantine and Medieval Annunciation Imagery’, The Art Bulletin 81/3 (1999) 430.
Loren D. Lybarger, ‘Gender and Prophetic Authority in the Qurʾānic Story of Maryam: A Literary Approach’, The Journal of Religion 80/2 (2000) 250.
Angelika Neuwirth, ‘The House of Abraham and the House of Amram’, in The Qurʾān in Context, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, and Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 528. Neuwirth also provides parallels between the Qurʾān and Gospel tradition that seem tenuous. For example, the Lord’s Prayer and Q. 3 16-17 (Angelika Neuwirth, ‘Mary and Jesus—Counterbalancing the Biblical Partriarchs’, Parole de l’Orient 30 [2005] 242).
Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) 16.
Robert Culley, Oral Formulaic Language in the Biblical Psalms (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967) 16. Alfred Lord, a noted pioneer in oral formulaic theory, defines theme as: “. . . a recurrent element of narration or description in traditional oral poetry” (Alfred Lord, ‘Composition by Theme in Homer and Southslavic Epos’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 82 [1951] 73).
Angelika Neuwirth, ‘Qurʾan and History—A Disputed Relationshi Some Reflections on Qur’anic History and History in the Qurʾan’, Journal of Qur’anic Studies 5 [2003] 12.
Gabriel Said Reynolds, ‘The Qurʾānic Sarah as Prototype of Mary’, in The Bible in Arab Christianity, ed. David Thomas (Leiden: Brill, 2007) 203.
Angelika Neuwirth, ‘The House of Abraham and the House of Amram’, in The Qurʾān in Context, ed. Angelika Neuwirth, Nicolai Sinai, and Michael Marx (Leiden: Brill, 2010) 520.
Ibid., 519.
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The Annunciation to Mary as presented in the Protevangelium of James is an early account of Mary’s childhood and the Virgin Birth that flourished in both Western and Eastern Churches. This Annunciation account, distinct from versions found in the canonical gospels of the New Testament, successfully migrated beyond its Christian milieu, where it had traversed primarily by textual means in late-antiquity. The account’s widespread influence is attested to by its entry into the oral milieu of Arabia, the account being the basis by which the Qurʾān vindicates Mary and corrects Christological error amid a seemingly polemical environment. This article will evaluate qualities of the selected passage Q. 3:42-7 that elucidate the Annunciation’s gain of a new identity as it became adopted into the Qurʾānic corpus while considering how the Annunciation as presented in the passage provides further clarity as to the polemical and political circumstances surrounding the proto-Muslim community.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 551 | 89 | 13 |
Full Text Views | 241 | 7 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 115 | 20 | 4 |