Gospel of James

The so-called Proto- Gospel of James or Protevangelium is an early Christian writing, which is believed to have originated around the middle of the 2nd century. The name derives from the Greek πρῶτος, ( protos ), " first " or " beginning " here and can be translated as " Vorevangelium ".

The font has 25 chapters, each chapter has an average of three verses. Contrary to the other language of the Gospel as a representation of Jesus' life, his proto gospel is a life of Mary. It extends beyond the birth of Jesus and tells in detail the origin of Mary, Mother of Jesus. So it is the desire for additional reports on the mother of Jesus - on the sparse in the four canonical Gospels addition - contrary. Throughout the church, the writing was very popular; but it was not included in the canon of the Scriptures.

Authorship and origin

The original name of the font is birth / origin of Mary - Revelation of James. The title has come to be today, is a subsequent designation from the 16th century, which goes back to the French humanist Guillaume Postel.

The Church's tradition wrote the authorship of the Lord's brother James to; pseudepigraphic authorship that time was not unusual. But since the author required the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, he was obviously not a witness of Jesus. The gospel will be hardly emerged on the whole before 150 AD. It could not have come much later, as Clement of Alexandria († 215) and Origen († 253/254 ) knew it already. The oldest manuscript of the Gospel of Papyrus Bodmer 5, dating from the 3rd or 4th century after Christ's birth.

The Abfassungsort the Gospel has not yet been determined with absolute certainty. There are indications, however, that the author has not written the text in Palestine, for example:

• The author is a lack of knowledge on geographic locations of Palestine ( Judea and Galilee ).
• He knows the Jewish regulations and practices inadequately.

Reception

The Proto Gospel of James was translated into numerous languages ​​, into Syriac, Georgian, Slavonic, Armenian and Latin, but also into Coptic, Arabic and Ethiopian. Only the 169 Slavic versions of this gospel make the interest in it more than clear. In the Orthodox Church it is recited in the liturgy.

Topics from the Gospel are often processed in the western as well as eastern European art (eg da Vinci Mary in the grotto ). Thus, the representation of Joseph of Nazareth is as an old man back to the reports this Protogospel. In chapter 10.2 about Joseph says of himself: "I am an old man and have sons " ..