Mary Between Bible and Qur An

Islam and Christian– Muslim Relations,
Vol. 18, No. 4, 509 –538, October 2007
Mary between Bible and Qur’an:

Soundings into the Transmission and
Reception History of the
Protoevangelium of James on the Basis
of Selected Literary Sources in Coptic
and Copto-Arabic and of Art-Historical
Evidence Pertaining to Egypt
CORNELIA B. HORN
Department of Theological Studies, St Louis University, St Louis, Missouri, USA
ABSTRACT Taking up the question of the permeability of boundaries between early Eastern
Christian and Islamic communities and their literatures, this article studies the Coptic and
Copto-Arabic trajectory of the transmission and reception history of the Protoevangelium of
James, a text which offers remarkable parallels to presentations of Mary and Jesus in the Qur’an.
Being a second-century Christian apocryphal work, the Protoevangelium tells of Mary’s infancy
and youth and ends shortly after the birth of Christ. The article proceeds from Émile de
Strycker’s claim of the Protoevangelium’s Egyptian provenance through an examination of
Egyptian Christian traditions concerning it, covering Coptic and Copto-Arabic literature up to
and including the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. Ongoing
research on Christian women in Copto-Arabic sources points to traces of the usage of the
Protoevangelium of James in the early stages of redaction of the History of the Patriarchs of the
Coptic Church of Alexandria. Coptic and Copto-Arabic art also provides a number of pictorial
representations of passages in the Protoevangelium. Finally, the transmission history of the
Coptic and Arabic versions of the Protoevangelium rounds out the picture of the reception
history of this text in Christian Egypt into later medieval times. The article contributes towards a
systematic study of the spread of the Protoevangelium of James tradition in the late antique and
Byzantine Christian East and also towards a better understanding of the oral, written, and visual
milieu in which the Qur’an and early Islamic exegetical traditions encountered apocryphal motifs
derived from the Protoevangelium of James.
It is not a novel insight to comment on the reality of contacts, interactions, and exchanges
between early Eastern Christian and early Islamic communities, or even of their mutual
Correspondence Address: Cornelia B. Horn, Department of Theological Studies, St Louis University, Humanities
Building #124, 3800 Lindell Blvd., St Louis, MO 63108 USA; Email: [email protected]
0959-6410 Print/1469-9311 Online/07/040509–30 # 2007 CSIC and CMCU

DOI: 10.1080/09596410701577332
510 C. B. Horn
influences upon one another.1 Boundaries existed between these two groups, yet the defi-
nition of these boundaries was flexible. Moreover, the permeability of these boundaries
varied, at times allowing for significant exchanges of ideas and technological
and scientific achievements, as well as the transfer of literary expressions from one to
the other.2 Such permeability carried a positive valuation, since it contributed to the
development of both sides.
In the course of time, one Christian character in particular, that of Mary the mother of
Jesus, was given an exceptionally favorable reception in both communities.3 Examining
the literary representation of Mary in both traditions, separately as well as with a view
towards possible influences of one tradition’s heritage upon that of the other, ultimately
provides a valuable test-case for elucidating the relative density or openness of said bound-
aries between the Muslim and Christian communities. While this study cannot accomplish
a full discussion of all the components and perspectives, or even all the details, of a given
aspect that would contribute to such an undertaking, it attempts to make some headway
into this process of study by focusing on how one particular literary tradition concerning
Mary, that of the Protoevangelium of James, was received in one of the religious traditions
in question, namely Coptic and Copto-Arabic Christianity. With this main task in view,
this article will present a few initial indications of selected specific points at which, in
the process of the reception of the Protoevangelium of James in this Christian tradition
in Egypt, contacts with the emerging and eventually established religious tradition of
Islam provided contexts for an encounter with, and a reception of, the Protoevangelium
of James tradition in the Islamic community. The article approaches the question of the
permeability of boundaries between Eastern Christianity and Islam from the perspective
of a limited number of examples taken from Christian literary and visual artistic traditions,
in order to demonstrate that the reception of specific Marian traditions within Christianity
in Egypt was sufficiently dense, continuous, and prominent for their presence not to escape
the notice of a Muslim audience, which in turn would have been inspired to actively
receive and reshape this tradition. It is possible to establish a line of pre-qur’anic interpret-
ation of Mary that unquestionably goes back to extra-biblical traditions that were estab-
lished in Egypt in late antiquity. That same line of interpretation also extends
subsequently into the Qur’an, thus leaving not much doubt that an active exchange
between the two traditions offers the best model of explanation for that close relationship.
The present discussion sets aside another important factor in the development of written
and, especially, pictorial images of Mary in Egypt, which is the influence of Greco-Roman
and Egyptian religions in the first century CE. One well-known example of such influence
is the image of Mary as the Nursing Mother (Greek Galaktrophousa, Latin Maria lactans),
which is depicted in Coptic art from early on. The Protoevangelium of James mentions
that Mary gave Jesus her breast,4 but the popularity of this image in early Christian art
may be due to the widespread cult of Isis. Isis is often depicted feeding her little son
Horus at her breast. This is an example of a simple correspondence of one pictorial
representation to another (Isis—Galaktrophousa) and of an image with a text (Isis—
Protoevangelium of James). In both instances, there is little or no difference of interpret-
ation of the image itself. In this case, the permeability of boundaries between Christianity
and the Isis cult in Greco-Roman Egypt manifests itself in the context of Marian devotion
in Egypt. A further example of the susceptibility of Marian devotion to Greco-Roman
practices is the prevalence of Mary in Christian magic (see, for example, Beltz, 1998;
Meyer, 1996). Here, Mary is appropriated into a new system, in which there are different
Mary between Bible and Qur’an 511
relationships between the believer and Mary, and between Mary and Jesus. In Christian
magic, the Mary of the tradition tied to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and to
apocryphal Christian sources has been interpreted, not merely transferred. Long before
Islam, the representation of the figure of Mary, independent of the medium chosen, was
a nexus of syncretism, in which apocryphal Marian traditions were of central importance.
The correspondences between the Protoevangelium of James, as well as pictorial depic-
tions of Mary in Egyptian Christianity, and characterizations of the figure of Mary in the
formative period of the Qur’an may also be described in terms of how the first Muslims
did not merely take a syncretistic approach to Mary, by fitting her into their own system
of religious symbols, but also interpreted what they found written about her, or the way
she was depicted in Christian iconography. Hence, this investigation is a modest attempt
to shed light on one aspect of the proto-qur’anic interpretation of apocryphal Christian
texts. Furthermore, it is hoped that an understanding of the nature of the interpretations
that have been transmitted in the Qur’an will shed light on the interpreters: their social
and cultural milieu, and their possible geographical, religious, and temporal contexts.
This methodology attempts to build, through sound historical-critical philology, what
emerges as the ‘human face’ of Muhammad’s immediate milieu and that of other early con-
tributors and redactors of the textual basis of the growing Islamic tradition. Far from being
comprehensive and complete, the present study offers one step towards achieving this goal.
Along with the infancy narratives found in the canonical Gospels of Matthew and Luke,
the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James exerted far-reaching influence on shaping per-
ceptions of Mary’s character within the Christian community.5 Given the relative dearth of
information regarding Mary that can be derived from the Gospels, a growing popular curi-
osity about details of Mary’s life furthered the wide reception and thorough familiarity of
people with such a text, which filled precisely that lacuna. As a late-second-century Christian
apocryphal work that tells of Mary’s infancy and youth and ends shortly after the birth of
Christ, already before the rise of Islam the Protoevangelium of James had experienced
more than 400 years of a lively reception history within early and late ancient Christianity.
Early Islamic traditions enshrined in the Qur’an and Islamic exegetical treatises upon the
Qur’an, as well as Egyptian Christian traditions from the early Islamic centuries, witness
to the familiarity of members of their respective communities with the traditions contained
in the Protoevangelium of James. Recent research into the Marian traditions featured in
the Qur’an has demonstrated the great density of potential, possible, and probable parallels
between representations of Mary in the Qur’an and in Christian literature (see Mourad,
1999; Horn, 2007).6 The clearest and perhaps best-known parallels of Marian material are
those between sūrat Maryam and sūrat Āl cImrān, and the Protoevangelium of James. A
sine qua non for the effective examination of the realm of possibilities for interaction, as
well as the direct lines of exchange between these two traditions, is the need to study the
transmission and reception history of the Protoevangelium of James carefully. In doing so,
it is understood that the evidence for the popularity of the Protoevangelium of James in
Christian circles in Egypt is only fragmentary and does not permit the reconstruction of
the full extent of where and when Christians in Egypt heard of, saw, or otherwise encountered
traditions about Mary based on the narrative of the Protoevangelium of James. This also
means that opportunities for Muslims to encounter such traditions were more frequent
than the data available for this study can document or even suggest. An approach to
Muslim–Christian relations that is grounded, not in the realm of speculative dogmatic and
theological claims as to the divine inspiration of a given text, but rather in the realm of
512 C. B. Horn
investigating both religious traditions as part of a larger framework of the history of relations
between religions in the Middle East in medieval times cannot proceed without tracing
in detail ideally all the possible contributions to the mapping out of encounters between
representatives of both faiths.
When attempting to reconstruct how widely and how well the Protoevanglium of James
and its traditions were known in Egypt, consideration must be given to several components
that contribute to the picture of the transmission and reception history of that apocryphal
text and that have to be identified and distinguished.7 What have to be collected and
analyzed are data on:
1. the history of the translation of the Protoevangelium of James into the various Eastern
Christian languages;8
2. aspects of the transmission history of the manuscripts of the text, such as the number of
extant copies, the extent of its distribution, the range of ages of the manuscripts, and the
locations and number of languages into which it has been translated, to the extent that
this information allows for insights into the geographical spread of the text;
3. direct citations of the text of the Protoevangelium of James in other early and late
ancient Christian literature;
4. allusions to distinct themes known only from the Protoevangelium of James in early
and late ancient Christian literature;
5. the usage of the Protoevangelium of James in liturgical contexts throughout the late
ancient Christian Near East;
6. representations of scenes from the Protoevangelium of James in artwork and as
decorations on other material objects, including architecture, discovered in or related
to the Christian East;
7. literary descriptions of such artwork and material objects that have perished since late
antiquity; and
8. representations and/or literary descriptions of such works in art preserved in the West,
particularly in places where connections to the Christian East as the place of origin of
the work or the artist can be established.
An additional factor (9) that may aid in measuring the spread of acquaintance either with
this text or with its motives is the extent to which they were known outside Christian
circles in the centuries prior to the rise of Islam. The level of familiarity with issues
raised in the text that one encounters in Judaism, for example, could offer further insights,
given that knowledge of this text and its traditions among Jews can account at least poten-
tially for a passing on of familiarity with it into the realm of Islam.9 The influential role of
Jews in offering Muhammad orientation concerning traditions of the Bible has already
been noted in Muslim sources of antiquity.10
Ordering the data gained by addressing such matters chronologically and geographi-
cally constitutes an acceptable methodology towards finding out about the relative fre-
quency of interaction with, and reference to, the Protoevangelium of James in a given
area, language tradition, and time period, both within Christianity and within the realm
of the interactions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam with one another. This examination
provides the researcher with some measure of the relative density of the spread of the story
in the Christian milieu. It also offers the methodological framework for the present article,
which pursues the study of the Egyptian milieu in the first and early second millennia.
Literary evidence establishes Egypt as a geographical area in which the Protoevangelium

of James was well known for most of the first millennium CE and beyond. Émile de Strycker,
who critically edited the Greek text of the Protoevangelium of James in 1961, rejected the
idea of a Syrian–Palestinian provenance and favored late-second-century Egypt (de
Strycker, 1961, p. 423). The earliest witness for a tradition found in the Protoevangelium
of James is the declaration in Clement of Alexandria’s Stromateis, book 7, that Mary
remained a virgin after parturition. In the Protoevangelium of James, a Jewish midwife
named Salome examined Mary and (the reader may safely infer) found that her hymen
was undamaged.11 Origen of Alexandria referred to the Protoevangelium of James as the
‘Book of James’ in his Commentary on Matthew (Matthew 13:55–56).12 Possible parallels
between the Protoevangelium of James and Justin Martyr’s works, and thus for the regions of
Palestine and Rome, have been judged to be significantly more vague and tentative than the
evidence from early Egypt (de Strycker, 1961, pp. 414–417). Ongoing research on the
representation of Christian women in Copto-Arabic sources by the present author points
to traces of the usage of the Protoevangelium of James in literary sources in Egypt at
least up until the eleventh-century layer of redaction of the Copto-Arabic History of the
Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria.13 Evidence from iconography shows that
the Protoevangelium of James continues to be received in Egypt itself, as well as in
Coptic communities across the globe, well into modern times.14
In the light of such parameters, which highlight the importance of Egypt for the trans-
mission and reception history of the Protoevangelium of James in Eastern Christianity and
well beyond the earliest Islamic period, the rest of this article will study aspects of the
Coptic and Copto-Arabic trajectory of this history, specifically with a view to examining
the extent to which the reception history of this text, and traditions associated with it, could
have provided a meeting ground for a cross-fertilization of the Christian and Islamic
traditions with regard to their perceptions of Mary.
The following discussion first examines aspects of the transmission history of the
Coptic, Ethiopic, and Arabic versions of the Protoevangelium of James. It then traces
important steps in the reception history of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic and
Copto-Arabic literature up to and including the redaction of the History of the Patriarchs
of the Coptic Church by Mawhūb ibn Mansūr Mufarrij. In this context, a consideration of
˙
some aspects of the intersection of the reception history of the Protoevangelium of James
with Greek sources from Egypt is appropriate. This article investigates the reception
history of this apocryphal text in a selection of examples of early Christian art in
Egypt, which have been preserved as witnesses to early illustrations of scenes featured
in the text of the Protoevangelium of James, and offers preliminary suggestions about
how the earliest contributors and redactors of the Qur’an might have encountered and
subsequently incorporated aspects of the traditions concerning Mary to which the
Protoevangelium of James traditions in Egypt are an ample witness.
Aspects of the Transmission History of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic,

with Some Consideration of the Versions of the Protoevangelium of James
in Ethiopic and Arabic
Émile de Strycker assumed the existence of a Sahidic version of the Protoevangelium of
James, which he considered to be among the earliest witnesses, dating to before 450 (1961,
p. 49). Fragments of the Sahidic version of the Protoevangelium of James have been
514 C. B. Horn
identified, but there is no complete Coptic witness.15 Fortunately there are complete Ge’ez
and Arabic versions that may reflect a Coptic Vorlage. The following paragraphs first con-
sider the evidence for Ethiopic and Arabic translations of the Protoevangelium of James
before the discussion then focuses on the Coptic material.
While it might be reasonable to postulate a relationship between the Coptic and
Ethiopic traditions of the Protoevangelium of James from early on, the edited Ethiopic
version, which belongs to a group of witnesses from after 1100 CE, is about 600 years
younger than the extant Coptic fragmentary material (de Strycker, 1961, p. 50).16 Among
the oriental Christian versions, the Ethiopic text is judged to be the least faithful rendi-
tion of the text (ibid., p. 38). Whereas apocryphal texts reached Ethiopia via direct trans-
lations from Greek or through the intermediary of Syriac between the fifth and seventh
centuries, a significant period of the renaissance of Ethiopic literature occurred in the
thirteenth century, when new apocryphal texts were translated into Ge’ez from Arabic
versions (ibid., pp. 362– 363).17 Thus, it is quite likely that the Ethiopic version of the
Protoevangelium of James derived from the Arabic version.
In his standard reference work on the manuscript tradition and literary history of
Arabic-speaking Christianity, Georg Graf (1944) provided an overview of manuscripts
written in Arabic or Karshuni (i.e. Arabic written in Syriac script) that contain the
Protoevangelium of James. There are several types of Arabic witnesses. Some consist
of a complete translation, corresponding to the contents in the Greek manuscripts,
others witness an expanded version and still others are a new retelling of the material
(Graf, 1944, pp. 224– 225). In addition, some Arabic texts preserve excerpts or short
summaries of the text or parts of the text of the Protoevangelium of James,18 and new
compositions were created around the general story line of the Protoevangelium of
James which were presented not in narrative form but rather as sermons or homilies
(maymar) (Graf, 1944, p. 225). Such homilies are evidenced in manuscripts from the
fifteenth century onwards.19
If one excludes the evidence for the Protoevangelium of James that is preserved in the
palimpsest Sinaiticus arab. 588,1 from any of the statistical calculations, since it has yet
to be determined whether the text there is written in Arabic or Greek, more than one-
third, or five out of the 12 manuscripts in Arabic20 for which Graf was able to collect
references, were written in Karshuni.21 The oldest witness Graf managed to adduce
dates to the fifteenth century. About 30 years later, however, a tenth-century manuscript
of the Protoevangelium of James became available, MS Sin. arab. 436, fols. 112r – 121v,
which is likely to be a direct translation from a Greek Vorlage (Garitte, 1973).22 Thus
far, it seems that no further attempts have been made to establish a critical edition of
the Arabic version of the Protoevangelium of James. Accomplishing this task is
clearly a scholarly desideratum. With Gérard Garitte’s edition of the tenth-century
witness, we have a possible candidate for the text upon which at least part of the Ethiopic
version may have been dependent, but Garitte’s manuscript is quite faithful to the Greek,
and moreover is fragmentary.23 From these considerations, it is clear that the question of
the precise dependence of the Ethiopic material cannot be resolved until the text of the
Arabic version of the Protoevangelium of James has been critically edited.24 The final
resolution to questions of the influence of the available fragmentary Coptic text upon
the Arabic material also has to await the publication of such a critical edition. This
inevitable delay, however, does not preclude one from studying other relevant aspects
of this Coptic material.
The evidence for sections of the text of the Protoevangelium of James that are preserved in
Coptic is fragmentary and does not allow one to conclude with certainty that there ever
existed a complete version of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic in antiquity. Several
fragments in Sahidic have emerged and have been published, among them two that were
edited with German translations in 1905 and 1958, and a third edited and translated into
French in 1905 (Revillout, 1905b). In 1905, Johannes Leipoldt identified and published
folio 89 of MS BN Paris Coptic 1305 as containing two fragments of the Protoevangelium
of James (Leipoldt, 1905).25 The folio page, on the front and back of which these two text
fragments are found, is both relatively recent, being medieval, dating to the eleventh
century, and badly damaged. Originally, the text of the folio containing the Protoevangelium
of James was written in two columns per page, but half of the page has been lost so that the
recto only retains the left column, while the verso of the page only preserves the right column
of text. On the recto, one may find a section of chapters 46 to 47 of the Protoevangelium of
James, an episode dealing with the murder of Zachariah.26 The column on the verso contains
a section of chapter 49, which constitutes a part of the author’s concluding comments (de
Strycker, 1961, p. 39; Leipoldt, 1905, pp. 106 [Coptic], 107 [German]). An additional
fragment from MS BN Paris Coptic 12917, first published in 1905 by Eugène Revillout,
preserves a complementary section of the text. While more is to be said below with
regard to the witness of MS BN Paris Coptic 12917 to a Sahidic Apocryphon with Infancy
Gospel material, one may take note here that the fragment on Zachariah which it contains
bears the title ‘Martyrdom of Zachariah, the priest, on the 8th of the month of Thot, in the
peace of the Lord’ (see Revillout, 1905b, p. 456; cf. Peeters, 1910a, p. 271, n. 1248;
Emmel, 2004, vol. 1, p. 378). The text itself is quite fragmentary, but one can determine
with sufficient clarity that it recounts scenes pertaining to the visit of the Magi and the
massacre of the Holy Innocents. Both in the case of the Sahidic fragments of MS BN Paris
Coptic 1305 fol. 89, and also here, one might perhaps suspect that a possible context for the
usage of this fragment of a ‘Martyrdom of Zachariah’ taken from the Protoevangelium of
James may have been the liturgical celebrations with readings for the feast of Zachariah
(de Strycker, 1961, p. 45, n. 2), the father of John the Baptist. Given the extent of the
fragment, perhaps one could alternatively assume that someone had selected readings for
the feast of the Holy Innocents, or one might also think of a feast related to John the
Baptist.27 Be that as it may, clearly a considerable portion of the text preserved in both of
these Coptic fragments witnesses to material contained in the Protoevangelium of James
that features the martyrdom of Zachariah, a section of the narrative which scholarship in
earlier years considered to possibly constitute the third part of a total of three originally
independent sources that had become integrated with one another to form the text of the
Protoevangelium of James, as it is now known.28
About 50 years after Leipoldt’s publication, Walter Till published another Sahidic
fragment (Till, 1958). This evidence for a Coptic version of the Protoevangelium of
James was taken from an earlier witness, a tenth-century parchment kept in the papyrus
collection in Vienna.29 In this case too, each page was written in double columns, but
of the original 24 lines per column, between two and five lines of text were missing or
corrupted at the bottom of any given column (Till, 1958, pp. 320 – 321; de Strycker,
1961, p. 39). The text of the Protoevangelium of James represented in this older
witness, namely portions of the text taken from chapters 43 through 46, likewise
derives from the concluding part of the Protoevangelium of James that treats the
martyrdom of Zachariah. Yet another Coptic fragment of roughly the same section
516 C. B. Horn
from the Protoevangelium of James is to be found in MS BN Paris Coptic 12918, published

by Enzo Lucchesi in 1988 (see Lucchesi, 1988, pp. 69 – 72).
Given the lack of a larger context, scholars, including de Strycker, were not certain
whether one could assume that the Sahidic fragments did indeed witness to a complete
Sahidic version of the Protoevangelium of James, or whether the material that has been
preserved merely represents selections translated specifically for, and used as, liturgical
reading on a given feast day, of either Zachariah, John the Baptist, the Holy Innocents, or
some other event. In fact, for the date of Zachariah’s feast day on the 8 Toth/5 September
(in the Julian calendar), the Greek Menologion also required the reading of a segment of the
text of the Protoevangelium of James that is very similar in content to the passage in
the Sahidic fragmentary evidence (see also Halkin, 1957, vol. 2, p. 318, n. 1881).30 The
Sahidic fragment taken from the Vienna parchment is similar in extent to an extract
witnessed to in a sixteenth (to seventeenth)-century manuscript from St Mark’s in Venice
that served as a eulogy for the Holy Innocents on the occasion of their feast day (see also
Halkin, 1957, vol. 1, p. 264, n. 823z). In support of this tradition, there is pictographic
evidence from Coptic monasteries that reflects a connection between the depiction of the
Slaughter of the Innocents and the narrative of the martyrdom of Zachariah, for which
the Protoevangelium of James seems to offer the earliest stages of development. In the
fourth- or fifth-century illustration of the scene of the Slaughter of the Innocents, as
found in the Monastery of Abū Hinnis, a soldier threatens John the Baptist’s mother,
˙
Elizabeth, who is holding her little son on her knees, while another soldier moves as if to
attack John’s father Zachariah, who kneels down and whose gesture of turning his back
to the gate of the Temple might suggest that he intended to defend the holy place.31
From this review of the data concerning the transmission history of the Protoevangelium
of James in the main languages relevant for the study of the history of Christian literature
in Egypt, several conclusions may be drawn. In all of the three language traditions relevant
here, evidence for the complete text, or for substantial sections of the text, of the
Protoevangelium of James comes from relatively late witnesses. The Coptic fragments
reflect a transmission history of the Protoevangelium of James that is rather close to the
Greek text and that quite markedly seems to be limited to material concerning Zachariah,
or at least to material from the latter portion of the Protoevangelium of James. The Greek
trajectory also seems to extend into the transmission history of the Arabic version, at least
as far as it is currently accessible. Since there is evidence that greater freedom was
exercised in some homiletic material that is preserved in Arabic and builds upon the
Protoevangelium of James, the need for work on the critical edition of the Arabic
version, as well as on texts witnessing to the reception history of the Protoevangelium
of James in Arabic, emerges very clearly. Given the ample evidence of manuscripts in
Karshuni, the extent to which some of the paraphrases and allusions recognizable in
parts of the Arabic tradition may depend, for example, on the Syriac tradition is another
important area of inquiry, even if it is one that does not fall within the orbit of what
this article can consider.
Aspects of the Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic

Literature
A full examination of the reception history of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic
literature is a task this study can only begin to address. The following discussion
cannot, therefore, do more than attempt to highlight a few aspects of the issues and obser-
vations that have emerged from ongoing research.
Coptic literature preserves several texts that witness to their respective authors’ famili-
arity with the Protoevangelium of James, which was established either through direct
access to the text in Coptic or through these authors’ familiarity with details of the
story through other sources. It is worth noting individual texts in which traces of this
tradition are reflected. The following examination considers material contained in a
so-called Sahidic Apocryphon, which retells and expands upon individual aspects of the
Protoevangelium of James and aspects of the intersection of this text with a Coptic Life
of the Virgin. Next, it studies elements of: the integration of material derived from the
Protoevangelium of James with the liturgical tradition of the Coptic Church as reflected
in lectionaries; the reuse of such material in the homiletic tradition; and the acquaintance
with the Protoevangelium of James that is reflected in selected narratives of an apocryphal
nature, here one dealing with Joseph and one with John the Baptist.
In 1905, Eugène Revillout provided access to a Sahidic apocryphal text32 but did not
offer information concerning his manuscript witness(es). P. Peeters was able to identify
MS BN Paris Coptic 12917 as containing at least some of the fragments that Revillout
had published (Peeters, 1910b, 16A, number 45), but that Paris manuscript does not
seem to have been the sole source for Revillout’s edition and translation. More recently,
Simon Mimouni saw in MS BN Paris Coptic 12918 an additional source for Revillout’s
edition (see Mimouni, 1994, p. 213, n. 5). Émile de Strycker followed Revillout’s publi-
cation and spoke of the material as a Sahidic Apocryphon that details much of the storyline
covered in the Protoevangelium of James. Mimouni reconstructed some of the fragments as
parts of a larger Coptic Life of the Virgin, to which also belong four other fragments, which
were first published by Eugène Revillout in 1876, and then republished and supplemented
with readings from additional manuscripts and translated into English by Forbes Robinson
in 1896.33 The first two of these fragments of a Life of the Virgin show close parallels to
traditions featured in the Protoevangelium of James (Robinson, 1896, pp. 2 –21). Until a
critical edition of the fragments presented by Revillout becomes available, not much can
be said definitively about their setting, provenance, afterlife, and influence on other
accounts. The comments here must restrict themselves to a description.
Half of the fragments consist of scenes that clearly develop material found in the
Protoevangelium of James, namely the Presentation of Mary in the Temple and her
Betrothal to Joseph,34 the Annunciation and Visitation, Joseph and Salome at the grotto
of the Nativity, and finally the Martyrdom of Zachariah. Interspersed are fragments that
feature other aspects of female figures named Salome, one being Salome the prostitute,
who came to repent of her former way of life and converted through the mediation of
her brother Symeon the priest, and a second Salome, the daughter of Herodias, who
danced at King Herod’s banquet.35 The remainder of the fragments focus on scenes
featuring Herod, Philip the Tetrarch, and John the Baptist, particularly with regard to
John’s preaching and decapitation.
Examining the fragments of the Sahidic Apocryphon on textual grounds, de Strycker
thought of the first and the last of them as being close enough to the Protoevangelium
of James to allow for some conclusions regarding their dependence on a Greek Vorlage
of it (de Strycker, 1961, p. 45). While there are clear connections to the subject matter of
the Protoevangelium of James, all in all, given the fragmentary nature of the pieces of
the Sahidic Apocryphon, establishing direct parallels to the text of the Protoevangelium
518 C. B. Horn
of James remains a tentative undertaking. Rather than assuming that the text of which they
were a part was translated directly from Greek or Syriac, Émile de Strycker argued for its
authentically Egyptian origin, as either having been composed in Sahidic or having been
translated from Arabic (ibid., p. 373). Both these options are difficult to demonstrate or
prove, since the fragments of the Sahidic Apocryphon nowhere overlap with the text of
the Sahidic fragments of the Protoevangelium of James discussed above (ibid.). As in
the case of determining the dependence of the Ethiopic version of the Protoevangelium
of James, so also here the lack of a critical edition of the Arabic text prevents one from
discerning both the possible dependence of the fragments of the Sahidic Apocryphon
and the Arabic tradition itself.36
Of remarkable interest is the emphasis that the material pertaining to the Sahidic
Apocryphon places on the various Salome figures. Several of the Coptic homilies that
could be examined for this study also display a rather lively interest in figures named
Salome, especially that Salome who is to be identified with Philip the Tetrarch’s young
daughter (Matthew 14:6–11 and Mark 6:22–28). In the Coptic homiletic tradition, this
young girl, who is portrayed as having danced lasciviously at Herod’s banquet and who
then requested John the Baptist’s head on a platter, is readily characterized as the embodiment
of female temptation and sinfulness.37 In the Coptic tradition, the interpretation of the figure
of Salome, who is known from the Protoevangelium of James as the woman who doubted
Mary’s virginity but converted from her disbelief, also became colored by the
representation of Philip’s daughter Salome as a sinful young woman. Through this move,
the name ‘Salome’ could be seen as that not only of an unbeliever but also of a female
sinner, who had to repent of a substantial sin and then converted.38 This emphasis on
Salome is also found rather frequently in Coptic art, to which the discussion will return below.
The reception of narrative elements of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic litera-
ture is prominent in material that relates to, or is part of, the liturgical tradition of the
Coptic Church. This article can highlight two areas that reflect distinct realms of this
reception, namely the integration of excerpts from the Protoevangelium of James into
lectionaries, and the use of these traditions in homiletic literature. First, we shall consider
evidence of the text’s reception in collections designated for liturgical reading.
Recent work in Coptic studies has been very successful in reconstructing the structure of
the library containing the literary works of Abba Shenoute of Atripe, who from c. 385 until
c. 465 served as the archimandrite of the White Monastery near Sohag, located close to
Akhmı̄m in Upper Egypt. In the course of reconstituting the lines of transmission of
Shenoute’s work, it became clear that in a few instances certain sections from Shenoute’s
corpus supplied readings that also were collected in lectionaries (see Emmel, 2004, vol. 1,
pp. 361– 379). If we refer again, for example, to MS BN Paris Coptic 1305 ff. 89– 90, a
section that, as seen above, witnesses to the transmission history of the Protoevangelium
of James, we note that it provides precisely such an instance of texts collected and paired
together as readings in a lectionary. Based on Enzo Lucchesi’s reconstruction of codex ZT
of the White Monastery library, Stephen Emmel identified this manuscript fragment as
part of a lectionary,39 possibly one prepared for celebrating feasts focusing on John the
Baptist. After a reading from the Protoevangelium of James that selected at least some
of the material dealing with the martyrdom of Zachariah, the lectionary offered an
excerpt from Abba Shenoute’s Discourse ‘Now Many Words and Things I Said’, a text
that scholars previously approached as one dealing with ecclesiastical discipline.40
Perhaps it is to be regarded as one of the ironies of history that excerpts from the teachings
of an author such as Abba Shenoute, who had vehemently opposed the reading of certain
apocryphal and Gnostic texts by the members of his monastery,41 should be found centu-
ries after his death accompanying apocryphal readings in the guides the Church itself
offered to its faithful, even if these particular apocryphal texts might perhaps not
readily be judged to be Gnostic. While this detail is a colorful vignette that illustrates
an important aspect of the reception history of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic,
one should also note that the acceptance of the Protoevangelium of James in the
context of lectionaries is not a phenomenon unique to the Coptic tradition. As seen
above, excerpts from the Protoevangelium of James also found their way into the
Greek Menologion. A fuller study of lectionaries from the early and late ancient, as
well as Byzantine, Christian period will have to examine how widespread this tradition
was. For the question of the permeability of boundaries between Muslims and Christians
in the early centuries of the rise of Islam this matter is of no small importance.
Well-established work on the history of the Qur’an recognized as long as 100 years ago
that the designation Qur’ān is not a native Arabic term, but was introduced into Arabic
from Syriac (see Nöldeke, 1909, pp. 33– 34). A recent study of the origins and structure
of the language of the Qur’an has argued that the very name Qur’ān points to the
origins of the Islamic Holy Book in the context of the creation of an Arabic lectionary
derived from a Syro-Aramaic lectionary (qeryānā) as model (Luxenberg, 2000, pp.
54 –83). Independent of whether or not one adopts Luxenberg’s proposition that the
Qur’an represents an Islamic version of a Christian lectionary (ibid., pp. 79 –83), the sug-
gestion certainly raises the question of what the study of Christian lectionaries may con-
tribute to the analysis of the relationship between Christians and Muslims at the time of
Muhammad and his early followers. In recent scholarship of Christian – Muslim relations,
more suggestions have been made that not all, but certainly parts, of the Qur’an can be
considered to be related to the presentation of texts in the form of a lectionary.42 Certainly,
none of the examples of the use of the Protoevangelium of James in the Coptic and
the Greek tradition proves that Muhammad or his early followers would have heard
passages from it being read aloud if or when they were present at a Christian liturgical
service. Nevertheless, this evidence does show that an encounter with traditions of the
Protoevangelium of James was a possibility for anyone who witnessed relevant liturgical
celebrations. It is known, for example, that some of the members of Muhammad’s own
family, such as Waraqa ibn Nawfal, a cousin of his first wife Khadı̄ja, had been Christians
(see Graf, 1944, vol. 1, p. 24). That being so, ibn Nawfal also would have had some form
of Christian upbringing and education that included opportunities for becoming familiar
with the narrative of the Protoevangelium of James simply by attending the Christian
liturgy, a celebration that from early on was open to Christians of all ages, including
young children.43 The acceptance of the Protoevangelium of James into the liturgy, there-
fore, and the subsequent acceptance of some of its traditions by participants at Christian
worship services provide at least one of the concrete constellations of factors that illustrate
the permeability of the boundaries between Christianity and Islam in the sense of traditions
moving from the Christian realm into that of Islam.
Another area in which the reception history of the Protoevangelium of James is closely
connected with the Christian liturgy is the realm of homiletic literature. To the extent that
Coptic literature selects from and reflects the influence of traditions derived from the
Protoevangelium of James, it displays a distinct preference for featuring elements of
the narrative of the Protoevangelium of James in homilies that were geared towards
520 C. B. Horn
promoting the ascetic life among believers. Two Coptic manuscripts in the Pierpont
Morgan Library (MSS Morgan 596 and 597), as well as one manuscript in the library
of the British Museum (MS Or. 7027), preserve slightly varying texts of a Coptic
Homily on the Nativity and the Virgin Mary. This homily is ascribed to Demetrius of
Antioch and is likely to have been composed in the second half of the seventh century.
It features the three-year-old girl, Mary, functioning as a model of the consecrated
ascetic life.44 When her mother, Anna, brought her to the priests at the Temple, the girl
was said to have run on her own to the altar as the place of the sacrifice of the Lord.45
Once she had entered the Temple, she never turned back,46 leaving behind any thoughts
about her parents or the world.47 In her daily progress and with her pleasant temperament,
she far surpassed the behavior displayed by any of the other virgins in the Temple,48 so
that at the age of ‘eight or ten’ she had even become a model for the priests, who were
afraid to meet her.49 Her body was strengthened in the fear of the Lord, which MS
Morgan 596 employs as the reason why the priests were afraid to meet the girl.50 MS
Morgan 597 understands the fear of the Lord as a force that bound and immobilized the
girl’s body,51 while MS BL 7027 avoids speaking of fear and says instead that the Lord
strengthened the heart of the little girl, who kept her body chaste.52 All three textual
variants emphasize the little virgin’s chastity, in body or in both soul and body.53
Between repetitions of the theme of chastity, the homily details what kind of behavior
characterized a virgin’s chastity. Thus, little Mary did not poke her head outside the
Temple gates seeking the sight of strangers,54 nor did she allow herself even to look at
a young male servant,55 or to be looked at by anyone to avoid the arousal of desires.56
As the homilist emphasized, the young girl ‘lived in chastity and great ascesis’,57 or, as
MS Morgan 597 expresses it, ‘in chastity, in the adoration of God, and in [proper] order’.58
To create a more explicit and detailed image of this young, ideal life of ascesis, meant to
be understood as a model for all, the homilist elaborated on how the little girl wore her habit
in an appropriate manner. Her mantle reached up to her eyes, thus presumably covering all
her hair.59 Her tunic reached down to her heels.60 A belt tied her mantle to her tunic,61 which
was neither dirty nor worn out.62 She did not treat her hair with a comb,63 did not place dark
shadows (perhaps kohl) on her eyes, nor did she apply cosmetics made from the crocus plant
to her eyebrows or cheeks.64 She did not wear sandals for seduction, nor did she adorn her
arms with bracelets.65 Little Mary did not desire any extra food nor did she stroll across
public places in the city, in order not to be tempted by what the world had to offer.66 She
never undressed to wash or take a bath, nor did she look at her body.67 Instead, until she
was 12, she lived in this ascetic manner, being in conscious awareness of God, with a
sense of the fear of God, and being guarded by Christ, since she knew that she had been
created to become his ark and the dwelling-place.68
Quite obviously inspired by the basic narrative of the Protoevangelium of James, the
author of this homily freely developed and integrated his own ideas about the proper
ascetic life into a basic framework provided for his purposes by the main details known
about Mary’s early life from the Protoevangelium of James. It remains to be investigated
to what extent such free development of an explicitly ascetic message is representative of a
wider Eastern Christian reception of the Protoevangelium of James, or typical of
and specific to the Coptic tradition. The existence of several of the Arabic homilies to
which Georg Graf refers may help in examining this question further in a separate study.
Other examples of Coptic literature that incorporate significant portions of the
Protoevangelium of James include the History of Joseph the Carpenter, a text that had
its origins of composition in Egypt sometime between the latter part of the sixth and the
seventh century.69 Scholarship assumes that the original may have been composed in
Greek, but the complete text of this work is preserved only in Bohairic, as well as sub-
sequently in Latin and Arabic translations. In support of the apparently relatively wide-
spread occurrence of this narrative, one can also point to the existence of a fragmentary
version in Sahidic.70 The first 11 chapters of the History of Joseph the Carpenter
follow the text of the Protoevangelium of James in many details.
Yet another significant example of the reception of the Protoevangelium of James into
Coptic literature consists of texts dealing with the figure of John the Baptist. British
Museum MS Or. 3581 B, for example, contains a Sahidic fragment on the birth and earliest
childhood of John the Baptist, followed immediately by a narration of the visit of the Magi to
the child Jesus. Forbes Robinson seems to have been the first to publish this fragment
(Robinson, 1896, pp. 162–165). He already observes that the life of John the Baptist and
the Visit of the Magi were themes that were rather common in Coptic sermons (ibid., p. 235).
Of particular interest also is a longer section found in Lord Crawford’s Sahidic MS 36,
which contains an account of Christ’s birth that closely ‘resembles . . . that of the
Protevangelium (cc. XVII –XX)’ (ibid., p. 196), but that also features several differences.
Three main points in which they differ from one another are that the Sahidic fragment
leaves out Joseph’s first-person account, that it has Jesus being born in a tomb and not
in a ‘cave’,71 and that the Sahidic fragment from Lord Crawford’s manuscript identifies
Salome not as the unbelieving woman whose hand withered when conducting the test
of Mary’s virginity, but as the midwife (ibid., p. 197). After about two pages of this
account of the birth of Christ provided in the Sahidic fragment of Lord Crawford’s manu-
script there also follow an account of the Magi, of Elisabeth’s flight with the child John and
of the murder of Zachariah.72 The arrangement of this material, as well as many but not all
of the details, agrees with the Protoevangelium of James.
Although this article can only offer an abbreviated discussion of the available material,
it may nevertheless already have become obvious that within the body of Coptic literature,
knowledge of both key and subsidiary features of the Protoevangelium of James was
widely present. Such features were willingly and readily employed and were developed
further to serve the specific goals of a given preacher. They were also incorporated
when creating new apocryphal traditions, thus highlighting parts of the life of other bib-
lical figures, such as Joseph or John the Baptist, or even seemingly unrelated characters,
such as Salome, that had previously remained unexplored.
In the context of examining the Christian literary tradition in Egypt for traces of
the influence of the Protoevangelium of James, one further body of texts that is central
to the self-identity of the Coptic Church cannot be ignored. In fact, the main church-
historical narrative of Coptic Christianity, the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic
Church, shows at least some acquaintance with traditions that ultimately are grounded
in the Protoevangelium of James. The following section highlights this connection,
which emerges via the intersection of Greek and Copto-Arabic literature.
The Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James at the Intersection

of Greek, Coptic, and Copto-Arabic Literature
The History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church is certainly among the best-known and
most widely received texts of Copto-Arabic literature in early Christian Egypt. In the
522 C. B. Horn
so-called ‘Third Preface’ to the text, one of the compilers and/or redactors, identified as
Severus ibn al-Muqaffa, spoke of those who assisted him ‘in translating the histories that
[they] found written in the Coptic and Greek languages into the Arabic tongue’. These his-
tories were ‘current among the people of the present day in the region of Egypt, most of
whom are ignorant of the Coptic and the Greek’. It was the author’s hope that these people
‘might be satisfied with such translations when they read them’ (Evetts, 1907, p. 115). The
precise role of Severus in the compilation and redaction of the History of the Patriarchs of
the Coptic Church, a question that has been much debated, is not vital to the argument
here.73 Of interest rather is the comment that Greek and Coptic sources were incorporated
into the work. The sources were gathered ‘from the monastery of Saint Macarius and the
monastery of Nahya and other monasteries . . . [as well as] from scattered fragments . . .
found in the hands of the Christians’ (Evetts, 1907, p. 106).74 The Coptic fragments of
church-historical material that have been identified thus far as having supplied some of
this material do not contain any evidence for the presence among them of traces of a trea-
tise, ‘On the Priesthood of Christ’, that precedes the first chapter of the History of the
Patriarchs of the Coptic Church dealing with Mark the Evangelist.75 The Greek tradition,
however, clearly witnesses to such a treatise,76 and thus it is to be assumed that this first
episode of the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church owes its origins to a Greek
Vorlage. It is precisely in this treatise, ‘On the Priesthood of Christ’, that one can grasp yet
another instance of the reception history of the Protoevangelium of James exercising its
influence in the Christian milieu in Egypt.
The treatise is framed by a dialogue between a Christian moneychanger named Philip
and a leader of the Jews by the name of Theodosius. Their conversation focuses on the
question of Christ’s messiahship, which Theodosius, in principle, acknowledges, yet
upon which, he insists, he does not need to act by accepting baptism. Theodosius provides
evidence that he has proper knowledge of the true identity of Christ. He tells his Christian
interlocutor of the existence of a document that was circulated among the Jews and wit-
nessed to Christ’s true priesthood as acknowledged by the Jews themselves. This docu-
ment relied very strongly on a narrative in which Jesus’ mother Mary played an
important role in witnessing to her son’s supernatural origins.
It is of interest for this investigation that, in its account of Christ’s birth, this document,
a Christian apocryphal legend, incorporated features that can be identified as related to an
episode recounted in the Protoevangelium of James. When a deceased member of the
college of 22 priests who served in the Temple of Jerusalem needed to be replaced, it
was suggested that Jesus, the son of Joseph, ought to be selected for the position. But
among the objections raised against Jesus’ candidacy was one based on the rumor that
the identity of his father was uncertain. To clarify the issue, and given that Joseph had
by then died, the priests interrogated Jesus’ mother Mary (Evetts, 1907, pp. 125 –128).
Initially, Mary was reluctant to answer any questions, assuming that no one would
believe her. As the priests continued to exert pressure upon her, however, she spoke to
them about her exceptional conception. Mary recounted the conversation that had taken
place between her and Joseph, when Joseph asked her whom she had been with, and
she swore to him that no man had ever touched her. The same exchange is found in the
Protoevangelium of James 13 (de Strycker, 1961, pp. 124 –127). As Mary firmly insisted
both on her virginity, despite giving birth to Christ, and on the presence of the ‘seal of her
virginity’ as evidence of it (Evetts, 1907, p. 128), the priests hardened in their judgment
against her and were unwilling to accept her word as proof, calling her story ‘a tale of
wonder’ (ibid.). The reader of the Qur’an will not miss that those who saw Mary bringing
her new-born baby to her people (Q 19:27) also spoke of what had happened as ‘an
amazing thing’. In the following verse, the Qur’an likewise witnesses to concerns that
arose as to whether Mary’s conception might have been illegitimate. The focus in the
Qur’an is the same as it continued to be in the later Christian tradition that continued to
accept the apocryphal text of the Protoevangelium of James or variations of it, as reworked
in the treatise ‘On the Priesthood of Christ’. Since, in the History of the Patriarchs of the
Coptic Church, Mary did not resist the priests, they ‘sent and summoned trustworthy
women from among their midwives’ and charged them with ‘clear[ing] up the matter
with regard to her’. As the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church expressed it
in its reworking of the apocryphal account of ‘On the Priesthood of Christ’, ‘the midwives
examined her’ and they witnessed that Mary had spoken the truth and indeed was ‘a virgin
inviolate, as she [had] said’ (ibid, p. 129). This detail of the story, with its explicit refer-
ence to midwives, is clearly inspired by, and is in fact a reworking of, the theme of the
disbelieving Salome testing Mary’s virginity that can be found in Protoevangelium of
James 20. Whereas the Protoevangelium of James features Salome testing Mary, in ‘On
the Priesthood of Christ’ the task was left to the midwives, one of whom also features
in the Protoevangelium of James itself.
Scholarship on the treatise ‘On the Priesthood of Christ’ has not yet definitively
resolved the question of the origins of the text. The observation noted above that some
texts in the Coptic tradition, for example, the Sahidic fragment from Lord Crawford’s
manuscript, identify the figure of Salome with the midwife may perhaps indicate that
Coptic traditions of the Protoevangelium of James played a role in the development
of this apocryphal work, of which, apart from the Greek and the Arabic preserved in
the History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church, only additional recensions in Georgian
and Slavonic have so far appeared.77 For the immediate purposes of the present article, it
is to be noted that, through the incorporation of this apocryphal treatise ‘On the Priesthood
of Christ,’ Egyptian Christians who were encountering their tradition through the medium
of Copto-Arabic literature were still in the eleventh century and beyond being presented,
and becoming familiar, with key features of the literary traditions of the Protoevangelium
of James.
Just as the priests in the Jerusalem Temple were not satisfied with just the oral testimony
of Mary to her virginity, so it is to be assumed, and can also be documented, that famili-
arity with the traditions of the Protoevangelium of James among Christians in Egypt was
not limited to encounters with elements of the story in various literary forms, whether
written or oral. In addition, features of the Protoevangelium of James appear with some
regularity in Coptic artistic depictions. The concluding section of this article examines
various aspects of the reception history of this text in Egypt in pictorial form. This creation
of visual images of elements of the Protoevangelium of James is also to be regarded as a
sphere in which the permeability of boundaries between Christianity and Islam is respon-
sible for the reception of Christian ideas into the Islamic milieu.
The Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James in Early Christian Art

in Egypt
When investigating the history of the reception in Egypt of the Protoevangelium of James,
a component that must not be overlooked is the contribution of material evidence of an
524 C. B. Horn
artistic nature.78 One of the assumptions to be tested, at least in some important aspects, is
that one might be able to discern the likelihood for relatively early contacts between the
Christian and early Islamic traditions that were inspired by the Protoevangelium of James
through visual representations of individual scenes featured in the text. To demonstrate the
potential dimensions of contact through this influence, the concluding part of this article
directs its attention to several iconographic examples, each of which illustrates aspects
of the early Islamic tradition’s possible relationship with material known from the
Protoevangelium of James.79
Recent research has shown that when the Qur’an alludes to the scene that features
Mary’s mother Anna, it emphasizes Anna’s receiving and responding to the angel’s
annunciation of the birth of a child to her. I have demonstrated elsewhere that the
Qur’an’s characterization of Mary’s mother’s behavior contains literary parallels with
the description of Mary’s birth in the Protoevangelium of James (Horn, 2007). But literary
parallels are not the only ones to be taken into account. Depictions of the birth of the
Virgin Mary became popular after the Feast of her Nativity began to be celebrated in
the late sixth century.80 It is noteworthy that the chronologically earlier event of the
angel’s annunciation to Anna is represented in images that were already appearing prior
to the late sixth century.81 Jacqueline Lafontaine-Dosogne was able to identify such
scenes as the oldest preserved depictions of episodes related to Mary’s infancy. The
annunciation of the birth of Mary is depicted on column A of the ciborium of Saint
Mark’s in Venice (see Lafontaine-Dosogne, 1964, p. 35 with pl. 1), which was probably
of Syrian or Egyptian provenance from the sixth century. The Crusaders looted this work
from Constantinople in 1204 CE. On that ciborium, the scene showing Anna is one of a
cycle of scenes that extends from the infancies of Mary and Jesus up to and including
Christ’s passion.
The angel’s annunciation of Mary’s birth to Anna is also depicted on one of two ivory
plates that likewise date to the sixth century. These two plates are now preserved in the
State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. They show scenes from the Protoevangelium
of James focusing on Anna. One of the plates illustrates the moment of the angel’s
annunciation of the birth of Mary to Anna (see ibid., with pl. 15, fig. 40).82 Art historians
identify either Syria or Egypt as the place of origin of these ivory plates (ibid., p. 35). Early
Christian art from Egypt also preserves an illustration that points to the fulfillment of
Anna’s response to the angel, namely her promise that the child be dedicated to God’s
service (Protoevangelium of James 8, de Strycker, 1961, pp. 80 –81). A fresco preserved
in the dome of the so-called Exodus Chapel (Chapel 30) in the Christian necropolis at the
Kharga Oasis at El Bagawat in Egypt, which dates to the fifth through seventh century,
shows a group of seven virgins ( paru1́voi) carrying lamps in their hands and processing
towards the gate of the Temple.83 According to the Protoevangelium of James, the
undefiled daughters of the Hebrews accompanied little Mary when she began her life as
a virgin in the Temple (Protoevangelium of James 8, de Strycker, 1961, pp. 98 – 99).
The existence of this pre-Islamic art in Constantinople and either Syria or Egypt, that is,
precisely and distinctly in the Christian East, constitutes evidence that points at least to the
possibility of Muslims, during the time of the early Islamic conquest of the Christian East,
encountering visually depictions of scenes unique to the Protoevangelium of James—here
the scene of Anna telling the angel about her plans for the child she is to bear.
One of the scenes of Mary’s life that occurred with great frequency in early Christian art
is the Annunciation of Christ’s birth to Mary. It is remarkable that, rather than reflecting
the narrative account offered in the canonical Gospel of Luke (or Matthew), this scene is
quite often depicted in forms clearly influenced by apocryphal traditions derived from the
Protoevangelium of James. Much material from the wider realm of Byzantine art could be
adduced to make this point, but this article’s goal is not to rehearse all the available
evidence. Sufficient insight for the immediate purposes of the present discussion can
be gained by focusing on material derived from Egypt.
Gérard Roquet has identified six examples of the depiction of the Annunciation in
Coptic art showing the influence of apocryphal traditions. Of these six, three, that is
50%, come from the period between the fifth and the seventh centuries (see Roquet,
1991, p. 204). Research for this study has added further examples to those he identified.
The oldest example consists of fragments of a fifth-century woodcut kept at the Louvre
in Paris.84 The relief shows the Virgin seated with her feet lifted off the ground. On the
edge of her lap over her knees is a basket. Her left hand holds something, probably
wool or thread, extending out of the basket, while her right hand is pointing upward, poss-
ibly greeting her angelic visitor. Of the angel’s figure, only the lower portion of his right
leg and his right foot is preserved. Mary’s face is turned straight towards the observer, a
feature that has been described as ‘typical of Coptic figures’ (Badawy, 1978, p. 160). The
expression captured in Mary’s eyes conveys a sense of great surprise, but this startled look
is not that of the Virgin in Luke’s Gospel, as Pierre Du Bourguet has interpreted the scene
(du Bourguet, c. 1968, p. 39). It is rather the look of the Virgin in the Protoevangelium of
James, which refers twice to her fear, first when she is said to have heard the voice at the
well, and second when the angel directly addressed her fear (Protoevangelium of James
22 –23, de Strycker, 1961, pp. 112 –115). Whoever saw the fifth-century woodcut is
likely to have wondered what message that young woman had heard from the mouth of
her visitor. The depiction of that moment of encounter would have been unforgettable
to any onlooker.
The composition displayed in this fifth-century woodcut occurred repeatedly in Coptic
art from the early centuries on. Marie-Hélène Rutschowscaya provides the example of a
printed fabric from the region of Ahkmı̄m, now preserved in the Victoria & Albert
Museum in London. The piece, dated to the fifth or sixth century, shows Mary, still spin-
ning thread, while the angel Gabriel ‘executes a graceful backward movement’
(Rutschowscaya, 1991, p. 528).
Of special interest for the topic under discussion is a further item that demonstrates the
same composition. The collections of the State Museum of Berlin, Germany, preserve a
golden medallion, or encolpion, that could be worn as a decoration around the neck. On
display in Berlin’s Altes Museum,85 it depicts on one side Mary seated on a throne with
a thread running from her left hand down to a basket, while the angel is shown standing
in front of her.86 The inspiration for this scene clearly derives from the Protoevangelium
of James 11 (de Strycker, 1961, pp. 112–117; Stolz, 2004, pp. 85–87). The medallion
dates from the fifth century, while the necklace or pectoral on which it hangs comes from
the sixth or seventh century.87 On the reverse of the central coin that decorates the necklace
is a depiction of the city of Constantinople personified and an inscription stating, ‘Lord, help
the wearer (f1́roysa, fem.)’ (Platz-Horster, c. 2004, p. 289), the grammatical feminine
form indicating that this medallion was intended to be worn by a woman (ibid., p. 288).
Both medallion and necklace belong to the treasury associated with Antionoë or Assiut in
Egypt (Volbach, n.d., p. 361; Platz-Horster, c. 2004, p. 288). This treasury preserves an
almost identical necklace, identifiable as a piece of jewelry worn by a male person (for a
526 C. B. Horn
depiction and description, see Zahlhaas, c. 2004). The medallion that was the pendant on this
second necklace is no longer extant. Art historians understand the two corresponding neck-
laces as once having been in the possession of a married couple (ibid., p. 290). It is note-
worthy that scholars have also concluded that a function of such pendants was to provide
a sign of distinction for army personnel in the higher ranks of the military (Volbach, n.d.,
p. 361). Indeed, this is seen as one of their primary purposes.
The piece of textile depicting the scene of the Annunciation, and the gold medallion
bearing the same scene may have functioned in quite a similar manner to convey motifs
associated with the Protoevangelium of James to onlookers whose tradition was open to
adopting narrative elements into their own discourse. One can easily imagine, for
example, how a general in the Christian army of Egypt might have worn around his
neck a medallion with some depiction of a Christian scene, perhaps even when fighting
against Muslim invaders early in the seventh century. If the general’s medallion did not
depict a comparable scene from the Protoevangelium of James, then the new Muslim
rulers’ first sighting of this type of Christian art might have occurred when they saw
the members of the general’s family, including his wife, whose medallion displayed
the scene of the Annunciation. The mistress of the house might also have worn or
had on display in her house some garment or cloth printed with that same scene of the
Annunciation. Both these material objects, clearly being pieces of art with practical
applications insofar as they were intended to be worn or displayed, depicted an identifiable
scene from the repertoire of images associated with, and even derived from, the
Protoevangelium of James, and there is some probability that they would have been
seen by Muslims in Egypt during the early Islamic period.
Coptic art, and Christian art in and from Egypt more generally, preserves many more
depictions of scenes that show details of the story told in the Protoevangelium of
James. Wall paintings in Chapel 51 at the Monastery of Bawı̄t feature not only an
additional example of the depiction of the Annunciation,88 but also one of the birth of
Christ modeled on the Protoevangelium of James (Clédat, 1999, pp. 113 – 114, 127 [pl.
109], 129 [pl. 113]). These wall paintings have been dated to anywhere between the
sixth and the ninth centuries CE (ibid., p. 110 with n. 63). Following the work of Jean
Clédat, Eugène Revillout noticed the congruence between the prominence given to
‘Salome, the midwife’, featured in the Sahidic Apocryphon and the same figure of
calome tme cı̈o (‘Salome, the midwife’) in the Nativity scene at Bawı̄t.89 The prominent
presence of a midwife, or Salome, or both, at the birth of Christ as noted above not only
characterizes literary accounts of the Nativity found in Egypt, but is a feature of scenes
showing the birth of Christ, or Mary with the Child Jesus, in Coptic and Copto-Arabic
art. Examples can also be found in manuscript illuminations90 and ivory carvings.91 As
a supplementary scene, one also finds depictions of the bathing of the newborn Jesus,
with two midwives assisting.92 The bathing of the child Jesus cannot be traced back to
the Protoevangelium of James, but the later apocryphal Arabic Infancy Gospel, also
known as the Arabic Life of Jesus, that became joined with other texts, including the
Protoevangelium of James, to form a fuller account of Mary’s life features the motif of
miracles of the Christ Child taking place through contact with his bathwater.93
Scenes of the birth of Christ, of the Presentation of the Child Jesus in the Temple, and
of the ‘Testing with the Water of the Curse’, all three of which can be shown to have
their resonance in sūra 19 of the Qur’an, occur relatively frequently in early Christian
art. In fact, the scene of the Testing with the Water of the Curse appears in cycles of
illustrations of the Protoevangelium of James, the origins of which have been discerned as
clearly influenced by Byzantine style and have sometimes been assigned to Egypt. In the
Protoevangelium of James, the event of Mary having to drink from the water is preceded
by an oath in which Mary swears with the formula ‘As the Lord God lives’ that she is
innocent of any intercourse with a man.94 This scene is to be compared with a passage
in Q 19:26 – 34. ‘Then eat and drink and refresh [your] eye, but if you see anyone from
among [those of] flesh, say, “I have dedicated to the Merciful One a fast, so that I shall
not converse [with] anyone”’(Q 19:26). As discussed elsewhere, the context of this
passage is that Mary has been driven out into inhospitable places and there, having
given birth, is offered nourishment (Horn, 2007, pp. 151 –153). Mary’s vow to fast reflects
her attitude of readiness to entrust her actions to God’s judgment, as described in the
Protoevangelium of James. The Qur’an presents the story in a somewhat different form.
While Mary speaks in her own defense in the Protoevangelium of James, in the Qur’an
she does not speak because she is under oath. Instead, her newborn child comes to her
defense. In effect, the presentation of Q 19:26 –34 may be the result of a harmonization
of this account to uphold Mary’s vow. The rationale for this may have been to demonstrate
that Mary’s defense of her sexual purity, which her pregnancy had called into question,
came from God alone. Q 19:27 – 34 provides a lengthy tradition, which is not paralleled
and transmitted in its entirety in any one extant apocryphal infancy text, and in which
Mary avoids speaking to her family to explain what has happened. In fact, she has no
need, as her child Jesus himself explains his mission rather eloquently in Q 19:30 – 33.
The Qur’an stresses Mary’s purity through her vow of silence even more than the
Protoevangelium of James. Yet the two texts share as a common element Mary’s obli-
gation to God under a vow, a detail not found in other witnesses. While a reference to
oral traditions concerning the Protoevangelium of James in the milieu that shaped early
Islamic discourse may suffice as explanation for these shared elements, which nevertheless
become incorporated into varying story lines, the medium of material culture and artistic
depictions is at least an additional possibility to explain contact.
An exquisite example from pre-Islamic times, which, like the Qur’an, avoids reference
to Joseph in the scene depicting Mary as drinking water and being under a vow, is known
from the ivory throne of Archbishop Maximianus of Ravenna (545 – 553 CE) (Volbach,
n.d., pl. 226). The connections of this city to the East in the middle of the sixth century
are well established.95 Moreover, the fact that artistic influence from Egypt is seen as
underlying the execution of the artwork on Maximianus’s ivory throne at least makes it
possible that similar artwork and scenes were also known in Egypt itself.
When considering such evidence, some caveats are necessary. One cannot assume that
the remaining evidence from the early and late ancient Christian world represents more
than a smattering of the texts and material expressions of Christianity that existed in the
ancient world. Suppression of Christian artistic expressions by rival Christian groups
and destruction of artwork by non-Christian belligerents in Egypt have effaced textual,
material, architectural, and pictorial evidence. Thus if one simply attempts to draw con-
clusions straight from the evidence, at times even the chance evidence that survives,
one runs the risk of misrepresenting the overall picture too easily. There may once have
existed considerably more material evidence that would have facilitated the contact of
non-Christians with ideas and images reflecting Christian apocryphal traditions.
An additional difficulty consists in the need to establish a method that allows one to
move from the positive evidence for a written and materially manifested tradition to
528 C. B. Horn
justifiable assumptions about an underlying or accompanying oral tradition that has to be

reckoned with. After all, comments in the Qur’an and the traditions of the Hadith clearly
point to oral contact between Christians and Muhammad and his early followers.96
˙
As one considers the potential for material evidence to have acted as a bridge between
Christian and Muslim conceptions of the narrative in question, it becomes clear that
several of the objects or iconic representations that have come down to modern times
may not have been readily accessible to the eyes of the new Muslim rulers or believers
in ancient times, given that some of them were to be found in places not easily accessible
to the wider public. One might argue, for example, that the wall paintings at Bawı̄t were
hidden away behind monastery walls. But it is not easy to determine exactly how restricted
access to them was. In the case of the depictions of the scenes of the Annunciation and the
birth of Christ that show influences from the Protoevangelium of James, one might take
into account not only that these two scenes framed two additional scenes (Mary’s visit
to Elizabeth and the flight into Egypt), and together with them covered the whole northern
wall of the room in which they were found, but that this series of illustrations decorated not
a simple, locked, monastic cell, but a sizable oratory in the monastery (Clédat, 1999,
p. 109). To the extent that outsiders gained access to the monastery, the likelihood that
they would have entered that oratory, being one of the larger buildings in the monastic
complex, and noticed the wall paintings there, is somewhat greater than that such visitors
or intruders, whatever the case may be, would have seen depictions of religious scenes in
small monastic cells.
The reception history of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic art is not limited to
motifs that in some shape or form came to be part of the realm of ideas that Christians
and Muslims have in common. Certain motifs, such as Mary nursing the baby Jesus,97
are quite well represented in Coptic Christian art without having had any noticeable influ-
ence on Muslim observers. While Coptic Christians shared their iconographical focus on
the image of Mary breast-feeding her son with adherents of the Isis cult, in which the
goddess is depicted nursing her offspring, the Christian depiction might in fact have
had an additional or alternative source of inspiration. The text of the Protoevangelium
of James speaks of the newborn child taking his mother’s breast in order to nurse
(Protoevangelium of James 39, de Strycker, 1961, pp. 156 –157). Immediately following,
the text also speaks of how the midwife cried out in admiration and joy for having been
allowed to see such a miracle. The reference point of the midwife’s attestation to the
miracle is the wondrous birth of the child, but there is no reason why a Christian audience
could not also have considered the sight of a child nursing on his mother’s breast as a pars
pro toto referencing the whole of the scene of the miraculous birth. For them, therefore, the
image of Mary nursing her child could function as image par excellence of the Incarnation.
That a mother would nurse her newborn child right after birth certainly is not a detail that
would require any outside or additional explanation. In the ancient world, one might
expect such a detail to be common knowledge. Mentioning it explicitly would therefore
probably serve a more specific purpose. Perhaps one might argue for a dependence of
text upon image here. In a setting in which the audience was familiar with the iconography
of a female deity like Isis nursing her son, the author of the Protoevangelium of James may
have been inspired by that religious iconography to refer to the child breastfeeding in the
text he (or she) composed, as a response to, or in order consciously to relate and contrast
the Christian event with, what was celebrated in the cult of Isis. Perhaps one might also
conclude that the very presence of that literary detail in the description of the birth of
Christ in the Protoevangelium of James even functions to confirm the Egyptian prove-
nance of that text. Nevertheless, despite the prominence of the motif in the text as well
as in images, both Christian and non-Christian, in Egypt, Islam does not seem to have
shared this tradition of describing or depicting Mary as nursing her child. Thus, the
nursing-mother motif is clearly a feature that played a role in the reception history of
the Protoevangelium of James in Egypt, but is one that did not become part of the
Islamic discourse.
The development of an Islamic reworking of notions and ideas that relate to the
reception history of the apocryphal traditions of the Protoevangelium of James, and the
Christian reception history of that same text, are not two congruous movements. The
permeability of boundaries between Christianity and Islam was such that not all material
came to be used or re-used on both sides. Some material either never passed through from
one side to the other, or was perhaps consciously not selected for use. The examination of
more specific criteria that guided this selection process probably went beyond matters of
mere availability. It is the hope of this author that future research might contribute further
towards clarifying not only which ideas and images may have been shared between
Christians and Muslims in the early centuries of their common history, and how—a
matter treated in this article—but also why certain elements were shared and why
others were never selected.
Notes
1. Recent studies include, for example, the articles published in Grypeou et al., 2006; Thomas, 2003; 2001.
2. For comments on the reception of the classical traditions, including science and philosophy, in the
Syriac-speaking realm, which offered an important medium for transmission of this literature to
Muslims, see also Phenix and Horn, forthcoming.
3. Here is not the place to offer comprehensive details regarding the literature on Christian Mariology. For a
still helpful introduction to the development of Christian thought regarding Mary throughout history, see
Graef, 1964. Given the relevance of Egypt for the present study, reference ought to be made here to a
valuable work dedicated to the development of Mariology in Egypt. See Gabriele Giamberardini, Il
culto mariano in Egitto, 3 vols., Pubblicazioni dello Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Analecta 6-8
(Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1975, 1974, and 1978 respectively). For Islamic perspectives on
Mary see, for example, Freyer Stowasser, 1994, pp. 67–82, 155–165; Smith & Haddad, 1989; McCarthy,
1982; and McAuliffe, 1981. Reading the Qur’an from a perspective strongly concerned with gender
equity, the comments in Wadud, 1999, pp. 39– 40, reveal how the text of the Qur’an on the event of
Mary’s giving birth can be read as revealing Allah’s empathy for the experience a woman undergoes
when delivering a child. Comparative work has been provided in, for example, Ashkar, 1996.
4. For further discussion of the place of this image in the reception history of the Protoevangelium of
James, see below.
5. The Protoevangelium of James continues to excite the imagination and curiosity of scholars. Of the size-
able body of secondary literature on this text one may here perhaps refer selectively only to Horner,
2004; Ehlen, 2004, pp. 16– 179; Zervos, 2004; 2005.
6. For a discussion of the possibilities of the influence of Greek mythology on birth narratives in apocryphal
Christian texts and the Qur’an, see, for example, Mourad (2002), who argues for a considerable impact of
the myth of the birth of Apollo on the formation of the story of Mary’s giving birth under a palm-tree that
is presented in the Qur’an. He also assumes influence of that myth on the account of the Holy Family
resting under a palm-tree as presented in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. The argument of the article
is considerably weakened by the author’s failure to consider alternative early sources containing the
palm-tree motif that may have offered inspiration to both the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the
Qur’an, such as the narrative offered in the Ethiopic Liber Requiei. See also Horn, 2007. Klameth
(1925, p. 137) locates the origins of the motif of the palm-tree in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew in
the ancient Egyptian notion of the descent of the soul into the netherworld, where it is strengthened
530 C. B. Horn
and nourished by a female deity (Hathor, Nut, or Mat) who dwells in a sycamore or palm-tree and offers
the soul food and drink for the journey.
7. This identification of a necessary program of study resumes and lightly expands upon one presented in
Horn, 2007.
8. See the material gathered and discussed in de Strycker (1961), pp. 353– 373; and Amann (1910, pp.
109 –137), who offers a discussion of the reception history of the text among Greek-speaking Christians.
9. For a helpful discussion of the relationship of the Protoevangelium of James to a Jewish milieu, see for
instance Horner, 2004.
10. For some consideration of the matter of Jews and Christians among those who ‘informed’ Muhammad,
see for example Gilliot, 1996, pp. 19–25; 1998.
11. Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 7.16.93.7 (Stählin et al., 1970, p. 66, ll. 20-22): ’All’, 6 Wike n,
tWî6 pWllWî6 kaì me´xri nûn dWkeî Mariàm lexv̀ 1 nai dià th̀n tWû paidíWu geńnhsin, W k
W sa lexv́ (kaì gàr metà tW tekeîn a th̀n maivueîsán fasí tine6 parueńWn e reuĥnai.)
See also de Strycker, 1961, pp. 412 –413; and the discussion in Peretto, 1957, pp. 66–67.
12. Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on Matthew 10.17 (Klostermann and Benz, 1935, p. 21, 11. 26–29):
tWù6 de` delfWù6 ’lhsWû fasí tine6 e nai, k paradW sev6 rmv́me nWi tWû pigegrammeńWu katà
Pe´trWn e aggeli´Wu tĥ6 bíblWu ’lakv́bWu, u Wù6 ’lvsh̀f k prWte´ra6 gunaikW 6
`
sun khkuía6 a t prW tĥ6 María6. See also de Strycker, 1961, pp. 393–395, 412; and Peretto,
1957, pp. 69–70. For an alternative interpretation of the “Book of James” as a complete gospel, not only
a text limited to Christ’s birth and early childhood, see the work by Eugène Revillout and his attempts at
reconstructing a Gospel of the Twelve Apostles. See also Eugène Revillout, “Un nouvel apocryphe
Copte. Le Livre de Jacques,” Journal Asiatique 10th series, vol. 5 (1905), 113–120.
13. For bibliographical details, see below. Some results of the study of Christian women in the Copto-Arabic
History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria appear in Horn, forthcoming a. For a discussion of the relevance
of the Protoevangelium of James for this text, see below.
14. See for example an icon of the Presentation of Mary in the Temple by Youssef Guirguis Ayad or an icon
of the Annunciation by Jacqueline Ascott. See Sadek & Sadek, 2000, p. 163, pl. 1 and p. 176.
15. This author is not aware of a modern rendering of the Protoevangelium of James into Coptic, but if there
is one she would be grateful to learn about its existence.
16. For the edition of the Ethiopic text of the Protoevangelium of James, see Chaine, 1909.
17. For a more detailed discussion and overview of apocryphal literature preserved in Ethiopic, see
Piovanelli, 1993.
18. A brief, rather liberal retelling is contained in Kitāb mayāmir wa-cajā’ib al-sayyida al-cadrā’ (1902, pp.
˙
28 –38 [1927, pp. 39–55]).
19. Graf, 1944, p. 225, lists as the oldest ones a text contained in a manuscript from Paris (MS Par. arab. 262
[Arabic; Ancien fonds 154; 15th cent.], ff. 65v–79v) and three examples preserved in manuscripts from
Cairo dating from the late seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century (MS Cairo 445 [Arabic;
1691–1693 CE], ff. 2r–25r; MS Cairo 471 [Arabic; 1741 CE], ff. 18r–36v; and MS Cairo 564 [Arabic;
1717 CE], ff. 1r–38r).
20. The manuscripts written in Arabic script and ordered chronologically when dated in Graf (1944) are MS
Sbath 125,15 (1440 CE); MS Par. Arab. 147 (Arabic; 15th cent.), ff. 232r–260r (incomplete); MS Beirut
631 (Arabic; 19th cent.), ff. 1r–75v; MS Sin. Arab. 441, 6 (also contains the Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-
Thomas and the Dormition of the Virgin); MS Sin. Arab. 556, 3; and MS Sin. Arab. 523, 2. With Graf one
also observes that Assemani, 1719–1728, vol. 3 , 1, 287, mentions an additional manuscript once kept in
the Maronite College in Rome. More recently, Troupeau (2005, p. 201) has added an additional reference
to MS Par. Arab. 300, ff. 346v–356r, which contains an incomplete extract of an infancy gospel, prob-
ably of the Protoevangelium of James. For further discussion of the relevance of the compilation of the
material offered in MS Sin. Arab. 441, 6 as witness to the development of the apocryphal Life of Mary or
Life of the Virgin tradition, which incorporated the Protoevangelium of James, see the comments in
Horn, 2006.
21. Ordered chronologically when dated in Graf (1944), the Karshuni manuscripts are MS Mingana Syr. 39
(Karshuni; 1462 CE), ff. 70v–73r, beginning in Syriac; MS Vat. Syr. 199 (Karshuni; 1545 CE), ff.
305v–325; MS Damascus, residence of the Catholic-Syrian archbishop, 59, c (Karshuni; 16th to 17th
cent.); MS Par. Syr. 232 (Karshuni; Ancien fonds 113; 17th cent.), ff. 304r–324r; and MS Diyārbakr
146, 30 (Karshuni).
22. For an overview of the content of that manuscript, see also the comments provided in Swanson, 2004, pp.
99 –100. On the Greek Vorlage of this text, see Cullmann, 1987, p. 335.
23. The Arabic text ends in the midst of Protoevangelium of James 15:4. See Garitte, 1973, p. 396.
24. A team of scholars associated with the Association pour l’étude de la littérature apocryphe chrétienne
(AELAC) under the leadership of Albert Frey are working on a new critical edition of the Protoevange-
lium of James for the series Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum. It is to be hoped that the Arabic
version will be part of this publication as well.
25. See also Leipoldt’s comments two years prior to the publication in Leipoldt, 1903, p. 8. See further
Peeters, 1910a, p. 138, n. 615.
26. See also the discussion in Lucchesi, 1988.
27. While John the Baptist was a favorite saint of Coptic Christians, there is evidence that the commemora-
tion of the death of the young children slaughtered at Herod’s command (cf. Matthew 2:16–18) also
received attention from homilists and rhetoricians. See, for example, de Vis, 1990b.
28. The first to raise the question of sources for the Protoevanglium of James was Adolf Hilgenfeld (1850,
pp. 153–161). For studies of the traditions surrounding Zachariah, see Berendts, 1895; and Blank,
1937–1938. See also Cothenet, 1988, pp. 4258–4259.
29. The parchment carries the identification notation ‘P. Vindob. K 9517’. See also Till, 1958, pp. 320 –322.
30. The Menologion offers the collection of readings at least from the New Testament and/or New Testa-
ment Apocrypha for the fixed, calendrical feast days of the year.
31. See the discussion in du Bourguet (1991), who opts for a fourth-century date for this depiction. See also
Clédat (1902, p. 47), who dates the image to the fifth century. For depictions see also Badawy, 1978,
p. 250, fig. 4.20. Chapel 30 at the Monastery of Bawı̄t also preserves fragments of the Slaughter of
the Holy Innocents as well as of Elizabeth standing holding the baby John in her arms. For depictions
see Clédat, 1999, p. 26.
32. See Revillout, 1905b. French translations of passages from the fragment are presented with the Sahidic
text presented in the footnotes to a given page.
33. In addition to the previous note, see also Robinson, 1896, pp. 2–41. The publication of the original
edition is to be found in Revillout, 1876. See also Peeters, 1910a, p. 138, n. 618, 2d. Revillout had
employed four manuscripts (117–120) from the Borgia collection in Rome, while Robinson added an
additional folio that had formerly belonged to MS Borgia 117, but in the meantime had become part
of a collection at Oxford (MS Clarendon Coptic B, 3, 14). See also de Strycker (1961, p. 46), who
sees clear connections between the Sahidic Apocryphon material and the Sahidic Life of the Virgin.
For a study of ancient traditions witnessing to the development of a genre of Lives of the Virgin, see
also Horn (2006). Neither Mimouni (1994) nor Horn (2006) offers a detailed study of the Coptic Life
of the Virgin tradition. An examination of that material is a scholarly desideratum.
34. A French translation of this section is provided in Revillout, 1903, pp. 163– 164.
35. For a more recent discussion of this material on the figure of Salome see Warns, 1982.
36. Given the limited manuscript basis for the Sahidic Apocryphon that has been identified thus far, it is dif-
ficult to advance any conclusions regarding the age of that apocryphal composition. See also de Strycker
(1961, p. 373), who was only aware of one manuscript from which the fragments of the text derived.
37. See, for example, de Vis, 1990a, pp. 28–30, 38–46. For a colorful depiction of the head of a young
woman dancing, see also du Bourguet, c. 1968, p. 97. For a relatively late depiction of Salome receiving
the head of the Baptist on a platter, see the manuscript illumination in MS BN Paris Coptic 13, fol. 103
recto, dated to 1179–1180. See Leroy, 1974, pp. 113, 131 –132, and pl. 59.
38. The Christian tradition sometimes also identified Joseph’s first wife by the name Salome. See, for
example, the comments preserved in question 153 in Collection a of the 154 Questions and Answers
of (Pseudo-)Anastasius the Sinaite (PG 89.312–824, here col. 812); the recent critical edition of the
Quaestiones et responsiones of this seventh-century author (Richard & Munitiz, 2006) no longer
includes this passage. See also Zahn, 1900, p. 341, n. 2; and Bauckham, 1990, p. 37, n. 119.
39. See Lucchesi, 1988; and Emmel, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 376–378, especially the description of the contents on
p. 378.
40. For an edition and French translation of this work see du Bourguet, 1958.
41. See Orlandi, 1982, for a description of the content of Shenoute’s homily I Am Amazed. Three years later,
Tito Orlandi published an edition of the text (1985), which, however, should only be used in light of the
comments presented in Emmel, 1993, pp. 159– 161, and 2004, vol. 2, pp. 646 –648.
532 C. B. Horn
42. See for example de Prémare, 2004, pp. 45–46. Work by Angelika Neuwirth on oral and performance
qualities of the Qur’an could also offer insights for evaluating the potential of conceiving of parts of
the Qur’an as lectionary, that is, as a guide for texts to be read out aloud. See for example Neuwirth,
1996.
43. For an illustration of the lasting effect that attendance at the Christian liturgy was already seen as exer-
cising on young children, see the discussion of the example of Athanasius of Alexandria playing the
liturgy with his playmates at the seashore in Horn, 2005, pp. 113–114. When Christian historians had
no doubt that specific words, phrases, and prayers from the liturgy were remembered by children, one
ought not simply to dismiss this as wishful thinking but to compare it, for example, with cases of
modern-day Coptic altar-boys, aged about five to ten, who regularly participate in and sing the liturgy
by heart (observed by the present author in a liturgical service held at Saint Mary’s Coptic Orthodox
Church, St Paul, MN, in 2003).
44. Demetrius of Antioch, 1994, pp. 47 –85, here 49 –50 (MS M596); pp. 86–131, here 89–90 (MS M597);
and pp. 132 –177, here 135 –136 (MS Or. 7027). Modras edited the text of three Coptic manuscripts, two
from the Pierpont Morgan Library (MS M596 and MS M597) and one kept at the British Museum (MS
Or. 7027), and provided Italian translations of the texts. MS Or. 7027 had previously been edited and
translated into English in Budge, 1915, pp. 74–119 (Coptic) and 652– 698 (English). Modras suggests
dating the work after 642 CE (Demetrius of Antioch, 1994, p. 27). References in the following section
identify Demetrius’s text via a paragraph reference and then offer references to the readings of the indi-
vidual manuscripts via page references in Modras and identification of the manuscript.
45. Homily on the Nativity §55 (Demetrius of Antioch, 1994, pp. 49 [MS M596], 89 [MS M597], and 135
[MS Or. 7027]).
46. Ibid., §56 (pp. 49 [MS M596], 90 [MS M597], and 135 [MS Or. 7027]).
49. Ibid., §59 (pp. 49 [MS M596, does not comment on the fear of the priests here], 90 [MS M596], and 135
[MS Or. 7027]).
50. Ibid., §60 (p. 49 [MS M596]).
51. Ibid., §60 (p. 90 [MS M597).
52. Ibid., §60 (p. 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
53. Ibid., §61 (p. 50 [MS M596, body and soul], p. 90 [MS M597, body], and p. 136 [MS Or. 7027, body and
soul]).
54. Ibid., §62 (p. 50 [MS M596], p. 90 [MS M597], and p. 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
55. Ibid., §63 (pp. 50 [MS M596] and 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
56. Ibid., §63 (p. 90 [MS M597]).
58. Ibid., §64 (p. 90 [MS M597]).
61. Ibid., §65 (pp. 50 [MS M596], 90 [MS M596, mentions the belt, and binding the mantle, but does not
mention that it was tied to the tunic], and 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
63. Ibid., §67 (pp. 50 [MS M596, does not mention the comb] and 90 [MS M597]).
64. Ibid., §68 (pp. 50 [MS M596, eyebrows], 90 [MS M596, eyebrows], and 136 [MS Or. 7027, cheeks]).
65. Ibid., §69 (pp. 90 [MS M597, does not add the seductive intention] and 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
66. Ibid., §§70– 71 (pp. 50 [MS M596], 90 [MS M597], and 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
67. Ibid., §§72– 73 (pp. 50 [MS M596], 90 [MS M597], and 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
68. Ibid., §§74–77 (pp. 50 [MS M596, speaks also of Christ dwelling with her, but does not mention the ark],
90 [MS M597], and 136 [MS Or. 7027]).
69. See Nagel, 1998, pp. 758–759; Engberding, 1953, p. 68; and Boud’hors, 2004. Gustav Klameth (1928)
dates it to around 400. For an edition, German translation, and study see Morenz, 1951. For an English
translation see Robinson, 1896, pp. xxvii–xxix, 130 –159, 220–235. For a recent French translation see
Boud’hors, 2005. For an edition, Italian translation, and discussion of the Arabic witness see Battista and
Bagatti, 1978. See also Bienert, 1987, p. 384.
70. The editio princeps of the Sahidic fragments was published in Revillout, 1876. See also de Lagarde,
1883, pp. 1 –37; and Lefort, 1953.
71. Robinson (1896, p. 197) notes that the tomb is clearly meant to function like a cave, yet he also hints
at the detail that the words for ‘tomb’ and ‘cave’ are not identical in Coptic. Thus, the reference to a
tomb does constitute a clear difference between this fragment and the storyline known from the
Protoevangelium of James.
72. In his commentary on the fragments of the Sahidic Life of the Virgin, Robinson provides an English
translation for both of these sections (1896, pp. 196 –197, 235 –236).
73. For some discussion see Johnson, 1973; 1977; Farag, 1973; den Heijer, 1989; 1991; Atiya, 1991; and
Müller, 1995 (with helpful bibliography). See also the comments in Horn (forthcoming a). Flavio
Nuvolone accepts Severus’s authorship somewhat uncritically (2005, p. 80).
74. For a survey of the landscape of monasteries and churches in Egypt, see also Evetts, 1895.
75. For a study of the Coptic material, see especially Johnson, 1973.
76. One long and two short recensions are preserved in Greek. An edition of the long recension and of the
older of the two short ones, accompanied by an Italian translation, has been prepared by Giorgio Ziffer
(1985). For the publication of the edition of the text of the long version accompanied by an Italian
translation, see also Ziffer, 1986. For a French translation of the long version see Nuvolone, 2005,
pp. 83–99.
77. Scholarship on the treatise ‘On the Priesthood of Christ’ or De sacerdotio Christi has been defined by the
work of Giorgio Ziffer, Gilbert Dagron, and Flavio G. Nuvolone. In addition to the editions and trans-
lations already cited above, see also Ziffer, 1988a; 1988b; Dagron, 1996; and Nuvolone, 2000.
78. For a helpful broader study that investigates the representation of Christian apocrypha in art throughout
the centuries and across various geographical regions, see also Cartlidge and Elliott, 2001; and, more
recently and in the form of a brief introduction to the questions, Elliott, 2006.
79. The following discussion resumes and expands upon material considered also in Horn, 2007. Here, the
emphasis is more strongly and more fully on art-historical evidence from Egypt.
80. For discussion, see Lafontaine-Dosogne, 1964, pp. 25–28.
81. For the description of that scene, see Protoevangelium of James 4 (de Strycker, 1961, pp. 78–85).
82. For a depiction of both ivory plates, see also Piatnitsky et al., 2000, p. 62, fig. B25.
83. Cartlidge and Elliott (2001, pp. 36 –37, fig. 2.8); and Wessel (1965, p. 147, pl. 6, bottom), who, however,
identifies the row of virgins as the Wise Virgins.
84. Louvre, Inventory No. X 5243; for depictions see Badawy, 1978, p. 162, fig. 3.85, and p. 160 (for dis-
cussion); du Bourguet, c. 1968, pp. 37–39 (depiction on p. 38); du Bourguet, c. 1971, pp. 40 (descrip-
tion) and 42 (depiction).
85. Verified by the author of this article during a visit in July 2006.
86. For depictions see Volbach and Lafontaine-Dosogne, 1968, pl. 74; and Volbach, n.d., pl. 255.
87. The latest of the coins incorporated into the necklace comes from the time of Emperor Maurice
(582– 602). See Platz-Horster, c. 2004, p. 288.
88. From manuscript illuminations, one could also refer to the depiction of the Annunciation shown on folio
3 verso of MS Coptic Pierpont Morgan Library 597. Showing Mary seated and her visitor standing next
to her, the illumination highlights Mary’s figure by showing her covered with a purple mantle. While not
holding a basket with thread or wool, Mary does carry tools used for spinning and wool-work in both
hands. This Coptic manuscript dates to 913– 914 CE. See Leroy, 1974, pp. 55, 103–104, pl. B and
35. See also MS BN Paris Coptic 13, fol. 136 recto, dated to 1179–1180 CE, showing the same
scene (ibid., pl. 61 and pp. 113, 133 –134); and MS Paris Institute Catholique Coptic 1, fol. 106
recto, dated to 1249–1250, illustrating the scene of the Annunciation known from the Protoevangelium
of James, with the angel on the left and Mary half seated, half kneeling on the right, holding a long thread
of yarn in both hands, possibly holding a spindle on her left knee (ibid., pp. 157, 167 [contra Leroy, this
author cannot see the scepter Mary supposedly is holding in her right hand] and pl. 86).
89. Revillout, 1905b, pp. 409–411, 428–442. Clédat (1999, p. 113 with comments referring to photo 113),
reports that the identification of the figure as calome tme cı̈o is (or at least was) explicitly spelled out
beneath the depiction. This female figure also has a square-shaped halo, in contrast to the circular
ones that surround Mary’s head and the head of the angel to Mary’s left.
90. See, for example, MS Paris BN Institut Catholique Coptic 1, fol. 2r and fol. 109v. Both folio pages show
scenes of the birth of Christ. See Leroy, 1974 pl. 76, 87. Fol. 109v, left column, picture at the top, clearly
presents two women in attendance at the Nativity. Each has a circular halo, a detail that makes it rather
unlikely that they merely represent the patrons of the manuscript. For comments on how Salome came to
be seen as a saint see Cartlidge and Elliott, 2001, p. 90.
534 C. B. Horn
91. See, for example, an ivory carving of Mary holding Jesus on her lap, accompanied by angels and the
repentant Salome. This ivory carving is now kept at Castello Sforzesco in Milan. See Wessel, 1965,
pp. 35, 41 (pl. 35).
92. See, for example, a limestone relief depicted in Wessel, 1965, p. 126 and discussed on pp. 153– 154.
93. See, for example, Arabic Infancy Gospel/Arabic Life of Jesus 17–18, 21, 25–27, and 29–31 in
Genequand, 1997, pp. 218 –225. See also Cartlidge and Elliott, 2001, p. 90; Horn, 2006.
94. Protoevangelium of James 15 (de Strycker, 1961, p. 134, ll. 15 –16, and p. 135, ll. 6–7; and Hock, 1995,
pp. 58–59, para. 15:13).
95. A simple reference to the famous mosaics of Justinian and Theodora in the Church of San Vitale in
Ravenna suffices here. For depictions, see Volbach, n.d., pl. 164 –167.
96. For a more detailed discussion of the relevance of this point, see Horn, 2007.
97. See, for example, the depiction of the full figure of a seated Mary nursing Jesus, incised on a fifth-century
stela from the Fayoum (see Badawy, 1978, p. 154) or on two murals at Saqqara (ibid., p. 263). For
ongoing discussion of the proper interpretation of the Galaktrophousa in Egyptian Christianity, see
for example Langener, 1996; 1999; Bolman, 1997; 2004; 2005; and the brief discussion in Sheridan,
2004, pp. 400 –402. While Bolman interprets the Galaktrophousa as an image of the Eucharist, Sheridan
situates it in the controversies concerning Nestorius and Chalcedon.
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Islam and Christian– Muslim Relations,

Vol. 18, No. 4, 509 –538, October 2007

Mary between Bible and Qur’an:

0959-6410 Print/1469-9311 Online/07/040509–30 # 2007 CSIC and CMCU

Literary evidence establishes Egypt as a geographical area in which the Protoevangelium

Aspects of the Transmission History of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic,

from the Protoevangelium of James is to be found in MS BN Paris Coptic 12918, published

Aspects of the Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James in Coptic

The Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James at the Intersection

The Reception History of the Protoevangelium of James in Early Christian Art

justifiable assumptions about an underlying or accompanying oral tradition that has to be

Revillout, E. (1876) Apocryphes coptes du Nouveau Testament (Paris: F. Vieweg).

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