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| Coptic |
THE Egyptian Christians, or Copts, believed that when " the fulness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman" (Galatians 4. 4), and that this woman was Mary, a virgin who was " espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David." Before husband and wife " came together " the angel Gabriel was sent from God to Nazareth, and he " came in unto her and said. Hail, highly favoured, the Lord is with thee : blessed art thou among women. And the angel said unto her. Fear not, Mary : for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name Jesus. . . . Then said Mary unto the angel. How shall this be, seeing I know not a man ? And the angel answered and said unto her. The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee ; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God " (Luke i. 27-35). When Joseph found that his wife had conceived he " was minded to put her away privily. But whilst he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife ; for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost " (Matt. i. 19, 20). Mary the Virgin brought forth her son in due course, and continued to be a virgin. Mary, though the Mother of God, was " begotten by a human father, and brought forth by a human mother, like every other man."[Cyril, Discourse on Mary 'Theotokos. See Budge, Miscellaneous Coptic Texts, p. 628. And she " tasted death like every other human being, because she was flesh and blood."] The words of the Evangelists were accepted as statements of absolutely historical facts by the early Egyptian Christians. The humanity of Mary, the humanity and Divinity of Christ, His Virgin-birth, which proved the reality of His Natures, the Human and the Divine, perfect God and perfect Man, the Unity of His Person, and the perpetual virginity of Mary, the Mother of God, or the God-bearer, have been the foundations of the belief of the Monophysite Church of Egypt for the last eighteen hundred years. And what the Copts believed and still believe they handed on to the Christian Ethiopians, or Abyssinians, and these have " kept the Faith " to this day.
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| Coptic |
When under the influence of the teaching of the Apostles and Disciples Christ's Doctrine spread abroad in the regions outside Syria and Palestine, the converts to Christianity demanded more information about the life of Christ when upon earth and that of Mary, both before^nd after His death, than the Gospels contained. The result of this demand was that many, both those with and those without adequate knowledge, wrote accounts of the manner of the birth and the infancy of Christ, and stories of His childhood, and accounts of Mary, which found general acceptance. H we are to believe all that is written in the works of the Fathers on the subject it would seem that every Apostle, and many of the Disciples wrote Gospels. In any case it is quite clear that even in Apostolic times many works of this kind were current in Syria and Egypt, and that they were soon translated into languages of more remote countries. One of the oldest and best known of these works is the so-called
Protevangelion, or the Book of James the Less, the cousin (" brother ") of Christ, and the first Bishop of Jerusalem. It was probably written in Hebrew, and it seems to have existed in the first century a.d. A manuscript of the work was brought to Europe by G. Postel (born 1510, died 1581) from Constantinople (?), was translated by him into Latin and was printed at Basle in 1552. From this book we learn that Mary's father and mother were called Joachim and Anna, that Joachim consulted the Urim and Thummim about the birth of the child, whom the angel told him his barren wife should bear to him, and it describes the birth of Mary, the flight of Elisabeth to the mountains, and the murder of Zacharias. [For the Greek text see Tischendorf, Evangelia Apocrypha, Leipzig, 1876, p. I ff.] Versions and extracts of this work exist in Syriac, Coptic, Arabic, and Ethiopic.
Another ancient work of the kind is the
Gospel of THE Birth of Mary, which was attributed to St. Matthew, and was regarded as genuine and authentic by many early Christian sects. In the third chapter it is stated that an angel told Joachim that God had shut up the womb of Anna his wife, so that He might open it in a more wonderful manner, and that that which should be born of her would be not the product of human lust, but the gift of God. [" et ideo cum alicujus uterum claudit, ad hoc facit ut mirabilius denuo aperiat, et non libidinis esse quod nascitur sed divini muneris cognoscatur."— De Nativitate Mariac, ed. Tischendorf, op. cit., p. 114.] Hence in later times many Christians asserted that Mary was born of a virgin, just as Christ was born of a virgin.
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| Ethiopian |
The Ethiopians have turned the History of Hanna into a service-book for the seven days of the week, and in this it is said a dove entered her body and that she conceived Mary thirty days later. A complete English translation of the Ethiopia text will be found on pp. 1-53. A large portion of this Gospel is repeated in the Protevangelion. A much longer work dealing with the Descent of Mary and the Infancy of Christ, which is attributed to St. Matthew and believed to have been written in Hebrew, was translated into Latin by St. Jerome, who called it, " Liber de Ortu Beatae Mariae et Infantia Salvatoris." [Published by Tischendorf, op. cit., p. 50 ff.] It was received by the Gnostics in the second century and is quoted by Epiphanius (Haer. 26. 12), and later Christian Fathers, e.g. Eusebius, Athanasius and Chrysostom, regarded it as authentic and genuine. This book is full of marvellous stories about Mary and the Child, and many of these have found their way into the writings of the Fathers of the Syrian, Coptic and Ethiopian Churches. According to one legend the Holy Family were carried swiftly into Egypt from Jerusalem upon a cloud of light, but according to another they travelled thither by caravan and suffered greatly on the road. At one place they took shelter in a cave for the night, and they found it full of dragons and were horribly afraid. But Jesus came down from His mother's bosom, and walked boldly up to the dragons, which at once fell down and worshipped Him. In the desert the lions worshipped Jesus, and went before Him to show Joseph the way. At the command of Jesus some palms bent down their heads so that Mary might gather the dates growing on them, and a branch of one of the palms was taken to Paradise and planted there, and it is still growing there. Jesus shortened the way to Egypt in a miraculous manner, and the Holy Family travelled in one day over a distance that usually required thirty days to traverse. When they came to Hermopolis (Heliopolis ?) they found 365 idols in the temple there, and as Jesus came to the temple all these fell down and were broken in pieces. Mary worked miraculous cures by means of her Son's swaddling bands, and lepers were healed by bathing in the water in which they had been washed.
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| Ethiopian |
On the road to Memphis Mary met the two thieves Titus and Dumachus, who thirty years later were crucified with Christ. According to the Gospel of the Infancy the Holy Family remained in Egypt three years, and they saw Pharaoh. When they returned to Bethlehem Mary worked many miracles, and Jesus began to cast out devils. He also made figures of birds which could fly, and of animals which could walk, and He dyed garments different colours by casting them into the fire. When Joseph made doors too narrow or boxes too small, Jesus widened the former and enlarged the latter. At school the master goes to whip Jesus, but his hand withered and he died. All these and many other stories of the same kind found their way into the legendary literature of Mary and Jesus during the first four centuries, and when Gelasius issued his decree for the destruction of books dealing with these subjects the number must have been very considerable.
The older Apocryphal Gospels attributed to Mary the power to work miracles nearly as marvellous as those worked by her Son during His Infancy and Boyhood, and throughout them it was tacitly assumed that her influence over Him was very great, and that He granted all her requests. The natural result of this assumption was that, little by little, men magnified the power of Mary, and in their private prayers, at least, appealed to her in their difficulties, and besought her to intercede with her Son on their behalf. At the same time their interest in her history grew steadily, and stories of her birth and childhood, and of her life in the Temple and after the death of Christ, were in great demand. Every tradition of her was carefully preserved, and every detail was regarded as a piece of precious information worthy to be written down for perusal by the faithful. The authorities of the Church prepared narratives of her life which they declared they had received from Mary herself, who appeared to them in answer to their urgent petitions ; the substance of such narratives was derived chiefly from the Apocryphal Gospels mentioned above. Thus we have one narrative attributed to Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria (see pp. 61-80), and another to Timothy, another Patriarch of Alexandria (see pp. 81-101). An account of her death (see pp. 152-167), which was believed to have been written by St. John, and a short history of how the manuscript of it was discovered (see pp. 143-151), were regarded as authentic and genuine, and treasured accordingly. Many of the Fathers wrote Homilies upon Mary, and the short extracts from some of them given below illustrate the manner in which her life was treated by them. [The extracts are from the Coptic Homilies by Cyril of Jerusalem, Demetrius of Antioch, and Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, edited and translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, Miscellaneous Coptic Texts in the Dialect of Upper Egypt, London, 1915.]
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| Ethiopian |
Of her life in the Temple Cyril of Jerusalem says: " They (i.e. Joakim and Anna) were in the habit of visiting their daughter once each month, when they carried to her whatsoever things of which she had need. And their little virgin daughter ministered in the Temple with the other women, who were aged virgins, and they taught her to work with her hands. And when she had become somewhat master of herself she used to go alone into the court of the Temple, but no man whatsoever saw her, with the exception of the priest and her father. Her food consisted of bread and water and a few green herbs, and she did not fast for long periods at a time. . . . The little Virgin Mary was in the Temple, and she remained by herself before the Archangel Gabriel came to her with a sweet odour. . . . There was no limit to her beauty, and the Temple was wont to be filled with angels because of her sweet odour, and thev used to visit her for the sake of her conversation. . . . The whole time of her life was sixty years."
