The Protevangelium of James

The Protevangelium of James tells stories about the life of the Virgin Mary that are absent from the New Testament Gospels: her miraculous birth to Anna and Joachim, her upbringing in the temple, and her marriage at the age of twelve to the aged widower Joseph. The text also adds significant details to the well-known stories of Jesus' conception, birth, and escape from the slaughter of innocents perpetrated by Herod the Great. Despite its noncanonical status, the Protevangelium of James was extremely influential in churches of the East, and since its publication in the West in the sixteenth-century has captured the imagination of readers all over the world. This study edition presents a fresh, new translation of the text with cross-references, notes, and commentary. The extensive introduction makes accessible the most recent scholarship in studies on Mary in Christian apocrypha, offers new insights into the text's provenance and relationship to Judaism, and discusses the text's contributions to art and literature.

""This book is a major contribution to the study of early Christianity. It is now the 'go-to' book for the Protevangelium of James, an important and often overlooked early Christian text from the later second-century that, among other things, laid the foundations for Marian devotion. And this is much more than a translation: Prof. Vuong provides an extensive, illuminating introduction and detailed commentary for nearly every aspect of the text.""
--Stephen J. Shoemaker, University of Oregon

""Lily Vuong's superb annotated translation on the Protevangelium of James opens a new perspective on an influential text too long neglected by modern scholars, richly situating its treatment of Mary in terms of its own literary structure and its early Christian context, but also with a powerful sense of its impact on Christian art, liturgy, and culture.""
--Annette Yoshiko Reed, New York University


Lily C. Vuong is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Central Washington University. She is the author of Gender and Purity in the Protevangelium of James (2013), and coeditor of Religious Competition in the Third Century CE (2014) and Religious Competition in the Greco-Roman World (2016).