The Virgin by Ashe Geoffrey

Author:Ashe, Geoffrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

3

A popular movement might be expected to show itself in popular legend. Among rank-and-file Christians there was always a demand for more information about the New Testament characters. It was strongest when concerned with the Holy Family. Ordinary people were more interested in homely detail than they were in the exploits of apostles and preachers. Yet here the Gospels were tantalising. They gave enough to provoke questions, seldom enough to settle them. Storytellers who professed to know more found a ready audience. Their talents, however, were selective. Like some of the Fathers, they seem to have been aware that the family side of Christ’s adult life had an unhappy quality. Most of the legends that survive dwell on the early years, when he was still a child or unborn, and his mother’s future looked bright before her.

We have already seen in Chapter 4 what the Book of James or Protevangelium has to say. It testifies to the early belief that Mary was not only a virgin when she conceived but a virgin always, even immediately after giving birth. It also proves that popular legend, however apocryphal, could infiltrate orthodoxy. Mary’s alleged parents, Joachim and Anne, were enrolled among the saints. Her absurd childhood in the Temple under a vow of virginity, with Joseph an old man appointed to be her guardian, was accepted with only slight modification as factual. The Protevangelium was a main source for an even wilder book, supposedly written by Matthew as a supplement to his Gospel, which was faked about the ninth century, and supplied medieval artists and poets with most of their uncanonical stories of the Virgin’s youth.[16]

A theme much favoured by other fanciful minds was the Flight into Egypt. Egyptian Christians loved to enlarge on this. They described incidents of the journey and assigned them to exact locations, such as Matarieh, where a spring of fresh water (a rarity in that country) burst forth for the Holy Family’s refreshment, and a sycamore grew to shade them. An Egyptian legacy to the whole Church was a legend linking the Flight with the story of the thieves crucified alongside Jesus. One was said to have been a Jew, the other an Egyptian. They robbed the Holy Family, but the Egyptian took pity and restored the meagre loot. It was he who repented on the cross thirty years later and was promised paradise (Luke 23:39–43). The tale is a curious adaptation of the motif of long-lost friends and relatives and surprising reunions, so dear to playwrights of the later Greek theatre, their Roman imitators, and their successors well into the Victorian era.[17]

To point this out, however, is to define the essence of the matter. Such stories are not theological or devotional but romantic. Even where they centre on Christ himself, as in the ‘Infancy Gospels’, the utmost they do is to portray him working miracles – some rather charming, some repulsive – at an earlier age than the New Testament admits. These infancy legends, like the writings about the Virgin Birth, tend as time passes to dwell more on Mary than on her child.

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