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

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.