third and fourth centuries, which decorated the life of Mary with fantastic fables and wonders of every kind, and thus furnished a pseudo-historical founda- tion for an unscriptural Mariology and Mariolatry.^ The Catholic church, it is true, condemned this apocryphal litera- ture so early as the Decrees of Gelasius ; * yet many of the fabulous elements of it — such as the names of the parents of sense of His higher wonder-working position, whence He repelled the interference of feminine weakness, which here met Him even in His mother." 1 Matt. xii. 46-50. ^ Luke xi. 27, 28. The /xivovvye is emphatic, utique, but also corrective, imo vero ; so here, and Eom. ix. 20; x. 18. Luther inexactly translates simply, ja ; the EngUsh Bible more correctly, yea rather. Meyer ad he. : "Jesus does not for- bid the congratulation of His mother, but He appUes the predicate fiaKapios not, as the woman had done, to an outward relation, but to an ethieal category, in which any one might stand, so that the congratulation of His mother as mother is thereby corrected." Van Oosterzee strikingly remarks in his Commentary on Luke (in Lange's BibelwerTc) : " The congratulating woman is the prototype of all those, who in all times have honored the mother of the Lord above her Son, and been guilty of Mariolatry. If the Lord even here disapproves this honoring of His mother, where it moves in so modest limits, what judgment would He pass upon the new dogma of Pio Nono, on which a whole new Mariology is built ? " ^ Here belongs, above all, the Protevangelium Jacobi Minoris, which dates from the third or fourth century ; then the Evangehiun de nativitate S. Marias ; the Histo- ria de nativitate Marias et de infantia Salvatoris ; the Evangehum infantias Ser\'a- toris ; the Evang. Joseph! fabri lignarii. Comp. Thilo's Cod. Apocryphus N. Ti. Lips. 1832, and the convenient digest of this apocryphal history in R. Hofmann's Leben Jesu nach den Apocryphen. Leipz. 1851, pp. 5-117. * Decret. de libris apocr. Coll. Cone. ap. Harduin, torn. ii. p. 941. Comp. Pope Innocent I., Ep. ad Exuperium Tolosanum, c. 7, where the Protevang. Jacobi is re- jected and condemned. 4:14 THIRD PEKIOD. A.D. 311-590. Mary, Joacliim (instead of Eli, as in Luke iii. 23) and Anna,' the birth of Mary in a cave, her education in the temple, and her jnock marriage with the aged Joseph'' — passed into the Catholic tradition. /"^ The development of the orthodox Catholic Mariology and Mariolatry originated as early as the second century in an allegorical interpretation of the history of the fall, and in the assumption of an antithetic relation of Eve and Mary, accord- ing to which the mother of Christ occupies the same position in the history of redemption as the wife of Adam in the his- tory of sin and death.^ This idea, so fruitful of many errors, is ingenious, but unscriptural, and an apocryphal