Entry of the Theotokos

The narrative of the Protoevangelium

Of the childhood of the Mother of God the canonical Gospels say nothing. What the Church keeps of it, as with the feast of her Nativity, she keeps from tradition, whose oldest written witness is the Protoevangelium of James, an apocryphal infancy narrative of about the middle of the second century. The book was never received as Scripture, and its account of matters treated by the canonical Gospels was set aside; but its story of the Virgin's early years was received into the Church's devotional memory, shaped the synaxaria and the festal hymnography, and fixed the iconography of the feast to the present day. Three fixed feasts of the year — the Conception by Anna (December 9), the Nativity of the Theotokos (September 8), and the Entry (November 21) — rest upon its narrative.

Before Mary was born, the narrative relates, Anna had vowed that the child God might grant to her barrenness would be given back to God as a gift, "to minister before him all the days of its life." The vow bound the parents to the temple. When the child was two years old Joachim proposed to bring her up; Anna asked that they wait until she was three, "lest she seek for father or mother" and turn back. And when the third year was full, Joachim summoned the undefiled daughters of the Hebrews, and they took up their lamps and went before the little girl as an escort, that she might not turn back and that her heart might be drawn toward the temple of the Lord. The priest received her, kissed and blessed her, and said, "The Lord hath magnified thy name among all generations; in thee, in the last days, the Lord will make manifest his redemption to the sons of Israel." He set her upon the step of the altar, and the Lord God put grace upon her, and — the narrative says — she danced with her feet, and all the house of Israel loved her.

The fifteen steps and the Holy of Holies

Around this spare account the hymnography and homiletic tradition raised a great structure of imagery. The bare Protoevangelium says only that the priest set the child "upon the third step of the altar"; the festal tradition elaborated the ascent into the celebrated image of the fifteen steps — the fifteen degrees by which, in the tradition, one mounted to the Temple, matched to the fifteen Songs of Ascents of the Psalter (Psalms 119–133 in the Septuagint numbering), sung by the Levites as they went up. The stichera and canons picture the three-year-old climbing all fifteen unaided, running up to the sanctuary while her parents and the virgins watch in wonder, "the ewe-lamb of God" hastening to the place prepared for her.

More daring still is the tradition the hymns will not let go of: that the priest led her not merely into the temple courts but into the Holy of Holies itself — the innermost place, entered by the high priest alone and but once a year, where the Ark had stood. The paradox is the heart of the feast's poetry. The one who is herself the true Ark, the living tabernacle, is carried into the empty Holy of Holies of the shadow; the girl who will hold the Uncontainable is set down in the place where God's presence had dwelt. The priest, the tradition adds, acted by a prophetic impulse beyond the Law, "not of himself, but that which was of God." In the received tradition this priest is named Zacharias and identified with the father of John the Forerunner (see Zachariah and Elizabeth) — a pious identification carried by the Protoevangelium and much hymnography, though the canonical Luke presents Zachariah as an ordinary priest of the course of Abijah and not as high priest, and the entry for Zachariah keeps that distinction.

The years in the Temple, and the angel

Having received her, the priest "set her down upon the third step of the altar," the narrative continues, "and she received food from the hand of an angel." So the Protoevangelium itself, in a single line, gives the tradition the feast has never forgotten: that the child Mary lived in the precincts of the Temple, nurtured "like a dove," and was fed by an angel of the Lord. Later homilists — Germanus of Constantinople and George of Nicomedia among them — developed the scene into a picture of unbroken prayer and heavenly converse: the maiden growing in the sanctuary, taught by angels, receiving from an angel's hand the bread of heaven, prepared in stillness and purity to become the dwelling-place of the Word. She remained, the tradition says, until she was twelve, when the priests — unwilling that a maiden come of age should remain within the sanctuary — entrusted her to the guardianship of the aged Joseph the Betrothed, in whose house she would receive, not long after, the Annunciation of Gabriel. Thus the Entry opens the years of her hidden preparation, between the Nativity that gave her to the world and the Annunciation that made her the Mother of God.

Origins and history of the feast

The Entry is the youngest of the great Theotokian feasts, and the one whose early history is least clear. No trace of it appears in the earliest strata of the Byzantine calendar; it emerges in the East between the seventh and eighth centuries. Some scholars connect its date and rise with the dedication of the "New" church of Saint Mary (the Nea Ekklesia) that Justinian I raised at Jerusalem near the Temple mount, consecrated in 543 — a great Marian shrine whose annual festival, as with the Nativity feast and the basilica by the Sheep Pool, may have grown into the feast of the Entry, spreading from Jerusalem to Constantinople and the wider East. Whatever its origin, by the eighth century the commemoration was kept in the capital: Germanus of Constantinople (†c. 733) preached two homilies "on the Entry of the Most Holy Theotokos," the earliest secure festal witness, and Tarasius of Constantinople is credited with homilies on the theme.

The ninth century gave the feast the service it still keeps. George of Nicomedia (fl. c. 860–880), deacon and chartophylax of Hagia Sophia and later metropolitan of Nicomedia, a friend of the patriarch Photius and one of the most fertile Marian hymnographers of Byzantium, composed the canons of the Entry that stand in the Menaion, and preached a cycle of homilies elaborating the narrative of the Temple years. By the close of the ninth century the feast was firmly established in Constantinopolitan usage; its later promotion to the rank of the Twelve Great Feasts fixed it in the place it now holds, the last of the four fixed Great Feasts of the Nativity half of the year.

The Western reception and the Roman suppression

The West received the feast late and by an unusual path. Kept for centuries only among the Greeks of southern Italy, it entered the wider Latin Church chiefly through the crusader kingdoms of the East: Philippe de Mézières, the French chancellor of the Lusignan kingdom of Cyprus, encountered the Greek feast of the Presentation there and became its passionate advocate in the West, composing a Latin office and a dramatic representation of it. Through his efforts Pope Gregory XI permitted the feast's celebration at the papal court at Avignon in 1372, and Sixtus IV extended it to the whole Roman Church in 1472.

Then came the odd reversal. In the breviary reform of 1568 Pope Pius V struck the Presentation of Mary from the Roman calendar altogether, on the ground that it rested on nothing but the apocryphal Protoevangelium and had no warrant in Scripture or the Fathers — the same scruple that had it kept as a lesser observance in the East never troubled, since the East had never held the feast to be an assertion of historical fact so much as a celebration of the Virgin's consecration. The suppression lasted seventeen years: Sixtus V restored the feast in 1585, and it has remained in the Roman calendar since, under the title "Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary," reduced to an obligatory memorial in the calendar reform of 1969. The Orthodox East, which gave the feast birth, never wavered in keeping it among the greatest of the year.

Theology: the living Temple, and the threshold of the Nativity

The feast's theology is written in a single word: temple. Mary is brought into the Temple to be shown as the true Temple — "the living Temple of the holy glory of Christ our God," as the exapostilarion calls her. The whole apparatus of the Old Covenant's holiness, the tabernacle and the Ark, the Holy of Holies and its once-a-year entering, the veil and the mercy-seat, are read by the hymns as figures pointing to her who would hold God in her womb; and on this day the figure meets its fulfilment face to face, as the child who is the reality is carried into the sanctuary of the shadow. The feast stands, then, at the seam of the two Covenants: the Old Testament, in the person of its priest and its Temple, receives and hands on its holiness to the one in whom the New Testament begins. The reading of Hebrews 9 at the Liturgy — the first tabernacle, its furniture, and the Holy of Holies entered by the high priest alone — is chosen precisely so, the letter's account of the shadow read over the entrance of its truth.

There is a second, forward-looking note. The Entry is the gateway of the Nativity. Falling six days into the Nativity Fast, it turns the Church's face toward Bethlehem: from this feast onward the katavasiae sung at Matins are the irmoi of the canon of the Nativity of Christ, the work of Cosmas of Maiuma — "Christ is born, give glory; Christ from the heavens, go to meet him" (Χριστὸς γεννᾶται, δοξάσατε). So the feast that shows the living Temple brought into the house of God also sounds, weeks in advance, the first note of the feast toward which the whole Temple imagery tends: the coming of the One for whom she is prepared, when the Temple of God becomes a cave and a manger.