A free cheat sheet from A Catholic Take — the two ancient sources behind September 8.
Open your Bible and look for the day Our Lady was born. It is not there. Not the day, not the place, not even the names of her parents. And yet the Church has kept September 8 as her birthday for something like fifteen hundred years — and every statue of St. Anne you have ever knelt in front of traces back through a book that is not Scripture.
That bothers people, and it deserves an answer rather than a dodge. So I went and got the two documents the whole feast rests on. One is a second-century story the Church sifted — she kept the names, canonized none of the text, and threw out the rest. The other is a sermon preached around A.D. 700 that Rome still reads in the Office of Readings on September 8 and that Byzantium still sings. One gives us the story. The other gives us the meaning.
Eight pages: what the Protoevangelium of James actually says and what the Church refused to take from it, St. Andrew of Crete in his own words, a dated timeline of the earliest witnesses to Our Lady running from St. Ignatius of Antioch in A.D. 107 to the Council of Ephesus in 431, how September 8 became a feast in Jerusalem and then in Rome, and why December 8 exists only because September 8 came first. Put your name in below and it is yours right now, free.
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Eight pages on where Our Lady’s birthday actually comes from — the two ancient sources, the earliest witnesses, and an honest word about what the Church kept and what she threw out.
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This is one of several free study guides I have put together for listeners of A Catholic Take. They are all in one place — take whichever ones you need.
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