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If you want to consider discredited forgeries that's up to you.

Oh, but I do.

Let me explain to you exactly why and how I consider these "discredited forgeries."

As a caveat, I don't hope to change your mind, wmfights, one way or the other. I'm a papist and I know my place among my betters. But I also realize that there are other people who read these threads and never contribute. Perhaps some of them might get some value from this explanation:

First, let's see what we both agree to: that the document was written in the Second Century AD. I understand it's from around 150 AD. You say 'at least 100 years after the close of the Apostolic Era,' which would place it a couple of decades later than that. OK, whichever. The point that we both agree on is that it was written before 200 AD.

The easiest way for me to show the utility of apocryphal documents like this is through example:

There is a widely-accepted Protestant school of thought that says that Mary had sexual relations with Joseph after the birth of Jesus; that she was only a virgin when she conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit (for what it's worth, I've met Protestants who hold the heretical belief that Jesus was the genetic product of Mary and Joseph and that he is only 'spiritually' the Son of God). A subset of this widely-accepted Protestant school of thought is that the dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary was an invention of a paganized Rome and that no early Christian group actually believed this. Alexander Hislop advanced this idea with his book, The Two Babylons. I am not saying if you are part of the latter group or not...if you are, great. If not, all the better.

This apocryphal document goes into rather gory detail about the midwife Salome verifying Mary's intact hymen after the birth of Jesus. As Free Republic is a family board, I'll spare all the details how she did that. And, as we both agree that the Protoevangelium of James is an apocryphal document, I would hardly stake my life (or my soul) on whether that actually happened or not, but it's really not important one way or the other. What is important about it is this: that some people believed that she was perpetually a virgin. And those people who believed this were around during the second century AD. Considering that this was two centuries prior to Constantine's reign, the mere fact that this was written, whether it is a factual story or a made-up story debunks the idea that Mary's perpetual virginity was invented by a paganized, post-Nicene, Catholic Church. The idea was around long before the Roman Empire was even close to tolerating Christianity, much less giving it official sanction.

The other important part to consider is this: this story is either documentation of 'oral history' or is, to one degree or another, fiction. One of the two.

>If the story is documentation of 'oral history' up to that point, then its accuracy is limited to the accuracy by which stories were passed down from generation to generation, until it was recorded. (Sort of like information one can glean from Homer's Odyssey)
If the story is a fiction (which, considering its pseudograph, I actually believe it to be), then you have to ask yourself the question, why was it written? Looking at this piece, in isolation, I can see one of two possibilities:
- This was a belief held by a minority of people and they were trying to propagate it through the invention and embellishment of the "facts" that made up their beliefs. Since this is a pseudograph, it's likely that they attached the name of an apostle to give it more weight. The other possibility is that:
- This was a common belief held by the majority of people and they were trying to defend it against sources that were attacking the belief system (sort of like the defenses against gnostics we see in the epistles of Peter). As above, since this is a pseudograph, the likely reason for attaching the name of an apostle to give it more weight.

The bottom line is that even though this is apocryphal literature and is definitely a pseudograph, there's still a lot that one can glean from it. Most importantly, an understanding of what was believed by, at least, some of the people at the time.

(BTW, I'm pinging some other folks because I think they'd be interested in reading this, not to get folks to gang up on you or anything)