SAN LUIS — The feasts of Santiago (Saint James) and Santa Ana (Saint Ann) are celebrated annually in Colorado’s oldest town.
This year, St. James was celebrated July 21, while Saint Anne was celebrated July 23-24.
Each day brought religious and secular activities, with parades Saturday and Sunday.
Saint Anne’s barrenness ended after 40 years of marriage to Joachim when she gave birth to a daughter, Mary, who was destined to become the mother of the Saviour.
Of David’s house and line, she was the grandmother of Jesus, according to apocryphal Christian and Islamic tradition.
Mary’s mother is not named in the canonical gospels or the Quran. In writing, Anne’s name and that of her husband Joachim come only from New Testament apocrypha, of which the Gospel of James, believed to have been written around 150, seems to be the earliest that mentions them.
Modern Orthodox Christian scholars contend that the names were written in the Gospel of James as a result of being known in the Christian community in which that work was composed.
James the Greater, son of Zebedee, was one of the Christ’s favorite disciples.
Tradition has it that upon the Lord’s death, he sailed forth to preach the Gospel in Spain, the country of which he is now the patron saint. Santiago was the first Apostle to become a martyr, beheaded in Jerusalem in 44 AD.
It is generally believed that the disciples who had followed him from Galicia took the body and sailed with it to the Galician town of Iria Flavia.
In the ninth century, the apostle’s remains were transferred to Compostela, which has since become one of the most important centres of Christian pilgrimage surpassed only by Jerusalem and Rome.
The Gospel of James, also known as the Infancy Gospel of James or the Protoevangelium of James, is an apocryphal Gospel which expands backward in time the infancy stories contained in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke and presents a narrative concerning the birth and upbringing of Mary herself.
It is the oldest source to assert the virginity of Mary not only prior to, but during and after the birth of Jesus.
The ancient manuscripts that preserve the book have different titles, including “The Birth of Mary,” “The Story of the Birth of Saint Mary, Mother of God” and “The Birth of Mary; The Revelation of James.”