The Bible never names Mary's mother; Anne comes from a second-century text
Saint Anne, grandmother of Jesus in Christian tradition, is absent from the canonical gospels. Her name first appears in the Gospel of James, written around the middle of the second century and later condemned by several popes. She still became one of the most widely venerated saints, patron of miners and mothers alike.
The Gospel of James, composed in Greek, supplied the story of Mary's parents, Anne and Joachim, and of Mary's childhood. In the fourth and fifth centuries Jerome mocked its absurdities and popes including Damasus I and Gelasius I branded it untrustworthy. Its tales survived anyway, because another apocryphal book, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, absorbed almost all of them. The narrative of a long-childless mother echoes Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel, and the name Anne itself derives from Hannah. The Quran mentions Mary's mother too, without naming her.
Devotion grew first in the East. Justinian built a church for her in Constantinople around 550, and her supposed relics reached the city in 710. In the West the earliest image of her veneration is an eighth-century fresco in Rome's Santa Maria Antiqua, but the Latin Church largely ignored her before the thirteenth century. Crusaders then carried relics home to places such as Apt, Ghent and Chartres. Growing devotion to Anne from the twelfth century fed into belief in the Immaculate Conception, the idea that Mary was conceived free of original sin, which Pope Pius IX made Catholic dogma in 1854. It is often confused with the virgin birth of Jesus.
Popular piety attached her to surprising causes. In the high Middle Ages she became a protector of sailors and a saint invoked against storms. Miners adopted her because medieval writers compared Mary and Christ to silver and gold, making Anne's womb the source from which the precious metals came. Protestant tradition holds that Martin Luther decided to become a friar after crying out to her during a lightning storm.
Her feast with Joachim falls on 26 July in the Catholic Church, and Orthodox churches honour the pair as Ancestors of God. Great shrines include Sainte-Anne-d'Auray in Brittany and Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré near Quebec City. In Maltese, the Milky Way is called the Way of Saint Anne.
Source: Saint Anne
