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Luke's elegant two-volume literary work, the Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, is shaped, plot-wise, like a 45 degree angle. At the vertex, the point of departure, is a Jewish girl of a Jewish family, keeping the feasts, expecting the consolation of Israel. She lives within pilgrimage distance of Jerusalem, not obligated like the men to attend the thrice-yearly observances in the holy city, yet pious and devoted to the God who brought her ancestors out of Egypt. Their collective story long antedates the occupying Romans, who are but another checkmark on a long list of oppressors—at this point, anyway, no worse than Philistines or Assyrians or Babylonians.

The temple of the Jews dates back 1,000 years (as the center of righteous worship, if not the building itself), and it is this temple that marks the distance along Luke's angle-shaped story, as the one axis veers further and further from the other. By the end of the historian's tale, the temple, soon to be obliterated, has been left behind by persecuted Christians who are driven away from the center of Israel's faith in order to convert the nations. The angle opens wide into an embrace that must, of necessity, include all the Gentiles. But trace its lines back, back before the expulsion, before the trial of the Messiah, the cleansing and the controversies, and you find the young Mary with her husband Joseph, presenting the child Jesus, just as Zechariah prophesied in that same Temple months before.

In the popular imagination of the church, this is not Mary's first visit to the temple. Apocryphal though they are, the 2nd-century Greek Protevangelium of James and its 8th-century Latin copycat the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew fill in details of Mary's early life that all the canonical documents pass over in silence. In these colorful tales, Mary's parents Anne and Joachim suffer the typical childlessness of an Old Testament couple. When they are at last granted a daughter, they gratefully dedicate her to the Lord's service. The festival of her presentation in the temple was brought to the Western church from the East in 1372 and is still celebrated on November 21st. The three-year-old heroine dances at her presentation and then moves in. Actually, this is historically unthinkable, though Jewish propriety once more gains the upper hand when, at the age of 12, Mary is moved out again lest her womanly issue contaminate the holy precinct's purity.

Meanwhile, during her residence, the Protevangelium reports that Mary is fed by an angel, spins thread, and weaves scarlet and purple cloth for the temple veil, the same veil that will be torn in two when her son dies. Pseudo-Matthew contributes the fresh detail of her weaving the seamless tunic that Jesus wore, first fitted for childhood and then magically growing along with the young Savior's body. Just as Mary clothed Jesus in flesh in her womb, so she clothed him in garments of lesser metaphysical import. As a result, iconography occasionally depicts Mary with spindle in hand. Even the floating balloons of gossamer that transport newly hatched spiders are called in French fils de la Vierge—the threads of the Virgin (which includes a nice pun, since fils also means "son").

But back to the canon. At the time of Mary's son's presentation, the family of three assembled, most likely, at the gate of Nicanor, on the eastern side of the Court of Women. There the wives of Israel came for their ritual purification after childbirth, at the limit of the temple grounds extended to women. Mary's devotion is evident, in good Jewish fashion, according to her keeping of the law: "And when the days of her purifying are completed, whether for a son or for a daughter, she shall bring to the priest … a burnt offering and … a sin offering, and he shall offer it before the Lord and make atonement for her. Then she shall be clean from the flow of her blood" (Leviticus 12:6-7). The offering, "a pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons," betrays her poverty, for she cannot afford a year-old lamb.

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