St Anne: The Grandmother of Jesus

by Gunther Simmermacher · Published July 26, 2022 · Updated July 26, 2022

Holy Family with St Anne and St John the Baptist by El Greco in c. 1600 (Prado, Madrid)

She doesn’t appear in the Bible, so what do we know about St Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary? Günther Simmermacher finds out.

St Anne at a Glance
Name at birth: Hannah
Born: Possibly around 50 BC
Died: Possibly around 12 AD
Family: Joachim (husband), Mary (daughter), Jesus (grandson)
Feast: July 26 (with St Joachim)
Patronages: Grandparents, child care, childless people, pregnancy, mothers, children, homemakers/housewives, teachers, lost articles, miners, equestrians, horse stable staff, carpenters, moving house, lacemakers, seamstresses, used-clothes traders, poverty.

Saint Anne is one of our most popular saints, with many churches dedicated to her, yet we know virtually nothing about her — except that she was the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

St Anne isn’t mentioned in the Bible; we know about her from the Gospel of James, which scholars believe was written around 150 AD. Although it was rejected for inclusion in the New Testament and even condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405 (mainly at St Jerome’s instigation), the Gospel of James is the primary source for much of what we believe about Mary, including her perpetual virginity and, indirectly, her miraculous conception.

The Immaculate Conception refers not to Mary’s virgin-birth of Jesus, as many non-Catholics (and possibly quite a few Catholics) mistakenly believe, but to that of Anne with Mary. Accordingly, Mary was conceived through divine intervention and without intercourse so as to preserve the Mother of God free of original sin from the moment of her conception — the creation of the “New Eve”. Pope Pius IX declared the Immaculate Conception a dogma in 1854, but the devotion went back to as early as Byzantine times, and the 16th century in particular saw a great revival.

Anne (derived from the name Hannah, meaning “grace” or “favour”) and her husband Joachim (“he whom Yahweh has set up”) were an older couple that had been childless, much to their distress. According to the Gospel of James, one day Joachim went into the wilderness to fast and pray for 40 days. At home, Anne did likewise. As she lamented her childlessness, an angel appeared to her, announcing that she would have a child. By the time Joachim returned from the wilderness, duly apprised of the new circumstances by an angel, his wife Anne was pregnant.

The child was born prematurely, in the seventh month of pregnancy. In scriptural tradition, this is seen as a sign of favour: Samuel, Isaac and Moses were also born in the seventh month of pregnancy. Indeed, the story of the conception of Mary is an echo of that of Samuel, whose mother Hannah also fell pregnant late in life after praying for a child.

Anne and Joachim expected their child to be a boy and vowed that he would be brought up in the Temple. As we know, the child turned out to be a girl, but true to their vow, Mary’s parents sent her to the Temple into the care of the priests when the girl was three. Legend says that Mary was fed there each day by an angel.

15th-century icon of St Anne and Mary (Benaki Museum, Athens)

The legends of St Anne

And that’s where we lose track of Anne and Joachim. Tradition has Joachim die soon after Mary’s birth, but Anne live long enough to help raise her grandson, departing from this world at the age of 62 in around 12 AD. This dating would suggest that she was around 32 when she gave birth to Mary — still quite young by our standards, but fairly advanced in years in a time when women became mothers mostly in their teens and early twenties.

Ancient tradition says that Anne married only once, but in the Middle Ages a legend arose that she was married twice more, to Clopas and then Salomas, producing one daughter in each marriage, all called Mary: Mary of Clopas and Mary Salome, both of whom are mentioned in the Gospels as being present at the crucifixion. The Catholic Church rejects these marriage legends as baseless.

We don’t even know for certain where Anne and Joachim lived. Some legends suggest that they lived in the city of Sepphoris, about 6km from Nazareth. A 5th-century basilica dedicated to Mary’s nativity has been excavated there. This location would explain how Mary came to live in the village of Nazareth, the Galilean town where she and her husband Joseph raised the young Jesus.

But according to the Gospel of James, when Joachim returned from his penance in the wilderness, he and Anne embraced at the city gates in Jerusalem, placing the couple firmly in the Holy City. And in Jerusalem, an ancient church named after St Anne marks the reputed place of Mary’s birth; a few metres away, a Greek Orthodox church makes the same claim. The 12th-century Crusader church of St Anne is located near the northern wall of the Temple, adjacent to the Pools of Bethesda, and near the gate through which livestock would be driven on their way to be sacrificed in the Temple (today’s Lions’ Gate). A previous church was built on that spot around 450 AD, dedicated to Mary’s nativity, so the location has an ancient tradition. Pilgrims today visit St Anne’s church before they begin the Via Dolorosa.

Its location so near the Temple might also suggest that Joachim and Anne had connections to the priestly class. Indeed, Mary’s older cousin Elizabeth was married to a priest (another pair of mature parents). And if little Mary was indeed raised in the Temple, as the Gospel of James has it, then that would strengthen the idea of the family’s standing among the religious establishment.

So, how did Jerusalem-born Mary end up getting married to Joseph in small, rural Nazareth? We can only speculate. One explanation would have Anne and Mary moving to Galilee after the death of Joachim. In the society of their time, a woman without a man’s protection had no rights and was a social outcast. That is why Jesus would raise the widow’s son at Nain — to give her the protection she needed — and perhaps also why Mary and Martha were so desperate when Lazarus temporarily died. So without Joachim, Anne probably needed a refuge under male guardianship. Such a man might have lived in Sepphoris — maybe one of those two other husbands which the medieval legend marries Anne off to, or maybe a family member. And in Sepphoris, they might have encountered one Joseph of Bethlehem.

Despite so little being known about St Anne, she is an enormously popular saint. She must be so, since she is the mother of Our Lady and the grandmother of Our Lord. And that’s all we really need to know about her.

The feast of Ss Anne & Joachim is on July 26.

This article was published in the July 2021 issue of The Southern Cross magazine