The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh is the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures, including the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. These texts are almost exclusively in Biblical Hebrew, with a few passages in Biblical Aramaic (in the Books of Daniel and Ezra, the verse Jeremiah 10:11, and some single words). The authoritative form of the Hebrew Bible for Rabbinic Judaism is the Masoretic Text (7th to 10th century AD), which consists of 24 books, divided into pesuqim (verses). The contents of the Hebrew Bible are similar to those of the Protestant Christian Old Testament, in which the material is divided into 39 books and arranged in a different order. Catholic Bibles, Eastern/Greek Orthodox Bibles and Ethiopian Orthodox Bibles contain additional materials, derived from the Septuagint (texts translated in Koine Greek) and other sources. In addition to the Masoretic Text, modern scholars seeking to understand the history of the Hebrew Bible use a range of sources. These include Septuag...

 The Gospel of James (or the Protoevangelium of James) is a 2nd-century infancy gospel telling of the miraculous conception of the Virgin Mary, her upbringing and marriage to Joseph, the journey of the couple to Bethlehem, the birth of Jesus, and events immediately following. It is the oldest surviving assertion of the perpetual virginity of Mary, meaning her viginity not just prior to the birth of Jesus, but during and afterwards, and, despite being condemned by Pope Innocent I in 405 and rejected by the Gelasian Decree around 500, became a widely influential source of Mariology. The narrative is made up of three distinct sections with only slight ties to each other: Chapters 1-17: A biography of Mary, dealing with her miraculous birth and holy infancy and childhood, her engagement to Joseph, and her virginal conception of Jesus; Chapters 18-20: the birth of Jesus, including proof that Mary continued to be a virgin even after giving birth; Chapters 22-24: the death of Zacharias, t...