Unknown Ethiopian artist, Amhara region
The Trial by Water, from an Illuminated Gospel (f.7r), Late 14th–early 15th century, Parchment (vellum), wood (acacia), tempera, ink, 41.9 x 28.6 x 10.2 cm (manuscript), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Rogers Fund, 1998, 1998.66, fol. 7r, www.metmuseum.org
In it Together
Commentary by Maryanne Saunders
In Buckle Church (part of the Göreme Open Air Museum) in Türkiye, a rare example of a visual depiction of the Sotah ritual is found, in the context of a fresco cycle dating from the tenth century. Rarer still is the fact it depicts the Virgin Mary and St Joseph being given the ‘bitter waters’ after her pregnancy becomes apparent. The second-century apocryphal text the Protoevangelium of James, followed by the seventh/eighth-century Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, details that Joseph and Mary had to drink the waters after being accused—not by each other, but by religious officials—of pre-marital sex.
Then Mary said, stedfastly and without trembling: O Lord God, King over all, who knowest all secrets, if there be any pollution in me, or any sin, or any evil desires, or unchastity, expose me in the sight of all the people, and make me an example of punishment to all. Thus saying, she went up to the altar of the Lord boldly, and drank the water of drinking, and walked round the altar seven times, and no spot was found in her. (Pseudo-Matthew 12)
The same scene appears to be depicted in an illuminated Gospel by the Ethiopian Amhara peoples in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries. Here, we see Mary, third from the left, holding a chalice in a Temple setting. The figures around her are ostensibly male and look on as she drinks from the bitter waters.
This illumination places the scene as part of a sequence of events following the Annunciation and preceding the birth of Christ—a sequence very like that found in the Protoevangelium and Pseudo-Matthew. Its inclusion in an apocryphal Christian narrative from as early as the second century is intriguing, and may capture a much older anxiety around Jesus’s parentage and the legitimacy of the pregnancy stemming from first-century allegations of illegitimacy by anti-Christian writers, such as Celsus (Grushcow 2019: 288).
By including, alongside the Gospel account of Mary’s pregnancy, a fidelity test understood to have been performed at the time—a test which was ostensibly to be judged by God—the author is providing as much confirmation as possible for Jesus’s divine origins. This may explain the episode’s rare but enduring legacy in Christian visual art.
References
Cleveland Coxe, A. (ed.). 1916. Ante-Nicene Fathers. Volume 8: The Twelve Patriarchs, Excerpts and Epistles, The Clementina, Apocrypha, Decretals, Memoirs of Edessa and Syriac Documents, Remains of the First Ages (New York: Christian Literature Publishing), pp. 368–83
Grushcow, L. 2019. Writing the Wayward Wife (Leiden: Brill)
Schneider, G. (trans.). 1995. Evangelia infantiae apokrypha – Apokryphe Kindheitsevangelien, Fontes christiani, Bd. 18, (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder), pp. 61–65
