As a former Protestant, I had no relationship with Mary—no framework for understanding her role beyond the Christmas story. Of all the aspects of Orthodoxy I’ve encountered, coming to terms with the Theotokos has been one of the most challenging. This series is my attempt to gather and reflect on what I’m learning as I take slow steps toward her, with openness, questions, and growing reverence.
I never gave much thought to Jesus having grandparents.
Not in a real sense.
While I have known that Jesus is fully God and was fully man, most of the focus was on the divinity part. Especially in the Protestant world, Mary (the Theotokos in Orthodox Christianity) was more of an afterthought.
I believed He was born, of course. I knew Mary was His mother. But she was more a supporting character—a means to an end. And I knew enough of the Roman Catholic approach to Mary to be dangerous, and develop a negative bias or two.
But then Orthodoxy entered my journey—and with it, two names I’d never heard before: Joachim and Anna.
Each week, near the conclusion of the Divine Liturgy, I heard:
“May Christ our true God, Who rose from the dead, through the prayers of his most pure mother, of the holy glorious and all-laudable apostles, of our father among the saints John Chrysostom, whose liturgy we have celebrated this day, of all the saints that have shown forth in this North American land and of the holy and righteous ancestors of God, Joachim and Anna, have mercy on us and save us for as much as he is good and he loves mankind.”
The first time I heard that, it gave me pause.
Joachim and Anna?
I couldn’t recall their names. I searched. Their names don’t appear in the Bible. Not once.
The “righteous ancestors of God” are Jesus’ grandparents. Since He had only one human parent, that meant they were Mary’s mother and father.
I didn’t know what to do with that at first. As a Protestant, I was taught that if it’s not in the Bible, it’s not valid. And yet, there they were—honored by name at the end of every liturgy.
To understand Mary’s role in the Orthodox Church, it seemed I needed to understand the Church’s recognition of her parents first.
I read some books (notably The Orthodox Church by Timothy Ware) and met with the parish priest for some foundational understanding.
Through that—and Joachim and Anna—I began to realize something critical about understanding Eastern Orthodoxy: It doesn’t treat Scripture as the only vessel of God’s truth. It treats Scripture as the heart of a living memory, not the whole memory itself.
I think the biggest “oh wow, I never thought of that” moment came when I realized:
The Church didn’t start with the New Testament. The Church is where the New Testament came from.
And in that Church, from the earliest centuries, the names of Joachim and Anna were remembered—not because of a Bible verse—but because of the faith of those who bore witness. They weren’t dismissed just because their names ultimately weren’t in books accepted into the Bible.
No, their names remained a part of the church, ultimately recorded in the Divine Liturgy.
That made me wonder: Until the New Testament was solidified, what did the Church look like? How did it operate? What did it believe?
And I realized, I had no idea.
I was shaped by a Christianity that has existed for about 500 years. And yet, there were almost 1,500 years of the Christian Church before that. I realized I knew absolutely nothing about the early foundation.
I had always just seen Christianity in terms of “Roman Catholic” and “not Roman Catholic.” But that never took into account that there was this whole other lineage that was removed from that dichotomy.
And that lineage treats tradition as memory.
Not as a loose pile of extra beliefs, but as something protected and handed down, like the way a family remembers the stories of its ancestors. In this case, it’s 2,000 years of ancestry.
Scripture is not deprioritized. It is central: read aloud, kissed, chanted, enthroned. But it’s not suspended in a vacuum. It breathes inside the rhythm of the Church’s life—its liturgy, its feasts, its prayers, even its art.
I asked ChatGPT to help me understand it. I asked if it was like a three-legged stool: Scripture, Tradition and patriarchal influence (the Church in general). The AI corrected me: Not really. It’s more nuanced than that.
“A better metaphor might be something like a living vine,” the AI said. “With Scripture as the root, Tradition as the soil and nutrients passed down through time, and the Church (guided by the Holy Spirit) as the branches bearing fruit.”
On that vine, Joachim and Anna aren’t footnotes.
They’re part of the story. They are how Mary came into the world. And because Mary said yes, Jesus entered history, too.
Which means, if I accept that tradition of Joachim and Anna being Jesus’ grandparents who contributed to his ancestry, then I also have to admit something else: The Church has remembered other truths, too.
These truths may not have been recorded in the accepted scriptures. But they were preserved. Guarded. Passed on.
Through art. Through liturgy. Through prayers and hymns. Through the patriarchs.
Through the memory of Orthodoxy.
And really, it struck me that I needed to face one important question: On what grounds can I dismiss the memory of the Orthodox Church?
Can I truly place more authority and trust in the last 500 years of Christianity that was mostly a reaction to Roman Catholicism than in 2,000 years of seemingly unbroken continuity that wasn’t influenced by the whole messy Reformation?
And as I reflect on that realization… I don’t think I can.
Because if I can’t trust the Church’s memory about Joachim and Anna, then how can I trust the very foundations of Christianity itself? The religion’s basic beliefs were carried, taught, and lived before they were ever written and compiled into the New Testament.
Paul wasn’t inventing Christianity in his epistles. He was clarifying, encouraging, and correcting based on truths already known and practiced by the Church. Not everything was coded in Biblical texts.
Some things were carried on through the life of the Church.
And if that’s true, then I can’t pick and choose what I want to accept based on my preferences or comfort level. It would seem to me that picking and choosing is how we ended up with thousands of denominations created one by one because someone decided they didn’t accept one teaching or another.
Either it is the Church's memory, or it isn’t.
And I don’t see how I can’t simply accept it, or not.
These reflections are part of my personal journey—how I’m seeing and interpreting things in the moment. Like any journey, my understanding may be limited or incomplete and will likely deepen over time. I share these thoughts not as conclusions, but as honest glimpses along the way.
I really enjoy reading about your journey! It resonates with me—I share many of the same reactions you have, and also appreciate your ability to find the right words to describe them. I look forward to reading more!