The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (or The Infancy Gospel of Matthew) is a part of the New Testament apocrypha. In antiquity the text was called The Book About the Origin of the Blessed Mary and the Childhood of the Savior. Pseudo-Matthew is one of a genre of "Infancy gospels" that seek to fill out the details of the life of Jesus of Nazareth up to the age of 12, which are briefly given in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. In the West, it was the dominant source for pictorial cycles of the Life of Mary, especially before the Late Middle Ages. Composition date According to the research of J. Gijsel and R. Beyers (1997), the archetype of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew's Recensio-α dates to 800 AD and the composition date to the first half of the seventh century, maybe to around 600 and 625 AD. Gijsel writes that Joachim's representation in Pseudo-Matthew is meant to evoke the model figure of a Merovingian nobleman, this one, according to Gijsel, being Dagobert I during his reign (629639). According to Berthold, the composition date of the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew is around 650 AD at the earliest, due to the fact that it "shows literary dependence on Vita Agnetis of Pseudo-Ambrose", which itself was used in De Virginitate by Aldhelm in 690 AD. According to G. Schneider, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew was composed in the 8th or 9th century during the Carolingian dynasty. The work expanded over time. The base content of Pseudo-Matthew shares many similarities with, and likely used as a source, the apocryphal Gospel of James. The attribution of the work to Matthew was not present in the earliest versions; the claim Matthew wrote the gospel was only added two centuries later, in the prologue correspondence between the bishops and Jerome. The similar Gospel of James had been condemned in Western Christianity by Jerome due to its reference to Jesus having brothers; seemingly in an attempt to avoid a similar condemnation, the prologue was added wherein an authority no less than Jerome himself translates the work from Matthew and approves of it. Similarly, the later sections which include a version of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas are not present in the oldest manuscripts, suggesting that the merging of the Gospel of Thomas content into the combined Pseudo-Matthew work happened later. Content The narrative is prefaced by a series of letters between the