Sub Tuum Praesidium: the oldest known prayer to Mary
The prayer
We fly to thy protection, O holy Mother of God.
Despise not our petitions in our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed Virgin.
Amen.
In short
Sub Tuum Praesidium is the oldest surviving prayer addressed to Mary. The Greek text was found on an Egyptian papyrus now kept in Manchester, and it is very short: four lines asking for shelter and deliverance. Its date is disputed, from the third century to the eighth.
- Written by
- Maria Luisa Navarro Schmitt
- Reviewed by
- Raphael Navarro Schmitt
- Published on
- Reading time
- 5 min read
When to pray it
At the end of the day, and in any concrete danger — it is the prayer for when there is no time to pray a long one. The whole thing fits in a single breath.
The prayer contains four verbs and not one adjective about the person praying. Fly, despise, ask, deliver. There is no description of feeling, no account of the situation, no promise of future behaviour. It was written to be said by someone with no time — and that economy is why it has crossed so many centuries almost untouched.
The central request is deliverance “from all dangers”, plural and unspecified. That makes it usable in any distress, and it is probably why it survived changes of language, of rite and of continent. A prayer that names the danger ages with it; this one names none.
Catholic devotion reads the request for shelter as a request for intercession: God protects, and what is asked of Mary is that she ask alongside. Most Protestant and evangelical churches do not hold that practice and address the request directly to God. Both readings exist, and this page presents what the devotion claims without deciding for anyone.
If one biblical scene matches the image of the prayer it is the flight into Egypt, and the geographical coincidence is not small. The oldest copy of this prayer came from Egypt, the same place to which, in Matthew, the family was taken by night to escape Herod. The prayer asks for exactly what that journey achieved: getting out of danger with the child alive.
Where this prayer comes from
When it appeared A Greek papyrus from Egypt, dated somewhere between the third and eighth centuries
In 1917 the John Rylands Library in Manchester bought a batch of papyri from Egypt. One fragment was catalogued as P. Ryl. 470 and sat unidentified until 1938, when C. H. Roberts published his reading of it: the Greek text of this prayer, all but identical to the one still recited. That is how Marian devotion acquired the oldest document it possesses.
The date has never been settled, and the disagreement is enormous. The palaeographer Edgar Lobel read the hand as third century; Roberts preferred the fourth; Hans Förster has argued for the eighth, on the grounds that Lobel’s dating was quoted rather than demonstrated. This is not a quibble over detail. Between the earliest and the latest date lie five hundred years and two different histories of Marian devotion.
The prayer entered the Greek, Latin, Coptic and Ambrosian liturgies, and each received it with a small variation. The Latin form adds “O glorious and blessed Virgin” at the end, which is not in the Greek of the papyrus — and it is that expanded form that reached English. The core is the same everywhere: shelter, petition, deliverance.
Little-known details
The papyrus calls her Mother of God before the title was defined
It took twenty-one years for anyone to notice what it was
The Latin version has a line the Greek does not
What the passages say
41And it happened that, as Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit.
42And she cried out with a loud voice and said: “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
43And how does this concern me, so that the mother of my Lord would come to me?
Elizabeth’s greeting is the distant root of the title the papyrus uses in Greek: she calls Mary the mother of her Lord. Note who is speaking — not a theologian and not a council, but a pregnant relative in a domestic scene. The expression is born in conversation before it is born in definition.
13And after they had gone away, behold, an Angel of the Lord appeared in sleep to Joseph, saying: “Rise up, and take the boy and his mother, and flee into Egypt. And remain there until I tell you. For it will happen that Herod will seek the boy to destroy him.”
14And getting up, he took the boy and his mother by night, and withdrew into Egypt.
15And he remained there, until the death of Herod, in order to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through the prophet, saying: “Out of Egypt, I called my son.”
The scene the prayer seems to describe without naming it: a family escaping by night into Egypt, protected on the road. Worth remembering that the oldest copy of this prayer was found in Egypt, almost certainly recited by Christians who knew this passage by heart.
34And Simeon blessed them, and he said to his mother Mary: “Behold, this one has been set for the ruin and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and as a sign which will be contradicted.
35And a sword will pass through your own soul, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
Simeon’s prophecy keeps Marian devotion from turning into a promise of an easy life. The one whose shelter is sought here is someone to whom suffering was announced, not someone spared it — which changes what the request for protection means.
1And a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon was under her feet, and on her head was a crown of twelve stars.
The image Christian art attached to Mary very early, and the one that appears in most depictions of this prayer. The chapter itself is not settled, though: part of the tradition sees the Church there, or Israel, rather than one particular woman. The three readings have coexisted for centuries.