The life of Simeon the Godbearer and Anna the Prophetess
Led by that same Spirit to the Temple on the fortieth day after Christ's birth, the day Mary and Joseph came to present the child there according to the Law, Simeon recognized in the infant the one he had waited his whole life to see. He took the child into his arms and spoke words of blessing and prophecy over him, telling Mary, among other things, that sorrow would one day pierce her own heart as well.
Anna, an elderly widowed prophetess who by then had spent decades almost never leaving the Temple, given over to constant fasting and prayer, was present at that same moment and recognized the child just as Simeon had; her fuller story is kept elsewhere on the Church's calendar, since she is remembered on her own day as well as jointly with Simeon here. A later tradition, examined critically by modern scholars and shown to have grown up well after the Gospel account itself, identifies Simeon as one of seventy translators who rendered the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and tells that he doubted a verse in Isaiah foretelling a virgin birth until an angel promised he would live to see it fulfilled; this story does not appear in the Gospel of Luke and is remembered as later legend rather than as part of the biblical account of his meeting with the infant Christ.
