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OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

General Editors

Gillian Clark Andrew Louth

THE OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES series includes scholarly volumes on the thought and history of the early Christian centuries. Covering a wide range of Greek, Latin, and Oriental sources, the books are of interest to theologians, ancient historians, and specialists in the classical and Jewish worlds.

Titles in the series include:

Ascetic Eucharists

Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals

Andrew McGowan (1999)

St Symeon the New Theologian and Orthodox Tradition

Hilarion Alfeyev (2000)

Asceticism and Anthropology in Irenaeus and Clement

John Behr (2000)

The Old Latin Gospels

A Study of Their Texts and Language

Philip Burton (2000)

Paulinus Noster

Self and Symbols in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola

Catherine Conybeare (2000)

The Cult of Saint Thecla

A Tradition of Women"s Piety in Late Antiquity

Stephen T. Davis (2001)

Eunomius of Cyzicus and the Nicene Revolution

Richard Paul Vaggione, O.H.C. (2001)

Ambrose: De Offciis

Edited with an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary

Ivor J. Davidson (2002)

St John Damascene

Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology

Andrew Louth (2002)

Augustine"s Commentary on Galatians

Introduction, Translation (with facing Latin text), and Notes

Eric Plumer (2002)

The Early Development of Canon Law and the Council of Serdica

Hamilton Hess (2002)

The Commentaries of Origen and Jerome on St Paul"s Epistle to the

Ephesians

Ronald E. Heine (2002)

Ancient Traditions

of the Virgin Mary"s

Dormition and

Assumption

STEPHEN J. SHOEMAKER

3 3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

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First published 2004

First published in paperback 2006

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Mom and Dad

Staunst du nicht, wie sanft sie ihm entging?

Doch die Himmel sind erschüttert oben:

Mann, knie hin und sieh mir nach und sing.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Marien-Leben,

'Vom Tode Mariae, III"

PREFACE

In many ways this is a book that I had hoped not to write. That is not to say that I have not enjoyed doing so, for I have. Neverthe- less, it was my initial intention to produce an altogether different study of early Dormition narratives when first taking up this corpus of traditions. This book owes its existence to my doctoral dissertation, which I defended at Duke University in 1997 under the title, 'Mary and the Discourse of Orthodoxy: Early Christian Identity and the Ancient Dormition Legends". As this title suggests, the dissertation was a somewhat different enterprise than the present volume. Yet it too was not the dissertation that I had hoped to write. It was my initial intention to produce a study of the early Dormition traditions that detailed their position in the culture and society of the early Byzantine Near East. Although I was able to achieve a fraction of this goal in the dissertation, as my studies of the Dormition traditions have progressed I have continually struggled with the need for a detailed study of the basic facts of these narratives, including such matters as the relations among these highly variegated trad- itions, their approximate dates, their relations to the emergent cult of the Virgin, and their theological positioning within the diversity of late ancient Christianity, among other details. Early in my studies of the Dormition traditions, Simon Mimouni"s exhaustive work, Dormition et assomption de Marie: Histoire des traditions anciennes, was published (1995). It was my hope that this volume could fill my need, but I am very sorry to say that it did not. Although Mimouni"s study is to be commended for its enormous scope and attention to detail, it is in my opinion fundamentally flawed in its approach to the trad- itions, as this study will frequently make clear. Unfortunately for my purposes, Mimouni"s study served only to make already murky waters even more cloudy, particularly for the reader otherwise unfamiliar with these traditions. More importantly, however, Mimouni"s study completely up-ended the significant scholarship on the early Dormition traditions that Antoine Wenger had begun and Michel van Esbroeck has been con- tinuing. The work of these two scholars, based on careful liter- ary and philological study of the various traditions, is without question the most useful analysis that I have encountered. In this regard, van Esbroeck"s series of studies on the Dormi- tion traditions (now collected in his Aux origines de la Dormition de la Vierge: Études historique sur les traditions orientales) offered more promise. Nevertheless, as anyone who has read these articles can attest, van Esbroeck"s studies often assume a great deal on the part of their readers. It can frequently be frustrating for uninitiated readers to follow the details of their arguments, unless they are familiar with all the various sources and issues that van Esbroeck has engaged elsewhere, many of which will be rather obscure to the average scholar of late antiquity. This is particularly the case with van Esbroeck"s brief article 'Les Textes littéraires sur l"assomption avant le Xe siècle", which I have found more valuable than any other single work in study- ing these traditions. In this extremely compressed article, van Esbroeck outlines the various traditions and presents two stemmata that diagram the literary relations among the different narratives quite accurately. Nevertheless, the article gives only the slimmest argumentation for its important and perceptive conclusions, leaving readers who are otherwise innocent of the Dormition traditions to take a great deal on faith. Moreover, while I strongly agree with van Esbroeck concerning certain fundamentals, in the following pages I offer a considerably different interpretation of the ancient Dormition traditions and their history. Nor were these the only two options available for understand- ing these ancient traditions. As the reader of this book will soon discover, a variety of hypotheses have been advanced concerning the nature of the early Dormition traditions, most of which I have found even more problematic. In view of these circum- stances, I decided that I would write a book to bridge this gap, providing a basic introduction to these traditions, with the hope of eventually being able to follow it with the book that I had initially wanted to write, resting my studies of these traditions" cultural significance on the foundations laid in this volume. I have also included a number of translations, some of them quite lengthy, to assist in the introduction of this unnecessarily ???? Preface obscure corpus. The idea to include these translations was initially suggested by my first readers, the members of my dissertation committee, who in reading my work expressed some frustration at the inability to access easily the narratives that I was discussing. I hope that these translations will help to open up these fascinating traditions to a much broader audience than they have yet received. At this point, then, I would like to thank the members of my dissertation committee not only for this helpful suggestion, but for the multitude of good advice they have provided me for the past ten years. Above all others, I must thank my Doktormutter, Elizabeth Clark, who has not only been an outstanding mentor and friend, but also deserves the credit for initially suggesting the early Dormition traditions as a topic of research. I am also deeply indebted to Orval Wintermute, who patiently guided my first steps in many of the languages required to undertake this project, as well as to the other members of my dissertation committee, Bart Ehrman, Dale Martin, and John Oates, whose gifts as both teachers and scholars have nurtured my own scholarship. In addition, I wish to thank my colleagues in the graduate programme, particularly John Lamoreaux and Andrew Jacobs, at Duke for their numerous, otherwise unacknowledged contributions to the gradual development of the present work. I especially wish to thank my most valued colleague and friend, Melissa Aubin, not only for her considerable contribu- tions to this work, but especially for her companionship and her support. Special thanks are also due to Derek Krueger, who more than anyone else helped this project to get off the ground, and to Susan Ashbrook Harvey, who kindly shared with me both her encouragement and her unpublished work on the Syriac Dormition traditions. At a later stage, Philip Sellew similarly made an important contribution, also by sharing his unpublished work and by offering helpful comments on my then work in progress. Walter Ray has been a valued dialogue partner almost from the start, particularly with regard to the liturgical traditions of Jerusalem and the newly discovered 'Kathisma" church in particular. News of the 'new" Kathisma church"s discovery broke just as the ink was drying on my dissertation, and I owe an enormous debt to the church"s excavator, Rina Avner, who personally introduced me to the site while I was in

Preface ??

Jerusalem and quite generously shared with me the unpublished results of the most recent (and final) excavations. I should also like to thank Michel van Esbroeck for generously providing me with copies of several forthcoming articles and certain other of his writings that proved very difficult to obtain. Moreover, I wish to thank Dumbarton Oaks for the generous financial support of a Junior Fellowship and the opportunity to utilize its outstanding Byzantine collection while completing my dissertation in 1996-7. Likewise, the valuable conversation and helpful advice of the various scholars then in residence improved this dissertation considerably, including particularly Alexander Alexakis, John Birkenmeier, Barbara Crostini, Leslie Dossey, Yizhar Hirschfeld, Alexander Kazhdan, William Macomber, Irfan Shahid, and Jean-Pierre Sodini. While in Washington, I was warmly welcomed by scholars at the Catholic University of America"s Institute for Christian Oriental Research. Of these, I thank especially David Johnson for providing me with repro- ductions of certain Coptic manuscripts at an early stage in this project, Janet Timbie for her comments on my edition of the Ps.-Evodius homily, and Monica Blanchard for kindly allow- ing me the privilege of sitting in on her 'Introduction to Old Georgian", a language which has proved crucial for the study of these traditions. Also I wish to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a fellowship in the year 1999-2000, which supported my stay at the W. F. Albright Institute for Archaeo- logical Research in Jerusalem, where I completed this book. I am very grateful to the Albright and its staff, as well as to the American Schools of Oriental Research, for the opportunities both to utilize the numerous resources of which it avails its residents and to enrich myself with the Albright"s extensive educational programme of speakers and site excursions in the Holy Land. In conjunction with my stay at the Albright, I would like to thank in particular Douglas Edwards, Eric Meyers, Yorke Rowan, and Robert Schick for their contributions to this study. I should additionally like to thank the libraries and staff of the École Biblique and the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum for allowing me to use their collections during my stay in Jerusalem. I am also indebted to the Armenian Studies program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and I thank Konstantine ? Preface Lerner, Daniel Stoekl, and Michael Stone for various contribu- tions to this study. I am especially grateful to Professor Stone for allowing me to participate in his Classical Armenian seminar and for his hospitality in general during my year in Jerusalem. I owe a special debt to Andrew McGowan for initially putting me in contact with Andrew Louth, and I would like to thank Professor Louth and Gillian Clark for agreeing to publish this volume in the Oxford Early Christian Studies series. Their comments, and those of Sarah Boss, who served as an anonym- ous reader, considerably improved the final product. When at last the book reached Oxford University Press, Hilary O"Shea, Enid Barker, Lucy Qureshi, Lavinia Porter, and Sylvia Jaffrey offered much assistance and showed great flexibility in bringing a work with so many languages and fonts into print. Finally, my greatest debt is imperfectly acknowledged in the dedication. I cannot begin to thank my parents for all that they have done. They have been simultaneously both my biggest fans and toughest critics, striking the difficult but crucial balance that good parents must. For this and for so much else, I am altogether grateful.

S.J.S.

Eugene

November 2001

Preface ??

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CONTENTS

List of Figures xv

Abbreviations xvi

Introduction 1

1. The Earliest Dormition Traditions: Their Nature

and Shape 9

The Ancient Traditions of Mary"s Dormition

and Assumption 25

Conclusions 76

2. The Ancient Palestinian Cult of the Virgin and the

Early Dormition Traditions 78

The Ancient Church of the Kathisma and the

Origins of the Palestinian Cult of the Virgin 81

The Church of Mary in the Valley of Josaphat

and the Tomb of the Virgin 98

Christian Eulogiai and the Palestinian Cult of

the Virgin 107

The Origins, Shape, and Development of Marian

Cult in Late Ancient Jerusalem 115

The Emergence of a Stational Marian Liturgy

in Early Medieval Jerusalem 132

Conclusions 140

3.

Rival Traditions of Mary"s Death: The Independent

Origins of the Ancient Dormition Traditions 142

Against the Priority of an Assumptionless

Tradition: The Obsequies, the Liber Requiei,

and the Palm Traditions 146

Topography, Liturgy, and the Question of

Origins 168

A Garden Closed and Reopened: Late Ancient

Paradise Traditions as Evidence of Independent

Origins 179

Conclusions 203

4. The Prehistory and Origins of the Dormition and

Assumption Traditions 205

Early Christian Heterodoxy and the Prehistory

of the Dormition Traditions 209

Resistance to Chalcedon and the Origin of the

Dormition Traditions 256

Conclusions 278

Conclusion 280

Appendices: Select Translations of Early Dormition

Narratives

A. The Ethiopic Liber Requiei 290

B. The Earliest Greek Dormition Narrative 351

C. Fifth-Century Syriac Palimpsest Fragments

of the 'Six Books" 370

D. The Ethiopic Six Books 375

E. The Sahidic Coptic Homily on the Dormition

Attributed to Evodius of Rome 397

F. Jacob of Serug, Homily on the Dormition 408

G. Parallels to the Liber Requiei from the Early

Palm Narratives 415

Bibliography 419

Index 454

??? Contents

LIST OF FIGURES

1. Basic outline of the ancient Palm traditions and

their literary relations 33

2. Basic outline of the ancient Bethlehem traditions and

their literary relations 47

3. Basic outline of the ancient Coptic traditions and their

literary relations 58

4. The fifth-century church and monastery at Ramat

Rahel (the 'Old Kathisma") 85

5. The 'Mar Elias" church (the 'New Kathisma") 86

6. Marian shrines of fifth-century Jerusalem 87

7. The church of Mary"s tomb 99

8.

Sixth-century eulogia token from Bet She"an

(Scythopolis) depicting the Virgin"s Dormition 109

9. Byzantine Jerusalem, showing Marian shrines 134

ABBREVIATIONS

Patristic texts are cited according to the systems of abbreviation outlined in G. W. H. Lampe (ed.), A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) (for Greek) and Albert Blaise and Henri Chirat, Dictionnaire latin-français des auteurs chrétiens (Paris: Librairie des Meridiens, 1954) (for Latin). Biblical and rabbinic texts are cited according to the list of abbreviations given in the Journal of Biblical Literature, 107 (1988): 579-96.

CCG Corpus Christianorum, Series Graeca

CCL Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina

CCSA Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocrypha

CSCO Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium

CSEL Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum GCS Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte

NHS Nag Hammadi Studies; Nag Hammadi and Mani-

chaean Studies PG Patrologia Graeca, ed. J. P. Migne, et al. (Paris,

1857- )

PL Patrologia Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, et al. (Paris,

1844- )

PO Patrologia Orientalis

SC Sources chrétiennes

TU Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des alt- christ lichen Literatur

Introduction

The end of the Virgin Mary"s life remains a relatively uncertain moment in the Christian story. Despite decades of research and the Vatican"s concerted efforts to resolve the matter during the past century, culminating in the 1950 dogma of the Virgin"s Assumption, the topic remains an unclear point of the early Christian tradition. Indeed, even the Vatican"s 1950 definition fails to clarify such a basic matter as whether or not the Virgin actually died before departing this world. In the Vatican"s defence, it must be said that the first four Christian centuries are surprisingly reticent on the subject of Mary"s 'death", although what little evidence there is does seem to indicate that, in contrast to the ambiguity of the modern Assumption dogma, Mary did in fact die. Our understanding of the end of Mary"s life improves considerably, however, once we reach the late fifth and sixth centuries, when there was suddenly an efflorescence of diverse traditions, both narrative and liturgical, all celebrating the Virgin"s departure from this world. This sudden prolifera- tion of traditions calls for an explanation: something about this topic and its narrative traditions must have resonated with the issues and concerns of the early Byzantine world. Although it is my intention to address in a future volume the intriguing question of why these legends found such great appeal during the period from 450 to 600, before tackling such a topic we must first come to grips with the complicated nature of the corpus itself. Before we can hope to interpret these traditions coherently within their broader context, we require a better understanding of the traditions themselves, including particularly the relations between different narratives and the nature of their early history and development in general. These are the aims of the present study: to bring a measure of clarity and coherence to this tangled mass of traditions by identifying the earliest, exploring the connections among them, and unravelling the nature of their earliest development. Such work is made necessary by the often intimidating diversity of these traditions: in fact rather than resolving the issue of how Mary departed this life, the abundance of fifth- and sixth- century traditions merely complicates the matter further. Only a very few themes are common to all (or almost all) the earliest narratives, and these include Mary"s death in Jerusalem; the involvement of at least a few of the apostles; Christ"s reception of his mother"s soul; the transfer of Mary in body and/or soul to Paradise; and the imagined hostility of the Jews towards Mary.ⁱ While this suggests a rather basic outline that may represent the earliest stage of these traditions, beyond this slim core the differences pile up very quickly. The list of variants is unfortu- nately too vast to catalogue here, but a quick comparison of the appended translations will give the reader a good sense of the diversity represented in the earliest traditions. Nevertheless, a select few of these differences were significant for the formula- tion of the 1950 dogma, and consequently they have held a firm grasp on the direction of much previous scholarship and will necessarily be important foci of the following discussions. Of the various disagreements among the narratives, no issue has attracted more attention, and likewise generated more con- fusion, than the moment of Mary"s death and its theological significance as described in these narratives. The overwhelming interest in this topic was generated primarily by the Vatican"s

1950 definition, in view of which many scholars turned to the

earliest traditions to garner support for the dogma, both before and since its proclamation. At the heart of the modern Assumption dogma lies a belief that Mary, at the end of her life, received 'prematurely" the final reward of the just, which others of the just will receive only at the end of time, at the Last Judgment. But if a few of the earliest narratives seem to express this view, others do not. The majority, however, as we will see, are quite ambiguous on this matter and thus not at all suited to fit within the sharp lines drawn by modern dogmatic discourse. ? Introduction ⁱ On the latter point, one can now see Stephen J. Shoemaker, '"Let Us Go and Burn Her Body": The Image of the Jews in the Early Dormition Tradi- tions", Church History, 68 (1999), 775-823. The ancient narratives are neither clear nor unanimous in either supporting or contradicting the modern dogma on this point, a situation that has often invited modern scholarship to manipu- late the early history of these traditions in the service of this modern dogma. The varied representation of Mary"s ultimate fate in these narratives requires that we clarify some theological terms, in order that we may better understand both the diversity of the early Dormition narratives themselves and their complex rela- tionship with the modern dogmatic formula. For instance, in many Dormition narratives, the Virgin"s body and soul are only temporarily separated, usually for three or four days, after which she is, like her son, resurrected and taken bodily into heaven,quotesdbs_dbs27.pdfusesText_33

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