Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption

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 Officiis 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 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Stephen J. Shoemaker 2002 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 First published in paperback 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Regent Typesetting, London Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn ISBN 0–19–925075–8 978-0-19-925075–2 ISBN 0-19-921074-8 (Pbk.) 978-0-19-921074-9 (Pbk.) 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 ÃÄÃÀÓÀ ÃÀ ÌÀÌÀÓÀ For Mom and Dad Staunst du nicht, wie sanft sie ihm entging? Fast als wär sie’s noch, nichts is verschoben. 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 traditions, 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 traditions, 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 viii Preface Wenger had begun and Michel van Esbroeck has been con- tinuing. The work of these two scholars, based on careful literary 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 ix 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 contributions to this work, but especially for her companionship and her support.

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