Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption

Front matter

ANCIENT TRADITIONS OF THE VIRGIN MARY'S DORMITION AND ASSUMPTION

Stephen J. Shoemaker

OXFORD EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

Préface

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. Nevertheless, 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 continuing. 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 Dormition traditions (now collected in his Aux origines de la Dormition de la Vierge: Etudes historique sur les traditions orientales) oftered 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 studying 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 understanding 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 circumstances, 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. 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 x 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 reproductions 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 allowing 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 Archaeological 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 Ecole 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 XI

Lerner, Daniel Stoekl, and Michael Stone for various contributions 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 anonymous 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.

SJ:S.

Eugene November 2001

Contents

List of Figures XV Abbreviations xvi Introduction I

I. The Earliest Dormition Traditions: Their Nature and Shape 9 The Ancient Traditions of Mary's Dormition

and Assumption 25