Truth Unites - Mary’s Assumption Is Simply Indefensible

Episode Date: August 20, 2023

In this video I express the Protestant concern about the bodily assumption of Mary, and respond to 6 common defenses of this dogma, including some from the recent video of Trent Horn. My first video on the topic: https://youtu.be/KMhlrM8Zb3M My response to Willam Albrecht: https://youtu.be/4tInqRCNxW8 Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

In this video, I'm going to lay out a Protestant concern about the bodily assumption of Mary. First, what I'll do is explain the importance of this topic and why it's appropriate to address. Second, I'll summarize the argument against the assumption, and then third, I'll respond to six common defenses that I've heard. Number one, that I'm making an argument from silence. Number two, that I'm being inconsistent for rejecting the assumption, but accepting other late beliefs. Number three, that the assumption is affirmed by Epiphanius, a Christian in the fourth century. Number four, that the assumption is in Revelation 12. Number five, that the assumption became universal quickly within the church and that that commends

its plausibility. And number six, that the assumption is affirmed by all of the so-called apostolic churches, and that that commends its plausibility. And then finally, in the conclusion, I'll draw an implication about the nature of church authority, kind of all that's at stake. on this issue of Mary's bodily assumption. Now, some of these things came up in a video that Trent Horn put out yesterday for my recording this, August 15th, 2003. His video came out. I've already scripted this video before Trent's video came out, but what I'll try to do is just incorporate

some of Trent's points here and there, because I think Trent is a good apologist and I enjoy engaging his work. Now, I've done other videos, and I'm happy to dialogue with him on this, too, if you wants. Now, I've done other videos on this topic, but this one will be the most updated, the most thorough. I've put a lot of work into it. Some of this information I'm not aware is out there available elsewhere. So I hope this will really be helpful. And it always does help if you share the video and subscribe to my channel and so forth. I try not to say that too much, but that does help. And I think this will be one of my more important videos just because of the topic, the subject matter. You'll see if you watch all the to the end, just all that's at stake, all that's bound up

in this one issue. Now, before I dive in, I know that hearing your beliefs criticized can be uncomfortable and even painful. I know what that's like. We all feel that, you know, in different directions. So my intention here is not to attack or injure or cause pain at a personal level. I'm going to put up a quote from Francis Schaefer about apologetics. I think about this all the time when I do apologetics work on YouTube, and I feel them acutely as I make this video. to summarize, he's basically saying, this is not a game. This is not just an intellectual exercise. And when we treat it like that, it becomes ugly and cruel, and it can destroy people.

We've all seen people destroyed by the ugliness of apologetics and how that can go. So he's saying toward the end of this quote, when you knock someone over, you need to be there to help catch them. They should know that you love them. And you should never cause any more pain than is necessary. Some pain and discomfort is inevitable. when two different ideologies clash. It's uncomfortable. It's awkward.

It's hard. It's frustrating at times. It's jarring. So that's just inevitable to some extent. But for my non-Protestant viewers, please know that those words from Francis Schaefer way upon me. I'm not trying to cause any more pain than is unavoidable. And I've tried to constrain and even just focus this video more and carefully scripting it

so that it doesn't stray off into anything that can be insulting or attacking or anything. The goal is not to do that. It's to commend the truth. At the same time, it's also worth saying that the truth of this matter is too important not to critically evaluate and not to transparently lay out the full case, and that's what I'm going to do, holding back nothing about how deep my concerns go on this topic. My channel is called Truth Unites. It's not called Unity at All Costs.

It must be the truth that unites us. So as much as I talk about ironicism, that does not mean we don't contend for the truth with all of our heart. That means we try to do so while maintaining harmonious relationship as much as we can and caring about the person like that Francis Schaefer quote. You know, they should know you care about them. And I do. I feel that love for these other traditions, for the people in them. But we should not hold back from contending for truth and seeking the truth with all of our heart.

and that is my motive in this video. So in that spirit, let me summarize my concern at the outset, and I need to put it this strong, to say that I think the evidence against the assumption of Mary is overwhelming. It gives every indication of being a post-apostolic accretion that seems to originate in heterodox groups and only slowly worms its way into the doctrine and piety and liturgy of the church over the course of many centuries, as we shall see.

And yet, it has been made by several churches into an obligatory, irreformable part of the Christian faith. So let me talk about that point first, the importance of this, because this can help us understand why, you know, all that's at stake here. I'm going to put up a definition of the assumption of Mary, as understood by the Roman Catholic Church. I'm going to be focusing a little bit more on the Roman Catholic dogma in this video, but I'll still talk about some of the other traditions as well. and it should be understood that the same idea is expressed with minor variation in the details and terminology and so forth in the liturgy of various Eastern churches like the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church. For this reason, the assumption of Mary represents a real fault line of divergence between Protestant Christianity and the rest of Christendom, pretty much, with only a few exceptions.

There's lots of issues that aren't like that. For example, calling Mary the mother of God is not a fault line of difference. Some Protestants are uncomfortable with that language, but historically, that has not been a point of divergence, and I've argued that it shouldn't be. Just as it shouldn't be in any way controversial for us to speak with honor about Mary as a model of courage and an example to us of faith. But the assumption of Mary that she was bodily assumed to heaven is a real, real fault line of difference between Protestantism and non-Protestantism. I'm just, sometimes I say

non-protestant as a catch-all so I don't have to list all the other churches, you know, because then if you try to list them all, someone's going to say, oh, you left out the Assyrian Church of the East or something like this. So it's a more convenient label. And also, as the most recent Roman Catholic dogma, I've said this several times, it represents an area where our traditions, Protestant and Roman Catholic are drifting further apart, and the same is true for the immaculate conception of Mary and for Mary in devotion. This is a crucial area. But the biggest reason why the assumption of Mary is so important, maybe I would say one of

the most important areas of ecumenical disagreement is the significance that is attached to this dogma. As I've mentioned many times in other videos, immediately after the definition of the bodily assumption of Mary in Pope Pius X, 12th's 1950 apostolic constitutional constitutional constitutional. constitution, munificentissimus dais, there is a warning that willfully denying or calling into doubt this dogma represents a complete falling away from the faith. It even goes so far as to say that changing or opposing the definition willfully will incur the wrath of God and the wrath of Peter and Paul. Now even if you allow for some wiggle room in terms of how this would be applied

to particular individuals, what's willfully, you know, you can, okay, nonetheless, you see the importance of this. This is an infallible teaching. It is obligatory, meaning you have to assent to it, and it is irreformable, meaning it's not going to go away ever. And so what no one should say to me is, Gavin, why are you focusing on the assumption of Mary? You know, I just read a comment about this thing. You know, people say this like, well, you know, if something is declared as an infallible dogma, then that sets the stakes pretty high, and it's totally appropriate to give it some critical reflection. And basically the Protestant concern here, by the way, some people misunderstand what I'm saying along these lines and they're responding as though we don't believe there are any essentials of the faith,

which is just completely missing the point. Of course, we affirm essential doctrines like the resurrection of Christ, for example. Paul teaches that in 1st Corinthians 15 very clearly. Anathemas are not wrong in principle. Anathemas are biblical, Galatians 1, or 1 Corinthians 1622, for example. Our concern is not that there are no essentials of the faith, the denial of which puts you at risk of God's wrath. Our concern is simply that Mary's assumption isn't one of them. And basically, we just want to follow our conscience. If you don't believe something is true, you cannot say that you do think it's true because that's lying.

And lying stains your conscience. Okay, second section, why don't we think this is true? Let me summarize some of the points I've gone into more fully in two previous videos, which are linked to the video description. Just an overview. Now, in what follows, I'm going to reference scholarship. Sometimes people strangely fault me for this, but I think they have a kind of naive anti-scholarship mentality. I'll hear people who say, oh, don't read the scholars, just read the primary sources. But the only way we can read the primary sources is through scholarship, through critical editions of texts, through translations, etc.

No one can possibly be just generally anti-scholarship any more than anyone can accept all scholarship. We all have to critically distinguish between good and bad scholarship. Now, my purpose in referencing scholarship is not just to say, well, therefore, it's settled. Just the opposite. It's to provoke people to look into it and to consider and say, why is all the scholarship going that route? So I'm going to talk a lot about Roman Catholic scholarship in this video. One of the points that I've made is that it appears to be something close to a scholarly consensus that the assumption of Mary only comes into the church in the late fifth century,

between 450 and 500. After the Council of Chalcedon. This is Stephen Shoemaker's summary. I'll put it up. He's a highly respected scholar working in this field. I won't read this. You can see this and numerous other quotes in my original videos. By the way, I am not misrepresenting him.

People sometimes wrongly accuse me of that. This is a summary passage of the thesis of his book. It accords with numerous other passages, and I've emailed him to ask him to review my video to make sure that I'm summarizing him accurately, which he did. Shoemaker also suggests in about six or eight other passages, I'll just put up one of them, that the assumption first appears to show up among Gnostic groups. And on pages 23 and 24 and 25 of this same book that I'm citing right here, he references widespread agreement about that point in the scholarship. The Roman Catholic scholar Brian Daly, another fantastic scholar, and a leading researcher on this question, puts the assumption coming into the church in the same broad time frame, though he thinks it starts among non-Chalcedonian Christians. And I've also referenced older Roman Catholic scholars like Ludwig Ott, Walter Berghardt, an important text on Mariology edited by Juniper Carroll, all of which are putting the assumption in this same time period, or even a little later. There's only differences on the details.

Eam and Duffy puts it as strong as to just say, and I quote him because I agree with him and I think he's being honest, that the assumption was simply unknown in the early church and has no historical evidence. I just think that's right. I just think he's being completely honest, and so I reference scholars who say that to invite people to see. Because I don't think people understand how big of a problem this dogma is. I don't think they get how serious the problems are. so I'm quoting these scholars to try to encourage people to look at what they're willing to concede. Why are they willing to do that?

And people say, oh, they're just skeptics. I don't think so. Okay, let me explain why. By the way, all those quotes and others are in my other videos or in my forthcoming book. I have a chapter on this topic, what it means to be Protestant, different title, August 2024, releasing. Now, what I do in my videos is I just walk through the evidence from the early church. So, for example, we look at Epiphanius, who is a Christian who lives in.

near Jerusalem near the end of the fourth century. Jerusalem is allegedly where the assumption took place according to most of the traditions, though not all. Some say Ephesus, which wouldn't be that far either. But Epiphanius conducts a careful investigation into the matter of what happened to Mary at the end of her life. And his conclusion is that no one knows her end. That would seem to indicate that there's not some kind of oral tradition about the assumption even at this time in the late 4th century. Now, Roman Catholic apologists often say, oh, this isn't at odds with the assumption because, because epiphanious references that she may have been killed or stayed alive or she was a martyr. He's saying, nobody knows. And they're saying, oh, yeah, but that doesn't contradict the

assumption because Mary could have died and then been resurrected and assumed. And it's true that the Roman Catholic dogma leaves that open either way, whether Mary died, resurrected, then assumed to heaven, or just straight assumed to heaven without an intervening death. For example, Tim Staples in his book on this topic writes, The fact that Epiphanius says Mary may have died and been buried says nothing of the assumption. We say in the creed that Christ was crucified, died, and was buried. This does not mean he was not resurrected. But the Apostles' Creed immediately adds on the third day he rose again.

By contrast, Epiphanius says nothing about a bodily assumption to heaven that has to be read into the text. Epiphanius instead seems to consider the possibility of death, either by natural causes or martyrdom as an alternative to her remaining alive. And then he says, we don't know. Nobody knows which of these is correct. In other words, when he says no one knows her end, he's not saying no one knows whether she died prior to an assumption. He just says, of these three options, nobody knows. And that's the result of a careful investigation. Okay. So people need to understand how big of a problem this is. It's not as though an assumption to heaven would be irrelevant to what Epiphanius is investigating. Supposing Mary had been buried and then resurrected and then assumed, that would give

him the answer to the question he is searching for of what happened. Awareness of such a tradition would have presented him with an answer to the question he's searching for. Even again, the Roman Catholic scholars admit this makes it look like there's not a generally known or tradition about Mary's final lot at this time in the late 4th century. For example, Walter Burkhart, who's a Roman Catholic scholar, says Epiphanius's approach suggests strongly the absence of a fixed tradition on Mary's final lot. That's especially the case because the Panerion was read widely throughout the church during Epiphanius's own lifetime. And yet, his findings appear to provoke no controversy and no counter testimony. Andrew Jacob,

notes that the Panerians circulated throughout the Christian world even during Epiphanius's lifetime and became the foundation text of subsequent pre-modern Christian heresiology. So basically you're wondering, okay, why, you know. Now, some people argue that Epiphanius does affirm the assumption in the next chapter of Panerion. I'll address that. That'll be one of my things I addressed in this video number three or something like that. Okay.

So we're starting off. We're moving. Now go all the way to the seventh century. And you have Isidore of Seville, who has a very similar kind of passage where he's basically saying he references the theory that Mary died as a martyr, and he's just uncertain about it. He mentions one possible location for her tomb. But now, the point, again, is not that Mary's death is necessarily at odds with the assumption. The point is that when people talk about Mary's end, they seem to be unable to find any fixed oral tradition about it into the 7th century

even. It's not settled there. We'll talk about how slowly and gradually the assumption does come in later in the video. Throughout the early church, there are numerous references to Mary's death. Tertullian mentions it, Augustine mentions it in numerous passages, and interprets it as a consequence of original sin, but it never comes up anywhere, anything unusual about her death or a resurrection after her death or a subsequent assumption to heaven or anything like that. Instead, many of the references to Mary's death speak as though her bodily existence is now over. For example, around the turn of the 5th century, Severian of Gabala references Mary's happy state in heaven and being called blessed, and then adds, in point of fact, while she was still living in the flesh, she was called blessed, for she heard felicitation while still in the flesh. Again, the Roman Catholic scholar Burkhart comments on this and says in its obvious implications,

it suggests a moment when Mary ceased living in the flesh, when spirit was severed from flesh, when Mary died. And he lists several other examples of passages that reference Mary's death and describe it as a separation of body and soul. Furthermore, what I've pointed out in my other videos is that when attestation of the story of Mary's assumption does emerge in the church, in the 5th century, it does so simultaneously with a number of alternative accounts of Mary's End, which it only gradually eclipses. And these, all these, in other words, all these different traditions pop up about Mary's End at the same time. And they're astoundingly diverse. I've read through a bunch of them. They're fascinating. They differ on nearly all the details. The plot,

the basic thing that's happening, the only things they have in common is there's conflict with the Jewish leadership, the apostles are involved, even the city where they are sometimes different, like I mentioned, it's not always Jerusalem. And one of the points that they differ on is whether there's even a bodily assumption. For example, the Dormition homily of Jacob of Surag in around 489 references the seraphim escorting Mary's soul into heaven, but it says nothing about her body. There's lots of these traditions you find with just an assumption of her soul only. That's pseudodionysius as well, for example. And then you find this idea that's attested in several of the early narratives that Mary's body is neither buried nor assumed, but it's kept guarded in some special place to await final resurrection.

For example, the Coptic Gospel of Bartholomew, which most scholars date to the 5th or 6th century, describes Christ promising to take Mary's soul to heaven and then adding, I will place your body under the tree of life, where a cherub with a sword of fire, will watch over it until the day of my kingdom. There's a similar idea in On the Dormission of the Holy Mother of God by pseudo-John the evangelist, many other texts as well. So here's the idea. Once you start seeing the assumption of Mary's body coming into the church, it does so simultaneously with all these alternative ideas. Now, lots of people have made efforts to try to say, well, the bodily assumption was the earlier tradition, and these other ideas are derivations from that.

even if you could explain how all the diversity could come in so quickly. The problem is the timing just doesn't fit. All these things come in at the same time. Here's how Shoemaker puts it. I'll put this quote up. He says there's simply no historical evidence for any sort of typological or theological evolution. Each type of narrative in all manner of opinions regarding Mary's ultimate fate are evident simultaneously when these narratives first appear at the end of the fifth century.

On top of that, one of the things I pointed out is that many of these texts, mentioning an assumption, exhibit an awareness of its late arrival. Shoemaker talks about apologies for the late appearance of the Dormission traditions in several texts. Pseudomilito's transitedist narrative is one, John of Thessalonica's homily on the Dormission of Mary's another. And his conclusion to that, I'll put up, is that this confirms modern scholarship's inability to identify any significant traditions concerning the end of Mary's life from before the 5th century. And basically, he says these admissions should make us not expect any earlier attestation. So the net effect of all of that is that the assumption of Mary just doesn't look like, it kind of looks like what even, sorry, even Duffy.

Even Duffy says that the assumption is just unknown in the early church. It's just, it's not there. Okay. It wasn't known by the apostle. or anybody within 10 generations of the apostles. That's just what it looks like. Now in response to that, some try to find refuge in what are called the palm narratives, like the Book of Mary's Repose, which is the earliest of these traditions in the East. That one probably goes back to the third century. But notice I said the assumption gets traction within the church in the late 5th century. The Book of Mary's Repose is a Gnostic legend.

This is the first text where you ever have a bodily assumption of Mary. And in this text, there's an angel Christology. Mary calls Christ, the great cherub of light who dwelt in my womb. At another point, the Christ angel figure says, I am the third that was created, and I am not the son. The actual narrative features of this text have all kinds of bizarre and scandalous details, including Joseph rebuking Mary for failing to preserve her virginity, and wondering perhaps whether he had impregnated her while intoxicated. Furthermore, the narrative contains many Gnostic features, such as a Gnostic creation myth. I'll put up Shoemaker's summary so that you can see it's not just me who reads it like that.

This is a scandalous text for us all. It offends all of us. It's not a Christian text. It's not a Trinitarian text. It dishonors Mary. And the whole interest in Mary is not for her virginity or her goodness or anything like that. It's it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's interested in Mary as her role in the possessor of secret knowledge about cosmic mysteries that Christ is the Christ angel has given to her, okay? This is a heterodox text. In fact, it talks about Mary as a sinner too, which is another problem. She talks about one point about her sin.

I've talked about that more. So the point is this. Efforts to try to stretch the assumption back earlier by looking at traditions like this backfire, because the more weight you put on them, the more you make it look like Mary's assumption is a belief that arose first in Gnostic circles and then subsequently came into the church. And that's the same thing could be true, though I wouldn't use the word Gnostic necessarily for the fourth century, late fourth century set of texts called the six-books Dormission Apocryphon. Those are associated with the Cholarydians, who are another heterodox group that Epiphanius

opposes for their excessive devotion to Mary. It just looks, and honestly, a lot of the things he's opposing looked like what would go under the label of Hyperdulia or veneration to Mary today. And he sees it as idolatry. So the earlier you go, the more problematic that becomes. That is why the best of Roman Catholic defenses of the assumption don't use those texts, like the Book of Mary's repose. One of the best recent Roman Catholic defenses of the assumption, for example, cites approvingly this statement that I'll put up that basically the assumption is not

the object of a historical tradition of apostolic origin, but a dogmatic explicitation rooted in the reflection on the whole of Revelation. And he puts it up precisely in the context of saying, no, you can't try to get from, you can't use the Book of Mary's repose in a historical reconstruction because of its heterodox theology. But people try to do this. I remember in my response to William Albrecht, I checked the Wikipedia page on the assumption of Mary, and it had completely changed, significantly changed from there to a week earlier since these discussions were happening, which I thought was kind of interesting. Unfortunately, what people try to do is stretch the data. They try to stretch the evidence to get Mary's assumption back earlier. And let me put up what

Shoemaker says about this because he's very fair. He criticizes those who work from anti-Catholic prejudice, but he also faults this tendency among Roman Catholic apologists sometimes to read modern Mariology back into these early patristic texts. And he says such an approach finds passages from early Christian literature that seem reminiscent of modern Catholic doctrines, and despite the clear absence of such beliefs from early Christian literature when read on its own terms, and the obvious contextual difficulties of these readings, on this basis it is often alleged that the Marian dogmas of modern Catholicism also belong to the early church. These apologetic exercises fail to shed any light on the actual emergence of

Mary and piety. People really misrepresent Shoemaker and the other scholars on this. Honestly, if you just don't take my word for it, don't take someone else's word for it, just get one of these books and read it yourself. And you'll see how much at variance the apologetics world and the scholarly world are at with each other. So, okay, that's a summary of the basic kind of argument. It's basically we're saying this just doesn't look apostolic at all or anywhere within I said 10 generations. I mean, that's a conservative estimate. Honestly, this looks like a late accretion.

Okay. How do people respond to that? One of the responses is people say that this is an argument from silence and therefore it is not conclusive. But from what we've already recounted, we can note that this actually isn't a problem or an argument from silence. We have, it's an argument from silence plus positive, specific, and diverse historical that makes the assumption of Mary very unlikely.

You know, people unsuccessfully inquiring into whether there's any known tradition about Mary's end. Texts that speak about the assumption as a late arrival. References to Mary as currently separated from her body. The diversity of accounts when it does show up. Okay, none of that is silence. And I want to reiterate this point because it's so important. The historical argument against the bodily assumption of Mary is not an argument from

silence. It's an argument from silence combined with other historical points of data that make it very unlikely. Silence is a feature of the argument, but it's not the full argument. Moreover, let me say something about arguments from silence. Arguments from silence can have plausibility value to the extent that you expect the sources in question not to be silent. So let me give a metaphor to prove this point to help people envision this. Suppose that you're driving in your car and on the radio there's a reference to a school shooting. And the radio doesn't specify which school.

So you're worried about your kids. You drive to the school your kids go to. And you walk around campus and just ask people, have you heard anything about a shooting here? Now, if the school has 2,000 students and is on a 10-acre campus and you interview 10 people and none of them have heard of such a thing, this will probably relieve you a little bit. you know, that'll help you a little bit. It would reduce the plausibility to a certain degree. But if the school has only 500 students and is on a three-acre campus,

and you interview 50 different people from different parts of the campus, including several teachers and staff, and none of them have heard of a school shooting happening, your confidence and your relief will be much further. In neither case, is it a logical deduction? You can always say it's logically possible that somehow does nobody heard of it? But the point is that the more you expect particular sources not to be silent about a particular event, the more relevant that is to the plausibility of that event.

Many people recognize that arguments from silence can have some degree of value because they will appeal to the fact that we have no relics for Mary. And that's a form of an argument from silence. Now, I don't think that that is particularly effective because it's not particularly surprising that we don't have any relics from Mary. There's lots of people we have no relics from. We don't have any relics from Joseph either, and that doesn't mean he was assumed to heaven. But the point is we should be consistent in whether or not we allow arguments from silence

to play a role in our thinking. Got to have it both ways. One of the examples that Trent mentioned in his video from a year ago, actually, I think, though I might have come up, I can't remember, is this point that the Exodus in the Old Testament is another historical event that doesn't have external testimony out of scripture. And so the idea here is like, just as a Protestant can accept the testimony of Scripture on the Exodus, a Roman Catholic or an Eastern Orthodox Christian can accept the assumption of Mary without external confirmation on the authority of the church.

But these two events are disanalogous because the Exodus took place 12 or 14 centuries earlier when we have much less historical documentation of any kind. So it's much less surprising that we wouldn't have external confirmation. But in the case of Mary's assumption, it's very surprising because we have not only numerous references to Mary's death, as we've seen people searching for traditions about what happened to her at the end of her life, but we also have numerous lists of the people that are understood to have been assumed bodily to heaven. I'll go through a number of these. When Turtullian is expounding the perfection of the resurrection body, he lists Enoch and Elijah as his example. of those who are translated to heaven. Elsewhere, when he's defending the view that the death, that the debt of sin includes death,

he gives two exceptions to that, Enoch and Elijah. There's two other passages in Tertullian where he's basically discussing Elijah's assumption, the nature of heaven, the nature of the resurrection body, Mary never comes up. When Ironaeus wants to list examples of those who are translated to heaven to prove that God can resurrect our physical bodies, he lists Enoch and Elijah, no mention of Mary. when Methodius wants to defend the resurrection of the body, he distinguishes between those who rose to die again, like Lazarus, and those who were taken up to immortality, like Enoch and Elijah.

Again, no mention of Mary. When origin lists exceptions to the general pattern of death, he mentions Enoch and Elijah, not Mary. When the Apostolic Constitutions, which is a 4th century compilation of texts dealing with church orders, appeals to examples of the power of God, in raising the dead, it mentions Enoch and Elijah. Again, no mention of Mary. When John Chrysostom wants to prove that bodily existence does not make virtue impossible, he appeals to those who do great deeds in the flesh and then are translated to heaven. His examples? Enoch and Elijah, not Mary. When Cyril of Jerusalem

lists examples of those who are not greater than John, despite being bodily raised to heaven, it's Enoch and Elijah, not Mary. Later, he references. Jesus' ascension and references Enoch and Elijah's translation to heaven, as well as Paul's travel to heaven, as well as the story of Habakkuk's translation from Israel to Babylon, which was a myth that some believed. Still, Mary never comes up. When Jerome wants to exposit the nature of the resurrection body, he gives examples. It's Enoch and Elijah, not Mary. When Ambrose wants to list those who are caught up to be alive with Christ, he lists Enoch and Elijah. along with Paul and some apostles, but not Mary.

When Augustine references Faustus' belief that Elijah, Moses, and Enoch were bodily assumed to heaven, it's just those three, and then later he himself references Kylestius' question about the location of Enoch and Elijah, and he rebukes him for asking that. Mary never comes up. So the point is, the church fathers are not silent about listing people who are assumed to heaven. There's plenty of times where you'd expect that somewhere this is going to come up. that it wasn't just Enoch and Elijah, actually the most important person, the most important creature. Mary, the queen of heaven, she also was assumed to heaven. You kind of think that would

come up somewhere. It's just Enoch and Elijah, sometimes Moses, sometimes Paul in 2nd Corinthians 12. Eusebius has another passage where he lists the possible assumption to heaven of an old bishop named Caeraman. Of course, Jesus' ascension to heaven is frequently discussed, yet nowhere do you get any idea of an assumption to Mary. Now, some of these passages you could explain this or that way. You could say maybe the author just chose not to include Mary as an example. It's just choosing Enoch and Elijah. Maybe he's speaking strictly of those assumed to heaven without an intervening death,

and they thought Mary was buried and then assumed. Okay, fine. Maybe they're focused just more on the Old Testament figures. Trent mentioned some of these possible explanations. He mentioned Clement and Methodius and several others. Okay, maybe that can work for some of these texts, but for all of them? If Mary is as important in the early church

as she is in Roman Catholic theology and in the theology of other churches as well, is it really plausible that she would be bodily assumed to heaven and it would simply never be mentioned in Turtallion, Ireneus, Methodius, Origin, the apostolic constitutions, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Cyril of Jerusalem, etc. When they're literally telling you,

here is the people who were bodily assumed to heaven, and they don't include her. So that's the way the argument from silence works. It's not conclusive, but what you do is you take that argument from silence, which is suggestive, and then you stack on top of it five things. Number one, all the references to Mary's death early on, none of which indicate anything out of the ordinary, and several of which reference her as having left her body. That's not silence. Number two, stack on top of that the testimony of Epiphanius and others like Isidore of Seville concerning the ultimate uncertainty of her end despite careful investigation into the matter. That's not silence.

Number three, you stack on top of that the diversity of the counts when they do show up. Number four, the acknowledgments of its late arrival. And number five, the fact that it seems to originate in heterodox contexts like the book of Mary's repose. and what happens is the combination of the deafening silence on the one hand, plus all of these other suggestive features ultimately yield that I would say Eam and Duffy was right. The best synthesis of the data is simply to yield to plausibility,

yield to what truth seems to be, that the assumption of Mary was unknown in the early church. All right, a second defense is people will accuse me of inconsistency, and they'll say, ah, you reject the assumption because it's a late accretion, but you don't reject this other Protestant doctrine that's also a late accretion, so you're being inconsistent. And I've heard people say this about the canon of Scripture, for example, other Protestant doctrines. And so people say we're cherry-picking, sometimes even that we're being disingenuous. By the way, calling someone

disingenuous is a serious charge. The word refers to a form of dishonesty and lack of sincerity. I am not disingenuous. I am sincere before God in my Protestant convictions. And we should avoid calling people disingenuous unless you have a clear reason to know that they are. And I say the same thing when I see Protestants doing that to Roman Catholics as well. That's a serious thing to say. We shouldn't say it unless we have really good reasons to think so. Because in the painfulness of ideological clash, it will often appear that someone might be being disingenuous when they're actually not. We need to know that. But anyway, here's why the charge of inconsistency is false. There are relevant differences between Mary's assumption and the various Protestant beliefs in question.

In the first place, a lot of times the doctrines that are mentioned simply do have early testimony in scripture and church history. So, for example, people will say, oh, well, you know, they'll say this about Sola Fide and Sola Scripura, but I just don't think those are in any way like the assumption of Mary. Number one, they're not historical events, their ideas. Number two, they are attested in both Scripture and the early church. When I argue for Sola Fide, I'm arguing not just from Romans 4 or 5, I'm arguing for John Chrysostom's homilies on Romans 4 or 5 and other relevant passages. When I argue for Sola Scriptura, I argue not just from 2nd Peter 121,

I argue from St. Augustine and so on and so forth. Even if you say that's a wrong interpretation here or there, that's still not analogous to the assumption of Mary, which she says no support. Second, many of the Protestant doctrines put forth here are not obligatory for Protestants as Mary's assumption is obligatory for Roman Catholics. So one of the examples that Trent will talk about, and he made a video about this, is eternal security. But that issue is not representative of Protestantism or obligatory for Protestants.

Mary's assumption is representative of Roman Catholicism and obligatory. on Roman Catholics, so they're disanalogous. But the third point is this. The third reason is not inconsistent. Mary's assumption is allegedly a historical event. It's not an idea that can develop or something in the process of discernment, you know. It's something that allegedly happened on a particular day

and a particular location, and according to the traditions, was witnessed by the apostles and was known by people. So that makes it different from something like the canon of scripture The canon of Scripture is not a one-time event. It's a process that transpires that begins all the way back while the Scripture is still being written. For example, Peter references Paul's writings as Scripture, and Paul references the Gospel of Luke as Scripture. And from the earliest of times, Christians are consistently speaking of certain New Testament books as Scripture.

All that happens is it takes time to finalize the boundaries, the fuzzy edges. You've got to figure that out, and that's not surprising that that would take time. But Mary's assumption, by contrast, is an alleged historical event. So it is surprising. 400 years goes by, and there's no one who's ever heard of it. A more relevant point of comparison would be the resurrection of Christ, because that's another historical event. Just imagine if we had to defend the resurrection of Christ in the way that with the evidence we have for the assumption of Mary. These are two issues that you could almost see at the opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of historical plausibility.

With the resurrection of Christ, we have multiple independent points of attestation within decades of the event in question. And we've got all kinds of other reasons to accept the Apostle's testimony about what they had personally seen, like their willingness to die for it and so many other things. With the assumption, we have hundreds of years of non-attestation, consistent statements that no one knew about it, and then diversity and contradiction when it does show up. It's almost like two different case studies in a good argument from history and a bad argument from history. So the point is there's no inconsistency in receiving the finalization of the canon, which took place over time but began right away,

and on the other hand, rejecting a historical event that has no attestation for 400 years within the church. That's not cherry-picking, that's just critical thinking about how to make distinctions. I think sometimes the reason people criticize Protestants for cherry-picking is that they assume we're operating with the same paradigm when we engage church history. So, you know, we hear them saying, you know, Augustine was a Roman Catholic, this kind of way of thinking. And then when we make an internal critique of that way of thinking, showing that that is superficial because it overlooks the change from Augustine's Day

to the contemporary Roman Catholic Church, they assume that what we're saying is, oh, well, then you must be saying, that Augustine was a Protestant. But that's not what we mean. It'd be like if one of your friends says the founding fathers of America were all deists, every last one of them. And they're a very triumphant deist themselves. And you say, that's not true. John Jay was not a deist. He was a Christian, as one example. And then they say, ah, you're cherry picking. You see, you're not cherry picking. You're just trying to be accurate about the diversity. And so it is with how we think about the church fathers, we can acknowledge that they didn't all agree on everything. They didn't agree with

each other, and they talked about that. Okay, third, these last several will be faster. This is a long video already. Like I said, it's too important not to give it an honest look. All right. Epiphanius. Some people say Epiphanius did affirm the assumption of Mary. Now, even if he did, that only moves the needle back about 80 years. But if you just read the entire statement people are talking about, I think this is seen to be a problematic reading. Now, to be fair, I should note that I am departing from Shoemaker on this point, because he does see a possible reference to Mary's assumption in this passage. But let me put it up and explain why I don't think that works. In the chapter immediately after what I just quoted, Epiphanius is opposing the Coloridian's

idolatrous excess in their devotion to Mary. And I'll put up this emboldened statement. Hopefully it'll be emboldened in what you see. And he basically, he compares Mary to three figures, John, Elijah, and Thetla, or some. I've heard some people say Tecla, but I think it's Thetla. She was an early saint and a follower of Paul. And what people do is they just read the relative clause pertaining to Elijah and apply that to Mary, but not that of John. Okay? we can no more insist that Mary was taken up like Elijah than that she leaned on the Lord's breasts like John. These relative clauses, that means starting with the word who, are simply describing and illustrating the godliness of each particular figure they're talking about.

You can't put it back to Mary, who's not the object of the word who. It's talking about Elijah there. And so, you know, in other words, the common thread between the three figures is godliness and then it's giving examples of their superlative godliness. Let me give a comparable example. Here's a sentence like this. George W. Bush was a president who served with honor. By the way, I probably shouldn't use examples that have to do with politics. I'm not trying to say anything about politics. It's just purely for the grammar of it. Okay. Who served with honor just like his father who presided over the final years of the Cold War and Ronald Reagan, who oversaw a resilient economy, and Jimmy Carter who fought for disease prevention and human rights above.

abroad. Okay. Now, you see the relative clauses are each describing the particular figure. The point of comparison is serving with honor. The relative clause illustrates how each person has done so, just like it's John who leaned on the Lord's breast, is one example. And so no one could insist from this sentence that George W. Bush must have presided over the final years of the Cold War, especially when they don't interpret the subsequent to relative clauses that way. If Epiphanius had intended in this sentence to convey that Mary was assumed to heaven, he surely has chosen the most cryptic, imaginable way to do it by smuggling it into this relative clause that's directly describing Elijah. Remember that it's just the previous chapter that he told us no one knows her end. So I think efforts to see the assumption

here reflect the dogmatic need, not a fair-minded interest in what Epiphanius meant. Now I'll talk more about Epiphanius on other matters in my book. All right, four, but I don't keep moving. Finish off. these last four are quick, or last three are quick. Number four, Revelation 12. People want to see the assumption of Mary in here in this vision of a woman in heaven. There are two problems with this, however. Number one is that the woman in Revelation 12 is not Mary, and number two is she is not assumed to heaven. So first, the description of the woman here is drawing from Old Testament imagery used to describe God's people, especially the faithful people under persecution, sometimes the faithful remnant. This is a common image throughout the Old Testament for God's people. A woman in

the travail of labor pains. That's what you see in Revelation 12, 2, and you see that in many Old Testament passages, for example. Jeremiah 431, Isaiah 2617, Micah 410. I give some examples like that in my book. I'll put them up here. And then specifically, the sun, moon, and 12 stars, which you see in Revelation 12.1 is a recollection of Genesis 379, where Joseph's brothers, who became the 12 tribes of Israel are depicted as Sanmunon 11 stars bowing down to him. Similarly, the sweeping away of stars in Revelation 124 is drawing from Daniel 810, where it describes persecution of God's people. The woman's flight into the wilderness in Revelation 126 is for 1, 260 days.

That is the exact same amount of time as the persecution described in Revelation 11, 1 through 3. and that probably corresponds to the time, times, and half a time in Revelation 124, which is the same time frame for persecution of God's people in Daniel 725 and 12 7-7-12. If you miss, there's a lot of details. Okay. If you missed the point here, the big picture is, this is not Mary, it's the church. It's the faithful people of God under persecution. If you interpret this imagery consistently with the rest of Scripture.

That is why the assumption of Mary, the idea that this is talking about Mary, the idea that Mary is the woman, has no precedent in the church, until people start to wonder about Mary's ultimate fate. As Shoemaker puts it, although this exegesis would subsequently become quite popular and has endured even to this day, there is no evidence of its existence before Epiphanius. On the contrary, the early church unanimously identified this apocalyptic woman with the church. Now, what people want to say is, oh, yeah, yeah, it can be Mary and the church. But what I'm saying is no one interpreted it that way. No one said it was both. Everybody said it was the church rather than Mary until you start to get more reflection about Mary's final end in this world.

Quite a coincidence, right? By the way, after the rise of belief in the assumption of Mary, still many people didn't see this in Revelation 12. I forgot to bring the book, but you can read through Andrew of Crete's Dormition homily in the 8th century, where he says none of the sacred writers, as far as we know, wrote about the immaculate supernatural passing of the mother of God or left us any account of it at all. Furthermore, even if Revelation 12 was about Mary, it simply says nothing about a bodily assumption. The woman is seen in heaven in verse 1 prior to all of the events of the chapter,

prior to the birth of the Messiah in verse 5, prior to her flight from the dragon in verse 14, prior to her stay in the wilderness for 1, 260 days in verse 6, prior to the persecution of her other children in verse 17. All of that is subsequent to the initial vision of her in heaven. So the idea that Mary was bodily assumed to heaven at the end of her life after these events happened is completely foreign to the passage. You have to kind of read that into the text. Okay, fifth defense I see is, but the assumption eventually became universal in the church. In fact, sometimes we'll say it quickly became universal. So people will say, yeah, you don't see it early on, or maybe they'll acknowledge some of the problems, but then they'll say, but it very quickly became accepted everywhere, and God wouldn't allow his church to fall into that kind of error.

Now, I have two responses to that. One is to simply point out, not everything that becomes accepted in the church or becomes mainstream is true. and the same argument could be made to support the damnation of unbaptized babies, which, to my awareness, was universal between Augustine and the Reformation. The only qualification is the idea of limbo, which mitigates the punishment, but nobody that I can find anywhere between Augustine and the Reformation for over a thousand years thinks that deceased infants who were not baptized get the beatific vision. So, in other words, it's simply undeniable, and that's just one example of others we can give.

simply undeniable that on particular points of doctrine, sometimes errors do become mainstream. And to say that, you know, if something becomes accepted, therefore it must be true, this is the kind of argument that could be made by Ahab against Elijah or something like this. That's just not a good criterion for testing the truth. Jesus never promised that church will not make errors. Matthew 16 does not say, I will build my church and no errors will ever enter into her. The promise is more specific than that. It's for indefectibility.

It says, I will build my church, the gates of hell will not prevail against her. And I did a video on that. It's talking about the church not dying. It doesn't mean every particular point of doctrine that comes to be settled and the church will always be right. We just don't have a promise for that. But secondly, what I want to observe in this video is how long it took for the assumption to become settled.

Because if people are saying, oh yeah, well, you don't have it early, but then you see it everywhere, that is actually not true. For example, the Roman Catholic scholar Michael O'Carroll has a study where he shows how much uncertainty there was about the bodily assumption of Mary throughout the medieval era. In the 7th and 8th centuries, among figures like Adamnon of Iona and Bede, there's uncertainty about the doctrine, and then you can see the effects of this. And then in the 9th century, Pascasius Redbirdus is another one who basically, according to O'Carroll, he declared that nothing was certain about the end of the century.

the Virgin's life save that she left the body. And I've confirmed that by looking at his sermons because Red Bertus describes Mary's end as an assumption of the soul only. Okay. So the point is you've got these major, like, Beed and Pescasius Radbertus, these are significant people who have an influence upon the subsequent centuries. And so there's, and there's other examples of this. In Spain, Walter Burkart talks about how the assumption was rejected by many people in the 8th century. Brian Daly talks about a wave of reaction against it in the 10th century. O'Carroll talks about the influence of Red Burdus and basically says this arrested development of thought on the assumption for two and a half centuries. And so he's pointing out, but part of the

reason for that is Red Burdice, surely unintentionally, used a letter falsely attributed to Jerome, which expressed uncertainty about Mary's assumption. And so you can see the influence of pseudo-Gerome for a long time in the medieval church. And O'Carroll gives examples of this in the 10th and 11th century, an Alphric of Ainsham's rejection of the assumption, and then in the 12th century, and a number of figures who profess ignorance about the assumption. He gives examples, including Isaac of Stella,

Peter of Sel, and Alred of Ravaux. So basically, the point is, it's not settled. You've got plenty of people who, you know, the idea that it's universal is not true. over a millennium from when Mary actually lived, it still is unsettled and questioned. And a lot of people are saying, I don't know. Okay. Last defense is people say, but why would all of the apostolic churches agree on this if it isn't true?

It's not just a Roman Catholic idea. It's in the Eastern Orthodox Church. It's in Oriental Orthodox and others, Anglo Catholic and so forth. And basically what I would say is I don't like using the term apostolic. describe like that, but that's a separate point. But the simple answer is that formal rupture doesn't preclude common belief and common development. The Eastern Orthodox Church and the Oriental Orthodox Church are alike in almost every possible way, except for a few very slight differences. Even the original split in the 5th century about Christology, there's arguably

been a lot of progress on that. It's more terminological than substantive. So if they're alike in every way, why would we expect that there would be a difference on this point? Here's a metaphor for this. Suppose that in the year 2030, the state of California split up into three distinct states, Southern California, Central California, Northern California. 70 years later, in the year 2001, a sociologist conducts a study of the culture and politics and language of these three states. and he's just amazed at how many commonalities they are, and he can't explain how this could come about.

Well, the proper response to that is to say, of course they're similar. Shared culture is exactly what you would expect, given the shared history and the geographical proximity. A formal or institutional rupture doesn't preclude common belief. In the same way, there are common beliefs in the Protestant traditions that have no formal connection to each other. You know, you look at the charismatic movement. And on this side of the globe and on that side of the globe, astonishing similarity of doctrine, even though they have no formal connection. But that doesn't mean that the similarities are true.

The better criterion for truth is simply to go back to the apostolic message and say, what did the apostles preach? Did they have any notion of Mary as assumed to heaven? To conclude by making some of the larger implications of this issue, how it ripples out, Ultimately, the assumption of Mary comes back to the question of authority. This is what debate in this topic always seems to terminate in. People want to say, whatever the problems are, they say Jesus established a church that has the authority to define a dogma like the assumption, and that's what it falls back upon.

The problem is that this is just not the kind of religion that Christianity is. Christianity is a revealed religion. we are accountable to the period of revelation. Think of Paul in Galatians 1-8. He says, even if the angels say something, it has to be tested by what God is revealed in the apostolic age. And in principle, the Roman Catholic Church agrees that the era of public revelation has ceased with the apostles, and that, therefore, we now await no further new public revelation. Vatican II defined the role of the Magisterium as expositing,

the apostolic deposit, not adding onto it. So you have sacred scripture, sacred tradition, together constituting the Word of God, and then the Magisterium is in the role of interpreting the Word of God. But what the assumption of Mary shows is that in actual practice on the street level, the Magisterium isn't just interpreting the apostolic deposit. There's just nothing there to even interpret in relation to it. Rather, unfortunately, we need to say it is adding on to the Word of God. unfortunately it has the effect of changing Christianity by stipulating additional requirements on top of the gospel that the apostles had no imagination would ever come about and shackling the consciences of Christians to those accretions that is the concern here's how the protestant historian philip shaft put it he said the

the whole tendency of the roman catholic church has for its object to subordinate the bible to tradition and then make itself the infallible judge of both with power to determine at pleasure what is God's word and the doctrine of the church and to anathematize everything that may go beyond its past decisions. And what Shaft was arguing is that this is a deal breaker for Catholicity or for embracing the wholeness of the church because doing this blocks off communion with all Christian traditions that descend from her pronouncements. And it also removes the possibility of any meaningful internal reform of prior magisterial teaching. And there are similar concerns with some of the Eastern traditions

that also require assent to the assumption of Mary. What I would say to people, oh, not to just cause pain for the sake of causing pain, but we've got to face the facts. We've got to face the truth. And what I would say, the appeal that I would make is to advise you to consider embracing a Protestant understanding of the church, according to which she must always see her own pronouncements as subordinate under the Word of God

and reformable in light of it. That view avoids yoking the conscience to that which is not found in the apostolic deposit. It also results in fewer anathemas to other Christians. So for example, we can recognize true Christians among those who affirm the assumption of Mary, even while following our own conscience by not adhering to it. A Protestant position, therefore, better fulfills the obligations of both truth and love. Okay, whew, made it to the end. If you watch to the end, let me know in the comments, and I will heart your comment. If there's video responses, I may not be able to respond to them all. I'll try to do watch them. I haven't even watched all the responses still to some earlier videos, but I'll try to keep up

with them as best I can. Maybe other Protestants can enter in and also kind of enter into the fray and engage some of these discussions as well. May this video, thank you for watching, and may Christ be honored in the way we search for the truth on this topic, because the truth about this is too important not to give it an honest review, and that's the intent of this video. So thank you all for watching. May the Lord bless you.