Lawrence Everett, quoting another Mariologist, Juniper Carol, admitted to the paucity of meaningful evidence from “apostolic tradition” (both written and oral) to the Bodily Assumption:
The absence of an uninterrupted chain of explicit testimonies linking our times with the Apostolic period was used by some Catholic theologians previous to the definition of Pope Pius XII as well by non-Catholic critics as an argument against the doctrine of the Assumption or its definability. Against these we quote the words of the eminent Mariology, Father Juniper Carol, O.F.M, written previous to the definition: "In order to establish the continuity of a given doctrine throughout the ages it is not necessary that we possess an uninterrupted chain of explicit testimonies linking our times with the apostolic period. The reason for this is quite obvious. Since the custody and infallible interpretation of the deposit of faith has been entrusted by God to a living organism which is the Church, and since the Church of today is the same moral person it was in the first or second century, it follows logically that whatever the Church of today holds and teaches as pertaining to the original deposit of revelation was also held and taught (at least implicitly) by the Church of the first centuries. Either we accept this as an incontrovertible principle or we will be confronted with very serious difficulties trying to reconcile the act that the deposit of revelation was closed at the death of the last Apostle with the fact that the Church has defined as divinely revealed certain truths which were not always explicitly believed, such as the Immaculate Conception, to cite but one example. (The Definability of Mary's Assumption, in The American Ecclesiastical Review, Vol. 118, 1948, pp. 164-65) (Lawrence P. Everett, “Mary’s Death and Bodily Assumption” in Juniper Carol, ed. Mariology: Volume II [Mediatrix Press, 2018],514-47, here, p. 539)
One has to appreciate the intellectual honesty and integrity of Everett and Carol on this point, though it is astonishing that Carol would appeal to the authenticity of such beliefs by assuming (pun unintended) that Roman Catholicism of the mid-20th century is the same church of the first and second centuries (in other words, Rome is the true Church, ipso facto the Immaculate Conception [defined in 1854] and Bodily Assumption [defined in 1950] are apostolic traditions). One should remember this when they encounter a Roman Catholic apologist who argues that the evidence from early Christianity for the Marian doctrines and dogmas are impressive (they are not).
For a book-length discussion of Mariology, including two chapters on the Immaculate Conception and one on the Bodily Assumption, see my work:
