Tradition of the Virgin’s Tomb
It is the contention
of Jugie that the existence of a tomb of the Virgin in Jerusalem or its
environs was utterly unknown before 570. To begin with, he rejects as legendary
the narrative in the Euthymiaca historia that the sovereigns of
Byzantium, Marcian and Pulcheria, desirous of having the body of Mary for a
church of the Virgin in Constantinople, addressed themselves to the Patriarch
Juvenal in the royal city for the Council of Chalcedon (451): “We hear that in
Jerusalem is the first and remarkable church of the all-holy Mother of God,
Mary ever virgin, in the place called Gethsemane, where the body that brought
life was buried in a coffin. We want to have her remains brought here for the
protection of the imperial city.” In reply, Juvenal relates what he has leaned
about Mary’s passing “from an ancient and utterly unerring tradition.” This
includes hear death, her burial in Gethsemane, and the discovery after three
days of a coffin empty save for burial shrouds. Thereupon Marcian and Pulcheria
ask Juvenal for the coffin and garments, and place them in the Church of the
Mother of God in the Blachernae quarter of Constantinople.
To support his thesis,
Jugie adduces (a) the positive affirmations of Epiphanius and Timothy of
Jerusalem; (b) the significant silence of pilgrims like Etheria and
Eucherius, Jerome and Paula and Eustochium, even Leo the Great; and (c)
testimonies, from the second half of the fifth century to the middle of the
sixth and beyond, which speak of a house of Mary in Gethsemane, of a church in
her honor there, but say nothing of a tomb. Jugie claims that the original tradition
of Jerusalem simply put the house of the Lady in Gethsemane; that and
naught besides. In the last years of the sixth century, or at the beginning of
the seventh, Mary’s house was located a half-hour from Gethsemane, on Sion, even
in the Cenacle where Christ had celebrated the Last Supper and the Holy Spirit
had descended upon the Apostles; from then on, Gethsemane and the Valley of
Josaphat enclosed the tomb which had received her virginal body. The reason
for the topographical change Jugie finds in the apocrypha: their need of a
sufficient distance between the death-place and burial-ground to permit the
episode of the hostile intervention of the Jews and the incident of the Jew
Jephonias. Sion was chosen because of the solemn mysteries that had been enacted
therein; the Valley of Josaphat, because it was “the valley of judgement,”
where God was to judge all peoples till the end of time; more precisely
Gethsemane, because it had been immortalized by the Saviour’s agony.
Other scholars disagree
radically. They suggest that, in view of the temperate narrative and the
similarity to Epiphanius’ approach, the Juvenal may well be substantially
historical; that there is strong support for the affirmation therein that the
church is erected at Gethsemane between the Council of Ephesus and the Council
of Chalcedon contained as a sacred memorial the sepulchre of Mary. They insist
that Epiphanius, though uncertain of Mary’s death, is completely intelligible only
if he knew of a Jerusalem tradition that Mary died and was buried. They
recall that the paragraph from Timothy of Jerusalem may well not come from
Jerusalem at all or even from the fourth century; that it does not necessarily
deny Mary’s death; that, in any case, Timothy’s testimony does not itself
constitute a tradition. They remind us that the argument from silence is
significant only if the writers in question ought to have spoken. In the
instance of Etheria, not only are we confronted with a considerable lacuna in
the MS precisely where the good Spanish pilgrim might have spoken of a
Jerusalem grave. Where she speaks of the Jerusalem liturgy, she mentions
only the sacred sites connected with that liturgy; and so she does not mention a
sanctuary of the dormition, because at that time (393-396) a sanctuary
did not exist. Eucherius, writing about the middle of the fifth century, does
not pretend to offer a complete description of the Holy Places; and the same
should be said of Jerome, of Paula and Eustochium, of Leo’s letter to Juvenal.
These scholars are
confessedly swayed by the testimony of the Breviarius de Hierosolyma and
Ps.-Placentinus. They are affected by their unanimity with which the apocryphal
accounts locate the death of Mary in Jerusalem. And they are much impressed by
the verdict of the archaeologist H. Vincent that history and archaeology are in
harmony in dating the construction of the Church of the Sepulchre of the Virgin
between 450 and 460.
Was there a tradition
before 431 which localized the grave of God’s mother? It would seem a defensible
inference from the existence of the shrine; but we are not justified in
asserting it apodictically. I am drawn to Gordillo’s modest affirmation that “before
the middle of the fifth century, when the public cult of the Virgin Mother of
God began, the faithful of Jerusalem visited the grave of holy Mary in Gethsemane;
and this grave confirmed them in their belief that our Lady died . . . The
silent testimony was the more convincing because in the bosom of the Church of
Jerusalem no voice had been raised to deny the death of God’s mother.”
As warmly, if not as
widely debated is Ephesus’ claim to Mary’s tomb. Here the cruces of evidence
and interpretation are two: the date of the Evangelist John’s departure for
Asia, and a letter from the Fathers of Ephesus (431) to the clergy and faithful
of Constantinople (131). On the first of these issues, only conjecture is possible.
Some scholars, for example, are persuaded that John did not leave Palestine for
Asia until a rather late date, even as late as the Jewish War (66-70); by that
time Mary was surely dead, and so she never saw Ephesus. Others see no good
reason for prolonging John’s sojourn in Palestine to advanced age; they find a
late and relatively brief apostolate in Asia irreconcilable with his Asian
fame; they prefer Tillemont’s dual hypothesis: a lengthy residence in Ephesus beginning
about 66, and an earlier visit when John would have brought Mary there; and
there she died.
The evidence of the
Ephesus letter is more tangible. The pertinent sentence remarks that Nestorious
had arrived earlier than others in Ephesus, entha ho theologos Iōannēs kai hē
theotokos Parthenos hē hagia Maria. The problem, paradoxically enough, does
not lie with the absence of a verb. The omission, if deliberate (and there is
no cause to suspect otherwise), is acceptable Greek; we simply some form of the
verb “to be.” The problem is the meaning of “John” and “Mary.” One interpretation
insists that the clause has no reference to a sojourn or dormition or relics of
John and Mary in Ephesus; it designates simply the principal church of Ephesus
b the names of its titular patrons. Others retort that the Council never speaks
of churches in precisely that way; they observe that the church of the Council
was simply the Church of St. Mary—the Church of St. John was distinct, though
attached; they argue that the natural sense of the clause calls for the
presence of John and Mary in Ephesus. It is certain, they say, that the Apostle
lived and died there; the same is therefore affirmed of the Virgin.
The evidence for
Ephesus is meagre, vague, equivocal. It does not justify a confident affirmation,
though it may permit a temperate conjecture, that before 431 a tradition
existed which localized the grave of our Lady in Ephesus. (Walter J. Burghardt,
The Testimony of the Patristic Age Concerning Mary's Death [Woodstock
Papers No. 2; Westminster, Md.: The Newman Press, 1957], 35-39)
