Thursday, July 27, 2023

Muna Tatari and Klaus von Stosch: The Earliest Understanding of Mary as the New Eve was not In Favor of the Immaculate Conception

  

Mary as the New Eve

 

The veneration of Mary as the new Eve begins even in the Protoevangelium of James, though this motif is subsequently expanded upon by such early Christian writers as Justin Martyr, and later Irenaeus of Lyons and finally Jerome in the West and Gregory of Nyssa in the East. This interpretative tradition lives on in Catholic theology to the present day. Gisbert Geshake, for example, talks about Mary as the new Eve: ‘In the same way that Christ through his life and death made good the misdeeds of Adam, so Mary rehabilitated the misdeeds of Eve through her obedience.’ This Adam-Christ typology, which was first posited by Paul, is thus supplemented with an Eve-Mary typology—with all the ramifications that this entails, even for the doctrine of salvation (soteriology). . . . In the Christian tradition, there are two different ways of understanding the Eve-Mary typology. The first more dynamic construction proceeds from the assumption that although Mary is affected to begin with by the consequences of the fall of man and therefore suffers from original sin, she later frees herself from its grip by giving birth to Jesus. In this line of thought, which represents the mainstream of the Syriac tradition, the typical Christocentricity of the biblical viewpoint is preserved. This is the construction that is clearly preferred by Ephrem the Syrian and Jacob of Serugh. The second, more static reading conceives of Mary as the new Eve, who is spared all along from the consequences of the fall. This understanding is nowhere to be found among the earliest Church Fathers, nor have we been able to verify that it appears anywhere in Syriac tradition. In the final analysis, both viewpoints led to a blossoming of Marian veneration and to a more intense dedication to the figure of Mary. (Muna Tatari and Klaus von Stosch, Mary in the Qur’an: Friend of God, Virgin, Mother [trans. Peter Lewis; London: Gingko, 2021], 42-43)