Jonathan Kieran

Much mystery and “assumption” (pun intended) has surrounded the final fate of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Legends abounded in ancient times regarding almost all of the main characters in the Gospel stories—even though the canonical accounts preserve almost none of the details about any of their demises.

Some of the deaths of these major players were pretty significant, too. Peter, for example, was supposedly crucified in Rome and the great basilica of St. Peter’s was (and still is) built over the traditional site of his grave in the 4th Century—a site that had housed a makeshift shrine or marker in the Vatican region of the city since the 2nd Century. Even skeptical archaeologists admit this, often begrudgingly.

The rise of the immense bulwark and bastion of the billion-member Roman Catholic Church is a pretty heavy-duty reality with a staggering impact upon the human race (and even the Bible books that same church helped canonize!). Yet, there was no mention of Peter’s demise in the sacred books as-written, even though the event would have been of tremendous importance to Christian communities across the Mediterranean. And Christians everywhere, even in the earliest times, knew about what happened to Peter; they simply didn’t tote around Bibles (which did not exist as we know them today) and frankly didn’t care all that much about the very recent fundamentalistic notion that nothing of Christian significance ever happened or existed outside of a few slim biographical collections.

Indeed, just because some event was not recorded in one of the Gospel books does not mean no great and momentous events ever occurred outside those limited accounts. The Fall of Jerusalem is not recorded in the Gospels. The eruption of Pompeii’s Vesuvius. The Apostle Paul’s beheading in Rome is not mentioned. The harrowing murder of Jesus’s fellow Davidic kinsman, James. Zilch. Zilch. Zilch.

The same goes for the end of the most important woman in the early Christian movement: Mary, the mother of Jesus. Nothing overt about her final fate (but cf. Revelation chapter 12) is ever recorded in the brief Gospel accounts. But that doesn’t mean there did not exist some very distinct traditions in her regard from a surprisingly early period. The traditions about her death and destiny, however, differed markedly from those of other impressive figures of the most ancient Jesus Movement.

For one thing, the earliest written traditional accounts (dating, quite probably, from the 2nd Century) note that Mary, like other members of the new Jerusalem movement, had experienced persecution of some form or another by religious authorities still displeased with her son and, toward the end of her life, as death approached sometime before the Sacking of Jerusalem, she was buried in a secret place in the wilderness outside the city proper by at least some of the disciples … only to have her physical remains go missing—removed miraculously from the world.

No alternative stories about her “end” ever gained traction and by the early 4th Century it appears that most people in Palestine and even as far away as Rome had come to accept this mysterious conclusion of her life as a general, if unofficial, belief. The fact that no other wild or fanciful “apocryphal” tales of her demise seem to have ever been composed in the face of a complete lack of knowledge regarding the subject may point to the fact that there was indeed a general, widespread early belief about her “death and removal from earth” from a notably early point.

One rather late addition to the tradition, however, appears in the form of Mary’s “house” in the city of Ephesus, but this seems to be a derivative of a later conviction that Mary spent time with the Apostle John in that city, since she had been presented to him as “Mother” by Christ himself from the cross (John 19:25-27), ostensibly as an indication that Mary, like Eve of old, was to be considered the spiritual mother of a “newborn race.” The tradition of Mary’s house in Ephesus was also bolstered by the fact that ritual veneration of Jesus’s mother was particularly strong in that city since at least the late 4th Century and likely earlier.

Whatever the case, Mary’s supposed tomb has been venerated just outside Jerusalem since at least the early 4th Century, with an official church finally built on top of it in the 5th Century by Bishop Juvenal and the exiled Empress Eudoxia. Whether the tomb is authentic or not is beside the point: it testifies to a very ancient local tradition that managed to survive the successive sackings and ruinations of the so-called Holy City beginning in 70 CE and proceeding through the next few centuries.

Take that, Ephesus. You may have the house, but you ain’t got the grave.

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