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Ascension of Christ or Ascension of Mary?: Reconsidering a Popular Early Iconography
Abstract
This essay argues that an early Christian iconography that art historians today typically identify as the “Ascension of Christ” was instead originally understood as a scene from the Six Books Dormition narrative about the ascension of Mary. This art depicts Jesus inside a sphere in the sky above his arms-raised mother, who is herself usually flanked by twelve apostles, including Paul. Subsequent changes to both the Dormition text and the iconography resulted in the loss of this scene from Christian memory, but two ascension scenes carved on the early fifth-century doors of S. Sabina Basilica in Rome support the argument.
... 54 I use a fourth-century gold glass plate from the catacombs, which depicts Jesus between Peter and Paul, to make a cartoon of Paul asking that question, and show the absurd humor in it when Jesus himself has long hair. See as the velata because of her long head covering, as seen in Figure 12. 58 The arms-raised pose was commonly used for the many female figures portrayed in early catacomb art, but this pose did not necessarily mean that the woman would be seen with a head covering. For example, an arms-raised woman flanked by sheep on a third-century Christian sarcophagus from Gaul was portrayed bare headed, as seen in Figure 13 The context of 1 Cor 11:3-16 further suggests that Paul intended the passage to support the leadership of women at the meal. ...
Jesus as androgynous, hermaphrodite, intersex, i.e., both male and female, in early Christ communities, focusing on the implications for early Christian gender roles.
Recent studies have demonstrated that from Late Antiquity up through the early modern era, some artists portrayed Jesus’s mother Mary as a priest, including depicting her with insignia such as the Eucharistic handkerchief and the episcopal pallium. In fact, surviving art indicates that Mary was portrayed with liturgical insignia as early, or earlier, than any male leader. Contextualizing why artists portrayed Mary in this fashion, some gospel writers paralleled Mary and Abraham as the cultic founders of their religion, and other authors represented Mary as a bishop of bishops, or high priest. Censorship, both ancient and modern, appears to explain why Mary is rarely remembered this way today.
These new Syriac fragments (BL syr. Add. 17,137 and Schøyen MS 579) offer early witnesses to the apocryphal traditions of the Virgin Mary's Dormition and Assumption. Both are important for the evidence they provide for the circulation of these apocrypha in the fifth and sixth centuries, for the "Six Books" apocryphon in the case of the Schøyen fragments, and for the Obsequies of the Virgin in the case of the British Library fragment. The British Library fragment is especially important inasmuch as it confirms the presence of certain elements in the earliest version of this Dormition apocryphon. In fact, the British Library fragment would appear to present one of the earliest witnesses to belief in Marian intercession. The Schøyen fragments, for their part, offer further evidence for the circulation and redactional diversity of the "Six Books" apocryphon now in several late ancient Syriac manuscripts. This article presents editions and translations of these two fragments.
The ancient Dormition and Assumption traditions, a remarkably diverse collection of narratives recounting the end of the Virgin Mary's life, first emerge into historical view from an uncertain past during the fifth and sixth centuries. Initially appearing in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, these legends spread rapidly throughout the Christian world, resulting in over 60 different narratives from before the tenth century preserved in nine ancient languages. This study presents a detailed analysis of the earliest traditions of Mary's death, including the evidence of the earliest Marian liturgical traditions and related archaeological evidence as well as the numerous narrative sources. Most of the early narratives belong to one of several distinctive literary families, whose members bear evidence of close textual relations. Many previous scholars have attempted to arrange the different narrative types in a developmental typology, according to which the story of Mary's death was transformed to reflect various developments in early Christian Mariology. Nevertheless, evidence to support these theories is wanting, and the present state of our knowledge suggests that the narrative diversity of the early Dormition traditions arose from several independent 'origins' rather than through ordered evolution from a single original type. Likewise, scholars have often asserted a connection between the origin of the Dormition traditions and resistance to the council of Chalcedon, but the traditions themselves make this an extremely unlikely proposal. While most of the traditions cannot be dated much before the fifth century, a few of the narratives were almost certainly in composed by the third century, if not even earlier. These narratives in particular bear evidence of contact with gnostic Christianity. Several of the most important narratives are translated in appendices, most appearing in English for the first time.
In 1902, British Syriac scholar Agnes Smith Lewis published the oldest Dormition manuscript, a narrative about the death of Jesus's mother. Its fifth-century text described scenes where Mary exorcised, healed, sealed, sprinkled water, preached, and led the apostles in prayer. Later copyists, however, independently redacted these heterodox markers of Mary's ecclesial authority, and Dormition homilists went further, adding orthodox markers of female respectability to their texts. Supplementing the traditions about female priesthood in the Dormition narrative, other early Christian writings about Mary the mother, or a female protagonist named just “Mary,” contain literary artifacts indicating that their authors believed she had been a Eucharistic priest. The heterodox nature of these writings suggests their composition belongs to the second century at the latest, along with the Protevangelium and the Gospel of Mary. As such, they may contain first-century oral traditions about a Jewish woman named Mary, the historical mother of Jesus.
The so-called Kollyridians of Epiphanius’s Panarion are commonly regarded in modern scholarship as a group of Christian goddess worshipers who believed in the Virgin Mary’s divinity. Yet a careful reading of Epiphanius’s account, with close attention to his rhetoric, suggests instead that the Kollyridians merely were offering Mary a kind of veneration that during the late fourth century was increasingly directed toward Christian saints. The Six Books apocryphon, an early Dormition narrative from the fourth century, enjoins on its readers ritual practices almost identical with what Epiphanius ascribes to the Kollyridians, yet without any indication of belief in Mary’s divinity. Comparison of this apocryphon with Epiphanius’s description of the Kollyridians further suggests that the Kollyridian rituals do not necessarily amount to goddess worship or belief in Mary’s divinity. Moreover, such comparison reveals that Epiphanius probably knew the Six Books apocryphon, either directly or indirectly, and his account of the Kollyridians likely responds in part to its early Dormition traditions. [End Page 371]