de Transitu may be the earliest source for the Assumption in Latin, but what difference should that make?
As you probably know, it only takes one heresy for a document to be condemned. Scanning quickly through de Transitu (at the link), I can spot at least two.
One is that the document has Jesus saying that Mary is worthy to be assumed bodily because she never had sexual intercourse. That's absolutely false and heretical.
Another is that the document speaks of Mary's soul and body being taken to heaven separately, while Mary's body is animated and able to speak while her soul is separated from it. That's not possible either.
So, yes, de Transitu appears to have been justly condemned, not because it taught the Assumption, but in spite of it.
So, the condemnation of the Transitus writing of the Assumption of Mary (reaffirmed by Pope Hormisdas) is not really a condemnation of the Transitus writing about the Assumption of Mary. Okaaaay. Now, if in that era there were already an established doctrine in place that rather counterintuitive hypothesis might serve as a plausible explanation, but such is not the case. The only way to believe that the condemnation of the Transitus writing of the Assumption of Mary is not really a condemnation of the Transitus writing about the Assumption of Mary is to presuppose the very thing in question.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, de Transitu was a theologically redacted version of the traditions in the Liber Requiei Mariae:
The earliest narrative is the so-called Liber Requiei Mariae (The Book of Mary's Repose), a narrative which survives intact only in an Ethiopic translation.[4] Probably composed by the fourth century, this early Christian apocryphal narrative may be as old as the third century. Also quite early are the very different traditions of the Six Books Dormition Narratives. The earliest versions of this apocrypha are preserved by several Syriac manuscripts of the fifth and sixth centuries, although the text itself probably belongs to the fourth century.[5]Later apocrypha based on these earlier texts include the De Obitu S. Dominae, attributed to St. John, a work probably from around the turn of the 6th century that is a summary of the "Six Books" narrative. The story also appears in De Transitu Virginis, a late 5th century work ascribed to St. Melito of Sardis that presents a theologically redacted summary of the traditions in the Liber Requiei Mariae. The Transitus Mariae tells the story of the apostles being transported by white clouds to the deathbed of Mary, each from the town where he was preaching at the hour.
You have, at the earliest, stories from the 3rd or 4th century. So where did the teaching originate? "Oral traditions"? Epiphanius of Salamis, who lived near Palestine and thus would have been in a position to know of such purported traditions, in AD 377 stated that no one knew of the eventual fate of Mary. It is an incontrovertible fact that no one within the church taught this doctrine for six centuries, and those who did first teach it within the church borrowed it directly from the book condemned by Pope Gelasius as heretical. Juvenal, bishop of Jerusalem, was the first, and the second was Gregory of Tours, A.D. 590. As referenced earlier, after quoting from Gregroy, Smith states,
"...The Abbe' Migne points out in a note that " what Gregory here relates of the death of the Blessed Virgin and its attendant circumstances he un- doubtedly drew (procul dxbio hausit) from the Pseudo-Melito's Liber de Transitu B. Mariae, which is classed among apocryphal books bj pope Gelasius." He adds that this account, with the circumstances related by Gregory, were soon after introduced into the Gallican Liturgy."
So to say that there is no evidence at all that de Transitu was condemned because it taught the Assumption of Mary, but in spite of it, is to assume the very thing in question, and to gloss over the fact that the Transitus literature of that era that is the ONLY KNOWN EXTANT SOURCE of a teaching purporting to relate to an actual historical event consists of heretical writings that are regarded by historians as complete fabrication and worthless as history. Since the dogma of the Assumption entails positive historical claims about an actual event, pleading an absence of evidence that de Transitu was condemned because it taught the Assumption of Mary ignores six centuries of silence from the Church, and cannot obscure the historical fact that the ONLY known historical source of the dogma is spurious heretical writings condemned by two Popes. The real absence of historical evidence to support the dogma is that of individuals who were personally present, or else were in contact with the events through unimpeachable sources.
The bottom line is that the Assumption is not taught on the basis of historical evidence, but in spite of it, for theological reasons. There is not a shred of historical evidence that this dogma was taught within the church for six centuries. The only known sources of a dogma purported to relate to an actual event,are spurious, pious forgeries and outright fabrication containing admitted absurdities written by heretics.
These and the like, what Simon Magus, Nicolaus, Cerinthus, Marcion, Basilides, Ebion, Paul of Samosata, Photinus and Bonosus, who suffered from similar error, also Montanus with his detestable followers, Apollinaris, Valentinus the Manichaean, Faustus the African, Sabellius, Arius, Macedonius, Eunomius, Novatus, Sabbatius, Calistus, Donatus, Eustasius, Iovianus, Pelagius, Iulianus of ERclanum, Caelestius, Maximian, Priscillian from Spain, Nestorius of Constantinople, Maximus the Cynic, Lampetius,Dioscorus, Eutyches, Peter and the other Peter, of whom one besmirched Alexandria and the other Antioch, Acacius of Constantinople with his associates, and what also all disciples of heresy and of the heretics and schismatics, whose names we have scarcely preserved, have taught or compiled, we acknowledge is to be not merely rejected but excluded from the whole Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church and with its authors and the adherents of its authors to be damned in the inextricable shackles of anathema forever (New Testament Apocrypha, Wilhelm Schneemelcher, Ed., (Cambridge: James Clark, 1991).
Cordially,