“Roman Catholic authorities admit this fact.”
Seeing as you’ve accused us of being slaves to the Pope, I should think you’d be looking for Papal evidence.
Ott’s no more of an authority than Duffy. He’s got an opinion. Fact of the matter is that the Pope and his authority argues that the evidence originated at Chalcedon when brought forth by then bishop Juvenal.
“Why not, is the Bishop of Jerusalem also infallible?”
Simply the fact that he was 300 years removed, not 2000 years removed. Big difference.
“Sorry, the facts are that there is 300 + years of silence, then a myth first appears from apochryphal writings.”
Knowing something about the history of Jerusalem, it makes sense. There wasn’t a bishop in Jerusalem per se, until Juvenal. The city was destroyed twice, once in 70 AD, and then again after Bar Kochba. That her tomb and the significance of her tomb would be lost to the church in the interim isn’t surprising.
Especially given the fact that even the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem had also been lost over that period, rediscovered and re-excavated shortly after Constantine’s Edict of Milan.
What papal evidence? The earliest writings about it are NON Christian? Have you ever read the Transitus by Pseudo Melito? It is a Gnostic or Collyridian fable sounding more like myths of King Arthur than anything Christian.
R.P.C. Hanson gives the following summation of the teaching of the Assumption, emphasizing the lack of patristic and Scriptural support for it and affirming that it originated not with the Church but with Gnosticism:
This dogma has no serious connection with the Bible at all, and its defenders scarcely pretend that it has. It cannot honestly be said to have any solid ground in patristic theology either, because it is frist known among Catholic Christians in even its crudest form only at the beginning of the fifth century, and then among Copts in Egypt whose associations with Gnostic heresy are suspiciously strong; indeed it can be shown to be a doctrine which manifestly had its origin among Gnostic heretics. The only argument by which it is defended is that if the Church has at any time believed it and does now believe it, then it must be orthodox, whatever its origins, because the final standard of orthodoxy is what the Church believes. The fact that this belief is presumably supposed to have some basis on historical fact analogous to the belief of all Christians in the resurrection of our Lord makes its registration as a dogma de fide more bewilderingly incomprehensible, for it is wholly devoid of any historical evidence to support it. In short, the latest example of the Roman Catholic theory of doctrinal development appears to be a reductio ad absurdum expressly designed to discredit the whole structure (R.P.C. Hanson, The Bible as a Norm of Faith (University of Durham, 1963), Inaugral Lecture of the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity delivered in the Appleby Lecture Theatre on 12 March, 1963, p. 14).