“Eamon Duffy.”
I suppose we can keep at this all day.
You trust Duffy greater than the then Bishop of Jerusalem at the Council of Chalcedon?
“In addition to Epiphanius, there is Jerome who also lived in Palestine and does not report any tradition of an assumption.”
Epiphanius is a reliable source that the information regarding Mary’s tomb was at 370 AD, unknown in Jerusalem. Considering that Chalcedon was 70 years later, this is entirely understandable.
“Isidore of Seville, in the seventh century, echoes Epiphanius by saying that no one has any information at all about Mary’s death.”
Writing in the West, after the Fall of the Empire?
There are many Eastern sources who confirm the Assumption.
You trust Duffy greater than the then Bishop of Jerusalem at the Council of Chalcedon?
Why not, is the Bishop of Jerusalem also infallible?
Sorry, the facts are that there is 300 + years of silence, then a myth first appears from apochryphal writings.
Thus, the Transitus literature is the real source of the teaching of the assumption of Mary and Roman Catholic authorities admit this fact. Juniper Carol, for example, writes: ‘The first express witness in the West to a genuine assumption comes to us in an apocryphal Gospel, the Transitus Beatae Mariae of Pseudo–Melito’ (Juniper Carol, O.F.M. ed., Mariology, Vol. l (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1957), p. 149). Roman Catholic theologian, Ludwig Ott, likewise affirms these facts when he says:
The idea of the bodily assumption of Mary is first expressed in certain transitus–narratives of the fifth and sixth centuries. Even though these are apocryphal they bear witness to the faith of the generation in which they were written despite their legendary clothing. The first Church author to speak of the bodily ascension of Mary, in association with an apocryphal transitus B.M.V., is St. Gregory of Tours’ (Ludwig Ott, Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (Rockford: Tan, 1974), pp. 209–210).
Juniper Carol explicitly states that the Transitus literature is a complete fabrication which should be rejected by any serious historian:
The account of Pseudo-Melito, like the rest of the Transitus literature, is admittedly valueless as history, as an historical report of Mary’s death and corporeal assumption; under that aspect the historian is justified in dismissing it with a critical distaste (Juniper Carol, O.F.M. ed., Mariology, Vol. l (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1957), p. 150).