To: RoadGumby
The Immaculate Conception rests on a premise that is foreign to Eastern Christianity because Eastern Christians do not accept St. Augustine's notion that we inherit the guilt of Adam.
Instead the Greek Fathers teach that we inherit a state of spiritual death and separation from God.
From that perspective the Immaculate Conception solves a non-problem. That said. The Eastern Orthodox refer to Mary as panagia or all-immaculate based on the definition of the Fifth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople.
Byzantine-rite Catholics do not celebrate the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the dogma isn't even discussed in our liturgical texts for the Feast of the Conception of St. Anna.
The same was true in the Latin Church prior to the dogmatic definition.
The closest we come to anything resembling the Immaculate Conception in the early centuries can be found in the Apocrphyal Infancy Gospel of Mary:
If, therefore, the reasonableness of my words does not persuade you, believe in fact that conceptions very late in life, and births in the case of women that have been barren, are usually attended with something wonderful. Accordingly your wife Anna will bring forth a daughter to you, and you shall call her name Mary: she shall be, as you have vowed, consecrated to the Lord from her infancy, and she shall be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from her mother's womb. She shall neither eat nor drink any unclean thing, nor shall she spend her life among the crowds of the people without, but in the temple of the Lord, that it may not be possible either to say, or so much as to suspect, any evil concerning her. Therefore, when she has grown up, just as she herself shall be miraculously born of a barren woman, so in an incomparable manner she, a virgin, shall bring forth the Son of the Most High, who shall be called Jesus, and who, according to the etymology of His name, shall be the Saviour of all nations. And this shall be the sign to you of those things which I announce: When you shall come to the Golden gate in Jerusalem, you shall there meet Anna your wife, who, lately anxious from the delay of your return, will then rejoice at the sight of you. Having thus spoken, the angel departed from him.
57 posted on
12/08/2011 10:45:39 AM PST by
rzman21
To: rzman21
That is a lot of writing to ssay not much.
The Apochryphal anything carries no weight, they are non-canonical. In this case apparently, for good reason.
1) Mary was favored among women, not above them. She was as much a sinner, as much in need of her Savior Son as the rest of us.
2) Mary was virgin, knew no man and bore the Son of God.
65 posted on
12/08/2011 11:00:34 AM PST by
RoadGumby
(This is not where I belong, Take this world and give me Jesus.)
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