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To: Claud

Here’s an English translation. For what its worth, the feast has been celebrated in the Eastern Church since the 6th century.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~sshoemak/texts/dormitionG2/dormitionG2.htm


186 posted on 08/17/2009 11:52:59 AM PDT by Kolokotronis (Christ is Risen, and you, o death, are annihilated!)
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To: Kolokotronis; agere_contra; AnalogReigns; Petronski
Here’s an English translation. For what its worth, the feast has been celebrated in the Eastern Church since the 6th century.

Thank you Kolo! Which actually brings up another point.

The author has a curious position that the fact of the Assumption is spurious, based on the Decretum Gelasianum (ca. 490s) which condemned the Transitus Mariae as heretical. I looked it up (see the link) and indeed, no question about it, the Transitus Mariae fell under the label of books that are not received by Catholics and should be avoided under anathema.

YET...the liturgical feast of the Assumption is at least this old. The Life of St. Theodosius states that the Church of Jerusalem celebrated a feast of the Assumption before A.D. 500. (I'll try to find this primary source as well)

Analog, I think you said you're an Anglican, so you understand feast days. Now how is it that we have a condemnation of the Transitus Mariae at around the same exact time that the Church in Jerusalem is celebrating its feast day?

Well, the easiest explanation I can think of is that the BOOK was condemned but the IDEA was not. One could argue I suppose that, well, maybe the Jerusalem Church was outside of the mainstream here, and they were sorta being corrected by the Gelasian Decretals. But I don't think that flies, because as Kolokotronis said, the feast wasn't squelched but kept going. It was present in the Greek liturgy by the next century, and it appears in the Roman "Gelasian Sacramentary" (!), the dating of which is problematic.

Evidently, the condemnation of the book had no effect on the spread of the feast or of the theology of the idea. Which, again, indicates to me that we are dealing here with a tradition of the Church which was *not* heretical, but which was orthodox.

212 posted on 08/17/2009 12:14:38 PM PDT by Claud
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