Good day,
Noted Scholar from the Roman Catholic denomination notes:
Raymond E. Brown: Some Roman Catholics may have expected me to include a discussion of the historicity of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary. But these Marian doctrines, which are not mentioned in Scripture, clearly lie outside my topic which was the quest for historical knowledge of Mary in the NT. Moreover, I would stress the ambiguity of the term “historicity” when applied to these two doctrines. A Roman Catholic must accept the two dogmas as true upon the authority of the teaching Church, but he does not have to hold that the dogmas are derived from a chain of historical information. There is no evidence that Mary (or anyone else in NT times) knew that she was conceived free of original sin, especially since the concept of original sin did not fully exist in the first century. The dogma is not based upon information passed down by Mary or by the apostles; it is based on the Church’s insight that the sinlessness of Jesus should have affected his origins, and hence his mother, as well. Nor does a Catholic have to think that the people gathered for her funeral saw Mary assumed into heaven—there is no reliable historical tradition to that effect, and the dogma does not even specify that Mary died. Once again the doctrine stems from the Church’s insight about the application of the fruits of redemption to the leading disciple: Mary has gone before us, anticipating our common fate. Raymond E. Brown, Biblical Reflections on Crises facing the Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1975), p. 105, fn. 103.
In Him,
Bill
