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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries toiling in the vineyard in Ottoman Armenia found the native women receptive to many of their ideas - until the subject of Mary came up. An American missionary recorded the following encounter in 1877:
There was another very religious woman, I once met with in one of the villages on Harpoot plain. She said, ‘Lady, I love you, and think you are a real Christian, but one thing you say I cannot receive. You say the Virgin Mary is not our intercessor. What should we women do, if we could not call upon the Virgin when in trouble, or suffering? She was a woman, and knows how to pity women like us’. This is what they all say.
1 Wheeler, S.A., Daughters of Armenia (New York, [1877]), 25–6 Google Scholar; quotation following, 19.
2 O’Carroll, Michael, Theotokos: a Theological Encylopedia of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Wilmington, DE, 1983), 357–62 Google Scholar.
3 Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power, ed. Marvin Meyer, Richard Smith, and Neal Kelsey (San Francisco, 1994), 335.
4 Mary’s full humanity also ensures our hope of resurrection. Eastern Orthodoxy insists on the Dormition (Koitnesis, ‘falling asleep’) of Mary, as opposed to the Assumption, because the notion that Mary did not die a real human death, but was simply assumed bodily into heaven, compromises her as a perfect model of redeemed humanity.
5 ‘The second day of Christmas’, in The Orthodox Herald, ed. W. Basil Stroyen and Nina Bohush Stroyen (Hunlock Creek, PA), 41 (1992), 43, 46.
6 The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, trans. Frank Williams (Leiden, 1994), 620-9.
7 See my forthcoming monograph, Tales from Another Byzantium: Celestial Journey and Local Community in the Medieval Greek Apocrypha (Cambridge, 2005).
8 Limberis; also the paper by Averil Cameron in this volume.
9 Vassilaki, esp. 199-204, 229, 298-9, 308-12.
10 Baini, Tales, includes a complete study of the Apocalypse.
11 Bodley, MS Misc. Greek 77. Except where indicated otherwise, the dialogue following is translated from the edition of M.R. James, Apocrypha Anecdota (Cambridge, 1893), 124-6.
12 BAV, MS Barberinianus Graecus 284, fol. 38r.
13 BN, MS Supp. Graec. 136, fol. 177; Bodley, MS Rawlinson G.4, fol. 122V.
14 James, Apocrypha, 124.
15 Baun, Jane, ‘Middle Byzantine “Tours of Hell”: outsider theodicy?’, in Smythe, D., ed., Strangers to Themselves (Aldershot, 2000), 50–5 Google Scholar.
16 James, Apocrypha, 126.
17 See esp. Maria Vassilaki and Niki Tsironis, ‘Representations of the Virgin and their association with the Passion of Christ’, in Vassilaki, 457-60.
18 The Life has not been fully edited; see O’Carroll, Jlieotokos, 203-4. Quotations here are translated from the Greek text in Wenger, A., L’Assomption de la tres sainte Vierge (Paris, 1955)Google Scholar.
19 Ibid., 407.
20 Ibid., 405-7.
21 See further Baun, ‘Middle Byzantine “Tours of Hell”’.
22 J. Galot, ‘La plus ancienne affirmation de la coredemption mariale’, Recherches de science religieuse, 45 (1957), 192.
23 See n.9 above.
