Assumption of Mary

The Assumption of Mary is one of the four Marian dogmas of the Catholic Church. Pope Pius XII defined it on 1 November 1950 in his apostolic constitution Munificentissimus Deus as the assumption of Mary, body and soul, into heaven. It is celebrated on 15 August.

It leaves open the question of whether Mary died or whether she was raised to eternal life without bodily death.

The equivalent belief in the Eastern Christianity is the Dormition of the Mother of God or the "Falling Asleep of the Mother of God". In the Lutheran Churches, 15 August is celebrated as the Feast of St. Mary. A number of Anglican denominations observe 15 August under various titles, including the Feast of Saint Mary the Virgin or the Falling Asleep of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

The word 'assumption' derives from the Latin word assūmptiō, meaning 'taking up'.

Some scholars argue that the Dormition and Assumption traditions can be traced early in church history in the apocryphal books, with Stephen J. Shoemaker noting about the dating:

For instance, Baldi, Masconi, and Cothenet analyzed the corpus of Dormition narratives using a rather different approach, governed primarily by language tradition rather than literary relations, and yet all agree that the Obsequies (i.e., the Liber Requiei Mariae) and the Six Books Dormition Apocryphon reflect the earliest traditions, locating their origins in the second or third century. Richard Bauckham too, through study... dates the Six Books to the fourth century....Numerous others, including Maximilian Bonnet, Jean Rivière, and Jean Gribomont, have concluded that these narratives originate in the fourth century, if not earlier.

According to Shoemaker, the first known narrative to address the end of Mary's life and her assumption is the apocryphal third- and possibly second-century Liber Requiei Mariae ("The Book of Mary's Repose"). Yet numerous features indicate that the Liber Requiei Mariae, or the Obsequies of the Virgin, as the text is called in Syriac, has manuscripts which date according to Shoemaker to the "fifth or sixth centuries" where the "original Greek underlying these early translations almost certainly belongs to the fourth century."

Another early source that speaks of the assumption are the Six Books Dormition Apocryphon. It dates almost certainly to the middle of the fourth century, if not perhaps even earlier. Most significantly, the Six Books Dormition Apocryphon provides compelling evidence for an early cult of the Virgin nearly a century before the events of the Council of Ephesus. Shokemaker, expressing his own opinion on the subject, states: "the diversity of their accounts already by the end of the fifth century ensures the apocryphon’s composition by the early fifth century at the very latest, and a number of features locate the Six Books much more probably in the fourth century" with the "Six Books apocryphon present[ing] a rather different sensibility about the veneration of Mary from the Liber Requiei".