I think it would be beneficial to specify exactly when the historical record first gives reference to the various Marian doctrines:
a) the doctrine of the Assumption of Mary first appears around the end of the 4th or start of the 5th century….so more than 300 years after the alleged event
b) the first record of an express statement of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is hard to pin point. It seems that its roots go back to the 4th or 5th centuries and that it was debated in the middle ages with Aquinas opposing it. It seems that an express statement of the doctrine doesn’t show up until hundreds of years after (maybe even a thousand years after) the alleged event
c) the doctrine of perpetual virginity first appears in the spurious Gospel of James around 150AD……only a hundred years of silence on this one.
d) the views of Mary as Coredemptrix and Mediatrix are also difficult to pin point partly b/c both have been built up over the centuries….again I suspect that it is fair to say that it wasn’t until a few hundred years after the death of Jesus that history records the early forms of these beliefs.
Elvisman would have us believe that this silence exists b/c doctrines were only recorded and defined when they were challenged. This explanation strikes me as being very implausible for a couple of reasons.
First, the apostles, the Apostolic Fathers and the ECFs did not write only when confronting heretics. Often their letters were addressed to believers explaining matters of faith and telling of how to run the good race. If Mary was as important then as she is now (to the venerators), then she would have merited mention on those occasions (particularly with respect to her role as mediatrix and coredemptrix she should have been mentioned b/c of her continuing importance in one’s salvation).
Second, on early challenge to orthodoxy came from Gnostics who denied that Jesus actually suffered in the flesh. John refers to those one who denies that Jesus came in the flesh. Ignatius described what one group of such Gnostics denied:
- But consider those who are of a different opinion with respect to the grace of Christ which has come unto us, how opposed they are to the will of God. They have no regard for love; no care for the widow, or the orphan, or the oppressed; of the bond, or of the free; of the hungry, or of the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again. *
If the Gnostics denied that Jesus came in the flesh, they would have no need for Mary’s perpetual virginity b/c a natural bodily birth would never have occurred. Mary’s need for purity b/c of having Jesus in her womb would therefore be reduced to zero and therefore her alleged sinlessness and her alleged immaculate conception would have made no sense to them. In contrast, if her sinlessness and her immaculate conception were part of orthodoxy at that time, they would have been referenced to establish Christ’s coming in the flesh via Mary’s pure womb. In “On the Flesh of Christ” Tertullian goes into a fairly detailed discussion on the novelty of Christ’s birth and how the Gnostics deny its reality.
In the first chapter Tertullian states:
Let us examine our Lord’s bodily substance, for about His spiritual nature all are agreed. It is His flesh that is in question. Its verity and quality are the points in dispute. Did it ever exist? Whence was it derived? And of what kind was it? If we succeed in demonstrating it, we shall lay down a law for our own resurrection. Marcion, in order that he might deny the flesh of Christ, denied also His nativity, or else he denied His flesh in order that he might deny His nativity; because, of course, he was afraid that His nativity and His flesh bore mutual testimony to each other’s reality, since there is no nativity without flesh, and no flesh without nativity. As if indeed, under the prompting of that licence which is ever the same in all heresy, he too might not very well have either denied the nativity, although admitting the flesh—like Apelles, who was first a disciple of his, and afterwards an apostate—or, while admitting both the flesh and the nativity, have interpreted them in a different sense, as did Valentinus, who resembled Apelles both in his discipleship and desertion of Marcion. At all events, he who represented the flesh of Christ to be imaginary was equally able to pass off His nativity as a phantom; so that the virgin’s conception, and pregnancy, and child-bearing, and then the whole course of her infant too, would have to be regarded as putative. These facts pertaining to the nativity of Christ would escape the notice of the same eyes and the same senses as failed to grasp the full idea of His flesh.
If Tertullian thought that Mary was immaculately conceived or that she was sinless then he surely would have raised those orthodox beliefs as giving evidence that these things were put in place so that Christ could obtain his flesh from her….
As such, the excuse that the historical record is silent on these Marian doctrines b/c there was no need to address them, smells extremely fishy.
