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After the commencement of Jesus' public ministry little notice is taken of Mary by the gospel writers. She was present at the marriage in Cana[?]. Very few gospel stories mention her until we find her at the cross along with her sister Mary, and Mary Magdalene, and Salome, and other women (John 19:26). Of the roughly 100 people in the upper room after the Ascension on the day of Pentecost, she is one of the handful who are named (Acts 1:14). From this time she wholly disappears from the biblical accounts. Her death is not recorded in Scripture. According to Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition, between three and fifteen years after Christ's Ascension, in either Jerusalem or Ephesus, she died while surrounded by the apostles. Later when the apostles opened her tomb, they found it empty and concluded that she had been bodily assumed into Heaven. (A tomb in Jerusalem is attributed to Mary, but it was unknown until the 6th century.)
Others, both Christians and non-Christians, reject the distinction between veneration and worship, and consider all these practices to be idolatry or unlawful worship.
Historic Christianity, including modern-day Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, teaches that she was a virgin before, during, and after giving birth to Jesus. Islam also takes this position, which is stated explicitly in the Qur'an. Some Protestants also hold this view, while many others believe that she was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, but that she later was not and had other children with Joseph the Betrothed. Catholics and Orthodox explain references to Jesus' brothers as either cousins, or as half brothers who were Joseph's children by a prior marriage.
Persons who are neither Christians nor Muslims generally doubt that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus.
The Gospel of Matthew describes Mary as a virgin who fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. The passage in Isaiah, in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, stated that a young woman would give birth to the Messiah. Some scholars believe that the Greek language Septuagint, which the author of Matthew would have used as his Bible, mistranslated the Hebrew word for young woman, "almah", into the Greek word "parthenos", meaning virgin. This suggests that the origin of the belief that Mary was a virgin derived from an attempt by Matthew at describing the fulfillment of a prophecy that was actually not made. However, many scholars find evidence that the Septuagint was translated from a different Hebrew text that has since been lost, based on comparisons between existing Masoretic texts, Septuagint texts, Dead Sea Scrolls, and some Samaritan texts. If so, then it is impossible to compare the Septuagint with the Hebrew text its translators used, and it remains possible that the Septuagint has an equally valid translation of Isaiah's prophecy.
In the academic community, controversy surrounds the interpretation of this passage. According to almost all non-Christian biblical scholars, many liberal Christian biblical scholars, and also according to Jewish tradition, the prophecy only describes events during the rule of King Ahaz of Judea. The prophet is giving information to the King about an event that will soon be made known to him. The text is clearly not about someone being born centuries later. However, soon after the development of Christianity a new way to read this text was born, one in which Isaiah was not only giving prophetic comfort to his peers, but was also cryptically forecasting the coming Messiah.
St. Irenaeus of Lyons observed in the second century that the Jews themselves translated the word "virgin" well before the time of Jesus; he attributes the translation "young woman" to Theodotian the Ephesian and Aquila of Pontus, both Jewish proselytes who published new translations of the Tanakh in the second century. Thus the universal acceptance of it in the Jewish community as meaning "young woman" apparently came about in response to the development of Christianity. Irenaeus reinterprets many prophecies by David, Moses, and Daniel as also predicting a virgin birth, and demonstrates why the messiah could not be born of Joseph (Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 21.). Jews and Christians have disagreed about the interpretation of these and other prophecies since the birth of Christianity.
Later generations of Protestants, however, abandoned the traditional teaching, citing references to "brothers" of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. Defenders of the teaching, including John Calvin, have pointed out that Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ and his disciples, lacked a specific word for "cousin," so that the word "brother" was used instead.
At the time that this dogma was promulgated, there was a strong sentiment among many Catholics that the immaculately conceived and sinless Mother of God would not have suffered death (which is "the wages of sin"), but was instead taken up alive into heaven like Elijah the Prophet. For this reason, the dogma was deliberately so worded ("when the course of her earthly life was finished") as to allow faithful Catholics to believe either hypothesis: that Mary was assumed bodily into heaven without dying, or that her incorrupt body was assumed into heaven after her death.
Judging from the sources quoted in Munificentissimus Deus, Pius XII himself almost certainly rejected the notion of Mary's "immortality" (the idea that she never suffered death) in favor of the more widely accepted understanding that her assumption took place after her physical death.
The tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church holds that Mary died, and that after her death and burial, she was resurrected and taken up bodily into heaven. This two-fold event is celebrated as the Dormition ("falling asleep") of the Theotokos. The Feast of the Dormition is celebrated on August 15, and is preceded by a fourteen day fast from meat and dairy products, the third longest fast of the liturgical year after Great Lent and Winter Lent. Despite the great importance of this feast in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, it is not, as in the Catholic Church, considered a matter of dogma, since it has not been formally defined by any ecumenical council accepted by the Orthodox.
For Orthodox and Catholics alike, Mary's assumption is seen as a concrete and present instance of the resurrection of the body; a belief asserted by virtually all Christians in the creeds, yet often replaced in the popular imagination by a more shadowy spiritual immortality.
Some non-Christians, particularly followers of Wicca, link Mary to the Earth Mother of various Neo-pagan traditions. Some Buddhists have even been known to link Mary to Kwan-Yin[?] of various Chinese Buddhist faiths.
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