Epiphanius' Ignorance Of An Assumption Of Mary

Cameron Bertuzzi recently hosted a three-hour video about the Assumption of Mary, with Ethan Muse, Suan Sonna, and William Albrecht as guests. And Suan posted a thirteen-minute clip from the program on his own YouTube channel, a clip criticizing Gavin Ortlund's work on the Assumption. My focus here will be on some material in the church father Epiphanius, which received a lot of attention in the original video and is the main topic of the clip Suan highlighted. I'll briefly comment on some other topics as well, but I'll mostly be discussing Epiphanius.

Epiphanius Did Not Affirm The Assumption Of Mary

It's become popular in some Roman Catholic circles to cite Epiphanius out of context in order to make it look as though he affirmed the Assumption of Mary. Somebody in the comments thread following Gavin Ortlund's recent video on the Assumption cited Epiphanius that way. You can click the link just provided to read his comments. Here's the response I posted there:

If you read the larger context, Epiphanius isn't claiming that Mary was assumed to heaven. He goes on, just after what you quoted, to compare Mary to the apostle John, even though she wasn't the same as John in every characteristic of John he mentions (Frank Williams, trans., The Panarion Of Epiphanius Of Salamis, Books II And III; De Fide [Leiden, The Netherlands: SBL Press, 2013], 641). He goes on to say "Elijah is not to be worshiped, even though he is alive. And John is not to be worshiped, even though by his own prayer - or rather, by receiving the grace from God - he made an awesome thing of his falling asleep." (ibid.) Epiphanius also mentions Thecla, a martyr, in this context. It seems that he's comparing Mary to three different figures - Elijah, John, and Thecla - whose lives ended in three different ways, the same three ways he mentions elsewhere when he says that nobody knows how Mary's life ended (ibid., 635). He's not claiming, in the passage you've cited, to know that Mary remained alive and was taken up as Elijah was, which would contradict what he said earlier about how nobody knows what happened at the end of her life. Rather, he's repeating what he said earlier about our ignorance of the end of her life. That's why he goes on to compare Mary to John and Thecla, just after what you misleadingly quoted. Just as his comparing Mary to John and Thecla doesn't require that Epiphanius believed that Mary died, his comparing Mary to Elijah doesn't require that Epiphanius believed she didn't die. Rather, he's repeating his earlier point that Mary's end could have been like the end of any of those three individuals.

Furthermore, his earlier statement about how nobody knows what happened at the end of Mary's life goes beyond merely whether she died. He also discusses other matters related to the end of her life, like whether she died as a martyr and whether she was buried. In an earlier passage, he writes of how in scripture we "neither find Mary's death, nor whether or not she died, nor whether or not she was buried", and he goes on to refer to how scripture is silent about the details of her living with John (ibid., 624). So, Epiphanius seems to be addressing the end of her life in general, not just whether she died. Thus, Epiphanius' statement that nobody knows what happened at the end of Mary's life seems to be a contradiction of Roman Catholicism's claim that Mary's assumption at the end of her life is an apostolic tradition always held by the church.