Mary and the early Church

[Nagomirov]

Я согласен с тем, что Мария, будучи воплощением смирения, не хотела бы, чтобы ее имя часто упоминалось.

 

[Nagomirov]

Мариология самым тесным образом связана с Христологией!

 

[Nagomirov]

 

[Nagomirov]

I agree that Mary being the epitome of humility would not want her name be mentioned often.

The original. Greek Orthodoxy.

 

[Nagomirov]

I agree that Mary being the epitome of humility would not want her name be mentioned often.

 

[Nagomirov]

I agree that Mary being the epitome of humility would not want her name be mentioned often.

 

[Nagomirov]

I agree that Mary being the epitome of humility would not want her name be mentioned often.

Russian Orthodox Church

 

[Nagomirov]

Russian Orthodox Church

 

[The Liturgist]

Friends I am interested in why Mary the Mother of Jesus hardly gets a mention by Paul and didn't seem to have a significant role in the early church.

These are the three verses with the name Mary - some of which may be referring to others.

Acts 1:14
All these were continually devoting themselves with one mind to prayer, along with the women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with His brothers.

Acts 12:12
And when he realized this, he went to the house of Mary, the mother of John, who was also called Mark, where many were gathered together and were praying.

Romans 16:6
Greet Mary, who has worked hard for you.

Do we have any other credible evidence that Mary had a role in the church ?

Yes, absolutely. She was a center of devotion, which is why the early church recorded her miraculous assumption into heaven, which is commemorated in traditional churches on August the 15th, and the reality of which is proven by the fact that unlike with nearly every other saint of the early church, we have no bodily relics of the Theotokos.

I would go so far as to state that since St. Mary points us to Christ, one key quality of a strong faith is one’s Marian devotion. We see a high level of Marian devotion in Martin Luther, for example, and John Wesley and all the leaders of the major Protestant denominations such as Cranmer, Calvin and Luther recognized her perpetual virginity without question, as my Lutheran friends @MarkRohfrietsch and @ViaCrucis like to point out.

Additionally, we have further scriptural evidence of the importance of Mary to the Early Church, in the form of one of the three Evangelical Canticles in the Gospel According to Luke, the Magnificat, which has always been sung throughout Christendom as part of the Divine Office (the Western Christians and Syrians tend to sing it at night, whereas it has always been a part of Matins in the Byzantine Rite, and is the most indispensible of the Nine Odes).

The Magnificat, and the related Canticle of St. Symeon, the Nunc Dimitis, were historically used in the Western Church in Vespers and Compline, and in the Anglican tradition, these were combined into Evensong, although recently, Compline has been successfully revived by many Anglican churches as a popular office, and I think the ideal solution to this is to compose a form of Evensong based on the Episcopal Church model from Rite I (the traditional form) of the 1979 BCP, in which the ancient Greek canticle of Vespers, Phos Hilarion (O Gladsome Light) is sung in addition to the Magnificat. This would require new settings, however, there are a number of English language settings of both by Orthodox and Byzantine Catholic composers which it might also be possible to license.

Likewise I think within Western Rite Orthodoxy, it makes a great deal of sense for Western Rite Vespers to feature Phos Hilarion as one canticle, and the Magnificat as another, and thus this service can be differentiated from Compline, but in the Orthodox manner they can be served back to back, and where this consists just of these two services, and perhaps the Ninth Hour, this could be called “Evensong”, whereas Morning prayer, subdivided into Matins and Lauds, with one featuring the other Evangelical Canticle, the Benedictus, as well as the canticle Benedicite Omni Opera, both of which are part of the Nine Odes of the Orthodox hymnographical genre known as the Canon, followed by the Anglican staple, the Psalm Jubilate Deo, and also the ancient hymn Te Deum Laudamus, according to tradition composed by St. Ambrose (an accomplished hymnographer) on the occasion of his baptism of St. Augustine, as a collaboration between them, and which also features in Orthodox worship, would be splendid.

And St. Andrew’s Service Book, which is the best Western Rite Orthodox liturgical text I have seen thus far, does set things up in a manner somewhat like this, and it also provides for a communion service following both the Anglican Rite (the Divine Liturgy of St. Tikhon of Moscow, so named because St. Tikhon was responsible for organizing a committee to revise the Anglican Holy Communion service to make it compatible with Eastern Orthodox theology, to accomodate Anglican converts who wanted to continue to use it, and the Divine Liturgy of St. Gregory, which is basically the Roman Mass (a slightly confusing name, since there is a Coptic Divine Liturgy of St. Gregory the Theologian, a different St. Gregory than Pope St. Gregory I Diologos, who is also credited with the main presanctified liturgy used in Orthodoxy, and also in Roman Catholicism on Good Friday until 1955, when Pope Pius XII removed the commonalities between the Orthodox Presanctified Liturgy and the Roman Mass of the Presanctified, even the common use of black vestments, for no justifiable reason, and likewise meddled with the Vigil Mass on Holy Saturday so that it no longer closely resembled the Eastern Orthodox Vesperal Divine Liturgy (previously, both, despite their name, were served in the monring, and the Roman version had twelve Old Testament prophecies, and the Orthodox version has fourteen, and energumens (adult catechumens ready for baptism) are baptized while these are read, and then hear the Epistle and the Gospel at the Vesperal Divine Liturgy of St. Basil or the Roman Mass (and possibly in antiquity the Divine Liturgy of St. James, since the Vesperal Liturgy on Holy Saturday, like the Divine Liturgy of St. James, uses the hymn Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent instead of the Cherubic Hymn), before partaking of the Eucharist, and then space is provided before that and the Paschal Divine Liturgy, which traditionally happens at midnight on Pascha (Easter Sunday), but Pope Pius XII seems to have confused the two, resulting in moving the Paschal Vigil into the evening on Holy Saturday. Alas.

 

[The Liturgist]

Thank you @Nagomirov

 

[The Liturgist]

I agree that Mary being the epitome of humility would not want her name be mentioned often.

That argument might have some validity except for the fact that St. Luke the Evangelist, who along with her adopted son St. John the Beloved Disciple, developed quite a close relationship with her, recorded in Gospel her song the Magnificat.

It is not a lack of humility that causes the Theotokos to want to rejoice publically in the fact that she was chosen to give birth to God, which is the greatest blessing bestowed on any human to date, and what is more, she points people to Christ. It was, for example, the icon of her painted by an Aztec, Juan Diego, known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, that was responsible for the destruction of the barbaric and genocidal Aztec religion, which may have killed as many as forty million people in human sacrifice, and which was part of a larger family of human sacrifice religions throughout Mesoamerica also including the Mayan religion, whose brutality and barbarity rivals the worst atrocities committed by Islam during their genocide against Armenian, Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians in the former Ottoman Empire starting in 1915, and previously against the Bulgarians in the 1870s.

I am convinced that devotion to Mary will be instrumental in overcoming the scourge of Islam, just as it played such a major role in recalling the Orthodox Christians of the former Russian Empire to Christ, along with their Catholic brethren, whose efforts in combination led to the collapse of the Soviet Union (during the attempted coup in 1991 against Gorbachev, the Orthodox priests stood with Boris Yeltsin and not the five hardliners including the head of the KGB who were attempting to reimplement Marxist-Leninism).

Likewise Marian devotion helped keep the Orthodox, Catholic and Lutheran faith alive in repressed countries such as Armenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, East Germany, Poland and the Baltic States.

Mary is not a goddess; she is the Mother of God because she gave birth to Jesus Christ, who is the incarnate Word of God incarnate, the divine Logos, fully God, and through the Blessed Virgin Mary having consented to give birth to him, fully Human, with his humanity and divinity consubstantially united.

Indeed, the Coptic Orthodox Liturgy (the Copts being the majority of the Egyptian Christians, where a Marian apparition resulted in an increased fidelity among Copts, the Alexandrian Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic, Coptic Catholic and even Protestants in the 1960s, and where Marian devotion is extremely important, summarizes her role, and also the nature of the Eucharist, succinctly, when, following the consecration of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of our Lord, the priest intones this confession:

“Amen, Amen, Amen. I believe, I believe, I believe and confess to the last breath that this is the life-giving flesh that Your only-begotten Son, our Lord, God, and Savior Jesus Christ, took from our lady, the lady of us all, the holy Theotokos, Saint Mary.

“He made it One with His divinity without mingling, without confusion, and without alteration. He confessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate.

“He gave it up for us upon the holy wood of the cross, of His own will, for us all. Truly I believe that His divinity parted not from His humanity for a single moment, nor a twinkling of an eye.

“Given for us for salvation, remission of sins, and eternal life to those who partake of Him. I believe, I believe, I believe that this is true. Amen”

 

[Nagomirov]

Спасибо @Nagomirov

 

[Nagomirov]

Спасибо @Nagomirov

А вы русский язык знаете? Если да, то послушайте, что о Матери Господа говорит православный священник, отец Андрей Ткачев.

 

[Nagomirov]

Спасибо @Nagomirov

 

[RocK Guy]

Friends I am interested in why Mary the Mother of Jesus hardly gets a mention by Paul and didn't seem to have a significant role in the early church.

Other than the Lord using her body for Him to be born into a physical Body... she has no role to play in our salvation at all. She's out of the picture.

 

[The Liturgist]

Other than the Lord using her body for Him to be born into a physical Body... she has no role to play in our salvation at all. She's out of the picture.

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

 

[RocK Guy]

“Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”

Exactly. Mrs Lincoln had zero to do with her husbands death other than being their when it happened.

 

[The Liturgist]

Exactly. Mrs Lincoln had zero to do with her husbands death other than being their when it happened.

On the other hand, by your own admission, the Blessed Virgin Mary directly enabled our salvation, because we are saved by virtue of God having become incarnate through her cooperation. And she made a very substantial and noble sacrifice and endured considerable suffering so that could happen. This does not make her our savior, but it does make her worthy of the highest level of veneration (hyperdoulia) and an integral and indispensable part of God’s economy of salvation. Since we have no way of knowing that any other human woman would have been of the correct inheritance, virtue and inclination to agree to bear God.

 

[RocK Guy]

the Blessed Virgin Mary directly enabled our salvation,

No, she was nothing more than a vessel. Had she not believed the angel, God could have easily gotten another woman to be Jesus's momma.

Mary worship is idolatry and God's Word tells us that idolators will not be spending eternity with the Lord. (Revelation 21:8, 1 Corinthians 6:10,11)

This does not make her our savior, but it does make her worthy of the highest level of veneration

No, I'm not instructed in God's Word to "venerate" (worship) anyone other than the Lord. Mary worship is idolatry. This is not biblical at all and cannot be found anywhere in scripture to worship or pray to Jesus' momma.

She was a sinner like everyone else that needed a savior so she is no more divine that anybody else.

Since we have no way of knowing that any other human woman would have been of the correct inheritance, virtue and inclination to agree to bear God.

God could have easily selected Beck Sue from down the road. It did not have to be Mary to be Jesus' momma as there are always other options for the Lord since people frequently reject the Lord's leading.

 

[chevyontheriver]

No, she was nothing more than a vessel.

Can you expand upon this a bit please. Did Mary contribute anything at all?