Status Updates From Mary in Early Christian Fai...

[On the explicitly anti-Catholic attitude of the translators and editors of the 4th century "Six Books Dormition Apocryphon:"] It is indeed a bit odd to find scholars expressing such disdain for material that they have presumably labored long and hard to bring to light.

This woman who would soon be hailed as the 'Scepter of Orthodoxy' was earlier revered by groups that were heterodox.... This could explain the distance that the early church fathers seem to have kept from Mary -- the taint of heresy may have left them hesitant to embrace her completely.

This narrative of Mary's relatively late arrival on the scene also appears in a "post-Protestant" guise in certain more secular accounts, and unfortunately here as in much earlier Protestant scholarship, a sort of anti-Catholicism occasionally can stand fairly close to the surface.