What is implied in the word assumption is that the body of the Mother of our Lord was after her death and burial raised to heaven by the power of God.  It differed therefore essentially from the ascension of our Lord which was accomplished by His Own inherent power.  When this assumption took place we have no means of knowing.  We do not certainly know where S. Mary lived, nor where and when she died.  Jerusalem and Ephesus contend in tradition for the privilege of having sheltered her last days and reverently carried her body to its burial.  There is no way of deciding between these two claims, although the fact that our Lord confided His Mother to S. John throws some little weight into the scale of Ephesus.  And yet S. Mary may have died before S. John settled in Ephesus.  We can only say that history gives us no reliable information on the matter.

In the silence of Scripture we naturally turn to the other writings of the early Church for light and guidance on the matter; but there, too, there is little help.  There is, to be sure, a group of Apocryphal writings which have a good deal to say about the life of S. Mary, where the Scriptures and tradition are silent.  Among other things these Apocryphal writings have a good deal to say, and some very beautiful stories to tell, of S. Mary’s last days, of her burial and assumption.  Are we to think of these stories as containing any grain of truth?  If they do, it is now impossible to sift it from the chaff.  These stories are generally rejected as a basis of knowledge.  And there has been, and still is in some quarters, a conviction that the belief of the Church in the assumption rests on nothing better or more stable than these Apocryphal stories; that the authors of these Apocrypha were inventing their stories out of nothing, and that in an uncritical age their legends came to be taken as history.  Thus was a belief in the assumption foisted upon the Church, having no slightest ground in fact.  The human tendency to fill in the silences of Scripture has resulted in many legends, that of the assumption among them.

There is a good deal to be said for this position, yet I do not feel that it is convincing.  That the incidents of the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary as narrated in the Apocrypha are historical, of course cannot be maintained.  But neither is it at all probable that such stories grew up out of nothing:  indeed, their existence implies that there were certain facts widely accepted in the Christian community that served as their starting point.  While the Apocryphal stories of the life of our Lady cannot be accepted as history, they do presuppose certain beliefs as universally, or at least widely, held.  Thus one may reject all the details of the story of the death and burial and assumption of our Lady, and yet feel that the story is evidence of a belief in the assumption among those for whom the story was written.  What was new to them was not the fact of the assumption but the detailed incidents with which the Apocrypha embroidered it.  I feel no doubt that these Apocryphal stories are not the source of belief in the assumption, but are our earliest witness to the existence of the belief.  They actually presuppose its existence in the Church as the necessary condition of their own existence.