Lauded in the world’s two largest religions as the mother of God’s Chosen One—for Muslims a great prophet and for Christians God incarnate— Mary of Nazareth is almost without contest the most famous woman who ever lived. Yet, very little was recorded and preserved about her life that can be deemed historically reliable. The information contained in the New Testament is scarce by any standard, leaving the preservation of traditions about her final days to the writers of apocryphal works centuries later.
The Gospels Tell Little about Mary after Jesus’s Resurrection
The New Testament’s biographies of Jesus, called the Four Gospels, all mention Mary. Most well-known are the stories in Luke and Matthew of her miraculous pregnancy and the events surrounding Jesus’s birth. Mary appears in the Gospel of John at the foot of Jesus’s cross, where Jesus instructs the unnamed “disciple whom Jesus loved”—whom most scholars believe to be the author, John—to care for her as his own mother as Jesus hung dying. This touching scene is the only clue that the Gospels’ authors left for future readers to guess where Mary may have spent the last years of her life.
Later, in the book of Acts, Mary is mentioned as being present in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost, when Jesus’s followers encounter a special divine presence associated with the Holy Spirit. Apparently, Jesus’s mother was there for this event. But thereafter she is never mentioned again, and there are no early historical sources that mention her whereabouts.
Mary’s Death in Jerusalem
One could say there are two traditions about where Mary finished her life—though they are not necessarily irreconcilable. The prevailing of these holds that she remained in Jerusalem after Pentecost, where she died and was buried in a tomb in the Kidron Valley. Christians, especially of Orthodox traditions, as well as Muslims visit this tomb, which is housed by a Crusader-era church.
Orthodox churches hold to both the “dormition”—“falling asleep,” a euphemism for death—of Mary as well as her assumption. According to the earliest traditions about Mary’s last earthly days, Mary was placed in the tomb upon her death but it was found empty three days later. However, the earliest of these sources date to the fifth century, and some Catholic theologians argue that Mary never died at all. Admittedly, a truly “historical” reconstruction of Mary’s life after Jesus is difficult to build.
Mary Went to Ephesus with John
Another tradition holds that Mary completed her life in Anatolia, in what is the nation of Turkey today. Tourists to the ancient ruins of Ephesus often visit a small, Byzantine-era stone building called the House of Mary near the old city. While the earliest evidence of the belief that Mary had lived in Ephesus dates to the fourth or fifth centuries, this tourist attraction was built in the sixth at the earliest.
The story of Mary’s presence in Ephesus comes from the New Testament tradition that John, whom the dying Jesus had commissioned to care for his mother, had travelled to complete his own life’s work in this region. According to church tradition, John was the only one of Christ’s original disciples—besides Judas Iscariot—who did not die a martyr’s death. He did, however, suffer torture and exile on the island of Patmos, now a Greek island in the Aegean Sea off the southwest coast of Turkey. Perhaps John had brought Mary with him to Anatolia.
Mary’s Return to Jerusalem after Living in Ephesus
The fact that a tradition of reverence for the tomb of Mary in Jerusalem dates back to the early fifth century coupled with the fact that there is no traditional site for Mary’s tomb in Ephesus may suggest that it is more likely Mary died in Jerusalem than in Ephesus. Some point out, however, that this does not mean Mary never travelled to Ephesus with John. It is possible that she did live for a time there before returning to Jerusalem.
Still, one cannot help but notice the late date of the emergence of the story of Mary’s Ephesian domicile. Compared to the suggestion that Mary simply lived and died in her own homeland, this idea seems unnecessarily complicated. Interestingly, the apocryphal story entitled Transitus Mariae (Latin for “The Passing of Mary”) relates that John travelled from Ephesus to Jerusalem (or Bethlehem?) to be with Mary at her death.
Mary in Bethlehem
The earliest detailed description of Mary’s death and subsequent assumption into heaven is the aforementioned Transitus Mariae. In its Latin and Greek versions, this text says that the events of Mary’s dormition and assumption happened in Jerusalem. The story relates that a multitude of Jesus’s disciples gather around her at the news of her impending death. Yet despite the substantial number of witnesses allegedly present, variations appeared between the versions of this story that have been preserved in different languages. In the Greek (the oldest) and Latin versions, the events happen in Jerusalem. But in a later stream of the Syriac version, they occur mostly at a house Mary allegedly had in Bethlehem. In this version, Jesus’s disciples gather around her there, and afterward she and her entourage are miraculously transported to Jerusalem where she dies, is entombed, and then found to have ascended on high.
But no “tomb of Mary” can be visited by pilgrims in Bethlehem. Thus, Jerusalem remains the nearly uncontested location of Mary’s final days, and is probably the place where she lived the rest of her life after her son’s astonishing life.
