Thomas and the Dormition

A widespread liturgical and hagiographical tradition holds that Thomas, absent at the Falling-Asleep of the Theotokos, arrived only after her burial; that the apostles opened her tomb for him to venerate her body, and found it empty save for the burial shroud — a sign confirming her bodily translation to heaven. This file sets out that tradition and pins it to its attestation in the apocryphal Dormition (Transitus) narratives and the Euthymiac History quoted by John of Damascus, presenting it as venerable liturgical tradition rather than asserted history.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Tradition

In the developed tradition of the Dormition of the Theotokos, kept by the Church on August 15, the apostles were miraculously gathered from their mission fields to be present at the death and burial of the Mother of God in Jerusalem. Thomas, according to a widespread strand of the tradition, was the one apostle who did not arrive in time: borne (in many tellings) on a cloud from his distant mission in India, he came only after the Theotokos had been buried (Shoemaker 2002; the Transitus literature). Grieved to have missed the burial, he asked to venerate her body; the apostles opened the tomb for him — and found it empty, containing only the grave-clothes or the burial shroud (and, in some tellings, fragrant with myrrh). The empty tomb was received by the apostles as the confirmation of what the Church confesses: that the Theotokos had been raised and translated bodily to her Son, her body not left to corruption (Shoemaker 2002; Festal Menaion, the Dormition).

There is a deliberate and much-noted fittingness in this. The apostle whose doubt at the Resurrection of Christ secured for the Church the bodily reality of that Resurrection (see The Doubt) is, in the Dormition tradition, the apostle whose very lateness — itself a kind of “doubt” or absence — occasions the discovery that confirms the bodily translation of the Theotokos. The tradition turns Thomas’s recurring role of the late and doubting one into the instrument of certainty a second time: as at the Resurrection, so at the Dormition, it is through Thomas that the Church receives the assurance of a body raised (this typological reading is common in the homiletic and hymnographic tradition; cf. Shoemaker 2002).

The Attestation

The honest handling of this tradition requires marking clearly what it rests on, for it is late in its written attestation and is not found in Scripture. The narrative of the apostles’ gathering, the Theotokos’s death and burial, and the empty tomb belongs to the apocryphal Dormition or Transitus Mariae literature, which begins to appear in the fifth and sixth centuries and develops through many recensions in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, and other languages (Shoemaker 2002, the standard study of this literature). The specific motif of the empty tomb opened for a late-arriving apostle is most influentially transmitted to the Byzantine tradition through the Euthymiac History, a (now-lost) work quoted at length by John of Damascus in his Second Homily on the Dormition — though the apostle named in the passage Damascene quotes is the occasion of the tomb’s opening in the context of the Empress Pulcheria’s request for relics, and the developed identification of the late apostle specifically as Thomas is carried by the broader liturgical and iconographic tradition (John of Damascus, Homily II on the Dormition, quoting the Euthymiac History; trans. Daley 1998; Shoemaker 2002). [Disputed: the empty-tomb-of-the-Theotokos motif and the gathering of the apostles are securely attested only from the fifth–sixth-century Dormition apocrypha and the *Euthymiac History* cited by John of Damascus (8th c.); the specific role of *Thomas* as the late-arriving apostle is firm in the later liturgical and iconographic tradition but is not uniformly the earliest form of the narrative, some recensions of which do not single him out — Shoemaker (2002) surveys the variants. The tradition is therefore late hagiographical and liturgical tradition, not a datum of the apostolic age.]

Pinned, Not Historicized

In keeping with the repository methodology, this tradition is pinned to its earliest written attestation and presented as the liturgical and hagiographical tradition it is, not asserted as history (METHODOLOGY §3.5, §4). Several points keep the handling honest. First, the bodily translation of the Theotokos is itself held in the Orthodox Church as a matter of liturgical confession and tradition rather than conciliar dogma in the way the Roman Catholic Assumption was defined in 1950 — the Orthodox keep the Dormition and confess her translation in their prayer and hymnody without a defining council (see The Theotokos). Second, the Thomas-and-the-empty-tomb episode is a narrative element within the broader Dormition tradition, attested in the apocryphal Transitus literature and the Euthymiac History, and received by the Church as edifying tradition — it is not Scripture and is not a separate dogmatic datum. Third, the tradition’s value is theological and typological: it expresses, in narrative form, the Church’s faith in the Theotokos’s bodily glorification, and it does so through the figure of Thomas precisely because of his role at the Lord’s Resurrection. The collection therefore reports the tradition fully and reverently, names its (late) sources, and refrains from presenting it as a historical record of the apostolic age.

In the Church’s Prayer and Image

The tradition lives in the Church’s worship and iconography even where it is not historicized. The hymnography of the Dormition and the iconography of the feast preserve the gathering of the apostles, and a distinct iconographic tradition depicts Thomas receiving the sash (cincture) of the Theotokos as she is borne up — the subject of the companion file (see The Sash of the Theotokos). In this way the late-arriving apostle, who in the Resurrection narrative came a week late and then confessed, is given in the Dormition tradition a role of honor: he is the one to whom the departing Mother of God grants a sign and a relic, and through whom the empty tomb is discovered. The Church keeps the tradition as a window onto the mystery of the Dormition, not as a chronicle — venerable, beloved, and pinned to its attestation.

See Also

References

  • John of Damascus. Homily II on the Dormition of the Theotokos. In On the Dormition of Mary: Early Patristic Homilies, trans. Brian E. Daley. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998. (Quotes the Euthymiac History; the opening of the tomb.)
  • Shoemaker, Stephen J. Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (The standard study of the Transitus literature and its recensions.)
  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (The Dormition; the hymnography of the feast.)