The House of the Virgin Mary is located on Mount Koressos 7 km from Selcuk. When the ruin of the first century house was found in the 19th century, it was a venerated place visited by descendants of early Christians living in a nearby mountain village. They called it ‘Doorway to the Virgin’ and went there on pilgrimage each 15th August which is the Feast of the Assumption.
House of the Virgin Mary
The Ephesus connection started with Sister Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) and her vision that the Virgin Mary lived and died in a place south of Ephesus in Turkey.
The author Clemens Bretano recorded the German nun’s visions and embellished them using tourist guides. Two missionary priest then discovered an ancient ruined house in the vecinity of Ephesus in 1881 and again in 1891. The house was acquired and restored.
The house now called ‘House of the Virgin Mary’ is considered by Catholics to have been the home of Mary before she ascended into heaven. It is now a Catholic shrine serving as a chapel, complete with spring of water underneath the house and a steady flow of pilgrims visiting the house.
In 1896 Pope Leo XIII and in 1961 Pope John XXIII removed plenary indulgences from the Church of the Dormition in Jerusalem and instead bestowed them on pilgrims who visited Mary’s House in Ephesus. Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824) was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004. The dogma of the Assumption proclaimed in 1950 by Pope Pius XII elevated the status of the Ephesus site to ‘Holy Place’.
Arguments against the connection of the Virgin Mary with Ephesus:
- There is no early tradition of Mary living in Ephesus by any Church Father – Orthodox Christians would vouch for this.
- Acts of St John by Prochurus is a pseudepigrapha writing about the apostle John in Ephesus and his memories of Jesus. It was declared heretical at the Council of Nicaea in 787 AD and is classified as a Gnostic text. I am not saying it is a reliable document, but, none-the-less it makes no mention of the Virgin Mary ever having gone to Ephesus. It claims that John went there in the company of Prochurus himself.
- In the 13th century a prothonotary of Ephesus (prothonotary = chief clerk of a Byzantine law court) called Perdicas visited “the glorious tomb of the Virgin at Gethsemani” describing it in a poem. If this writer went from Ephesus to Jerusalem to seek out the tomb of the Virgin Mary to venerate it, he must have known she was not buried in Ephesus.
Who was the virgin of the ‘Doorway to the Virgin’?
There is another writing now entitled Acts of John in Rome but formerly entitled Acts of the Holy Apostle and Evangelist John the Theologian.
This text portrays John as remaining unmarried and being known as ‘the virgin’ in Ephesus. In my opinion, the ‘Doorway to the Virgin’ referred to John’s house with he himself being the virgin in question.
Acts of John in Rome describes John’s arrest in Ephesus for causing trouble at the
Temple of Artemis, his trial in Rome before the Emperor Domitian, and his banishment to the Island of Patmos instead of execution after the miracle he performed at the trial. Later on he returned to Ephesus, there are miracles of people being brought back to life, John organizes the church and appoints Polycarp as bishop of Ephesus.
Although presented among the writings labelled pseudepigrapha, this book Acts of John in Rome rings true to a much higher degree than other pseudepigrapha writings. It is said that Acts of John in Rome consists of stories about John handed down orally and written down by the Greek historian Eusebius of Caesarea sometime before he died in 339. (Acts of John, although written before 180 AD earlier than than the above, belonged to the Gnosticism movement of the 2nd century whose aim was to obtain secret spiritual knowledge (gnosis) – Gnostic writings are not reliable at all).
Merry and True 