Roman Catholic scholar Ludwig Ott put it in his older work, often considered the definitive work summarizing Roman Catholic dogma: “the idea of the bodily assumption of Mary is first expressed in certain transitus-narratives of the fifth and sixth centuries. . . . The first Church author to speak of the bodily assumption of Mary, in association with an apocryphal transitus B.M.V., is St. Gregory of Tours.”11 In another significant older text, Roman Catholic scholar Walter Burghardt writes, “The investigation of patristic documents might well lead the historian to the conclusion: In the first
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