>Hi everybody,
>
>This is my first posting to medieval-religion
>
>
>In York Play XLIV, The Death of the Virgin, two Jews ask Mary to intercede
>for them because 'thou arte curtaise and comen of oure kynde'. I was struck
>by the phrase and wondered how much awareness was there of the Jewishness of
>Mary and Jesus in the late Middle Ages?
It depends on what you understand by "Jewishness". The Judaic descendance as
exposed in the genealogies of Mt 1,1ss. (and Lc 3,23ss.) was crucial to
support the belief that the incarnation was a fulfillment of OT prophecy
("ut adimpletur id quod dictum est a Domino per prophetam" Mt 1,22). But to
be Jew by birth was one thing, and becoming Christian by faith (and
baptism), was another. As I recall it, the Christian Fathers usually made a
case against, not for, the Jews when they stressed his Jewishness "secundum
carnem", because according to their interpretation the Jews directed their
hate against one of their own, who cared for their salvation as for the
salvation of his own people.
>
>A further question ensued: the Jews don't ask to convert to Christianity,
>but Mary intercedes for them anyway. The creeds (the Athanasian Creed in
>particular) state very specifically that salvation is not possible outside
>the Church. Was this an absolute?
Yes and no. The most famous case, I believe, is the story of the salvation
of Trajanus. The legend of Gregory the Great tells that Gregory, touched by
Trajanus' reputation of great justice, wept and/or prayed for his salvation
and then was told by a voice from Heaven that his prayer had been fulfilled.
If you look up the chapter on Gregory in the _Legenda aurea_, you will find
a long passage listing traditional attempts to harmonize this account with
the impossibility of salvation without repentance and sacrament, and with
the difficulty of imagining a saint praying for a damned. One of the
solutions accepted also by Thomas Aquinas (S.th. III suppl., q.71, 5) and by
Dante (Par. XX, 112ss., cf. Purg. X, 73ss.) was to infer that in response to
Gregory's prayer Trajanus was resuscitated to life and thus given a second
chance. See Dante's commentators on the passages cited above, and Gordon
Whatley, _The Uses of Hagiography. The Legend of Pope Gregory and the
Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages_, in: Viator 15 (1984), p.25-63.
Otfried Lieberknecht
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D-12163 Berlin
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