Talk:Mary's Well

Untitled

I just wanted to thank everyone who has helped in formatting and contributing to this page. This is the first page that I created on Wikipedia and I very much appreciate all of you helping to make it look and be better. Warm regards, Tiamut 13:01, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Palestine category

The place is in Israel which is already in the region of Palestine if that's what the cat Palestine meant. No place for another Palestine category in this case. Amoruso 14:38, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Mary's Well was used by Palestinian Arabs. It is located in a Palestinian Arab town in Israel. The external link provided to Palguide is a reliable source that establishes the connection to Palestinian history at the very least. Accordingly, I have added the .Tiamut 21:08, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Rosicrucians

Am I the only one who doubts the Rosicrucians are a reliable source for historical information? 65.213.77.129 (talk) 13:34, 6 August 2009 (UTC)

No, you are not. This entire article seems to exist to further myths that have no more bearing on us today than where Rhea mother of Zeus went potty. (216.139.137.243 (talk) 15:09, 16 October 2015 (UTC))

Mary's Well in the Annonciation church

it seems that you have totally ignored that for Roma, the catholic Church and since imperator Helen in the IVth centuary CE, there is another Mary's well, the one located in the basement of the Annonciation Church or basilic. It is fed by the same source that the well close to the orthodox church and probably existed at least since the IId centry CE. A paragraph about this well should be added. --luxorion

@Luxorion: Hi. Sorry to say, but everything you have added looks sub-standard and should be removed until it can either be better substantiated, or proven wrong. I don't just mean the poor spelling ("Annonciation") and lack of Wiki editing skills, those are minor issues and not an obstacle for useful additions, but the basic matter of RS, reliable sources.

Every statement in this paragraph is highly unlikely; unsourced; as not mentioned in any reliable source. Susan Slyomovics is not a specialist, she most likely misunderstood the fact when writing an article concerned with image & memory, published in "The Journal of Cinema and Media"(!), while for instance the very detailed Terra Santa page has no mention of any well/spring tradition there (look up under "Archaeology" here).

So no spring at the Catholic basilica! The only theoretical possibility remaining would be a local tradition (legend, to be exact) among Nazareth Christians that there is a spring near the Holy Grotto, of which the Terra Santa page and all the other sources make no mention. But for that we would need a RELIABLE, explicit source, still to be provided.

"The Catholic Church believes the Annunciation to have taken place .... at the Basilica of the Annunciation..."

Yes, but the canonical Annunciation, at Mary's home, not the apocryphal one at the well.

"This basilica .... This place is also named Mary's Well."

By whom? Says who? Never came across such a claim in souces of the owners, the Catholic Church.

"St. Helena ... on the site where she found the source of Mary's Well."

Again, says who? Local Christians all over Palestine and Cyprus like to have their churches dated back to St Helen, but in Nazareth? Never came across such a claim. And a local tradition, IF (!) indeed it exists, would still be far from being a RS. If sourced, it could & should be mentioned as a legend with theological subtones, period.

"Excavations have shown that it is fed by the same source as the well close to the Orthodox church, and probably existed at least since the 2nd century."

Says who? Bagatti, the main Franciscan excavator, doesn't seem to mention any of it. On the contrary, the site is full of cisterns for collecting rain water, which would be unneeded if such a strong spring would provide the area with fresh water.

No source, no logic, so no justification to keep it here. Arminden (talk) 08:25, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Just noticed: there is no registered user by the name luxorion. Not essential, but the rest is.

Considering all the above, I have removed the paragraph from the article, leaving only the short notice from the lead. I'm now "parking" it here for possible future re-use, if RS are found.

"Mary's Well for Catholics"

The Catholic Church believes the Annunciation to have taken place less than 0.5 km away at the Basilica of the Annunciation, a now modern structure which houses an older church inside of it that dates from the 4th century.

This basilica was erected after a first small church was built there at the request of St. Helena, mother of Emperor Constantine, in the 4th century on the site where she found the source of Mary's Well. This place is also named Mary's Well. Today this source is located in the basement of the Annunciation basilica. Excavations have shown that it is fed by the same source as the well close to the Orthodox church, and probably existed at least since the 2nd century. Arminden (talk) 08:59, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

@Onceinawhile:, hi. I see now that you also took up this source. I'm editing from my phone and it's not easy. Pls mind A) the difference between canonical (Luke 1) and apocryphal (Gospel of James), and B) the difference between a possible local legend, if there is indeed one and not just a misunderstanding by Slyomovich, and archaeological or even theological claims made by the official Catholic side. To me, this all looks like a mistake, a scholar from an unrelated academic field running wild with a hypothesis based on no or little substance. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 09:18, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi Arminden, thanks for your work to improve this article. FYI Slyomovics is a professor in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA; her academic field is not unrelated. What specific point(s) are you uncertain about?

The work I did on this article a couple of months ago was to try to answer the core questions of:

• Why the well is revered - i.e. its proposed connection to the Annunciation
• Why two separate places are worshipped by the two separate churches
• Why the external well-head is there (and became known as The Well, despite there being two original places)
• Why all the wells/streams have stopped working, and when this happened

Further work is needed to make these points very clear. Onceinawhile (talk) 11:57, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

Hi Onceinawhile, I thank you too, your topic is very interesting and it answers a question that bugged me (I did already guess by myself that the water was cut off from the fountain in order to "force" people to visit the Orthodox church, but now I know it). The lady has very different acadenic specialties, but my issue here is connected to archaeology. She implies, or that's how she's being quoted, herself with little conviction ("maybe") and sermingly without clarifying where she got it from, that archaeological digs have shown that there's a 3rd "spring" somewhere under de Catholic basilica or the monastery there. No such thing, as far as I could research. Maybe she knows of some folkloristic belief, which would indeed be part of her expertise, that the spring water reaches the Catholic compound more than half a mile away, where a now lost outlet was witness to the "Annunciation at the well". Does she say that? As a legend, it would be worth mentioning in its own right, but only as such.

Nazareth Christians are also the only ones to believe that Jesus jumped from Mount Precipice to Mount Tabor, so I'm quite aware that folk religion can be extremely imaginative. It can't be allowed though that an encyclopedic article retells folk tales as being archaeological fact. This is the tendency among local or non-local religiously-motivated contributors, and we must be on the watch. Wiki is, when well edited, one of the few areas where obscurantism isn't encroaching back on us. 21st century, my foot.

With, I hope, enlightened greetings, yours always, Erasmus van Arminden (talk) 12:28, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

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Is this a public toilet or Wiki?

I removed text sourced on a novel written as an interview with a 1st-century Essene. How much lower can Wiki fall?

Google Books about the author: "Dolores Cannon is a past-life regressionist and hypnotherapist who specializes in the recovery and cataloging of "Lost Knowledge"." I see. Of course.

Here is the removed material. Maybe part of it was based on other sources and can be somehow recycled. Good luck and may the Force be with you!

An underground spring in Nazareth traditionally served as the city's main water source for several centuries, possibly millennia; however, it was not always referred to as "Mary's well" or "Mary's spring". In his book, The Bible as History, Werner Keller writes that "Mary's Well" or "Ain Maryam", as the locals called it, had been so named since "time immemorial" and that it provided the only water supply in the area. Arminden (talk) 10:02, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

References

Ancient bathhouse

I have removed from the article a sub-standard and possibly unrelated paragraph. Here it is, for possible recycling.

I have now placed back a shorter sub-section, with the basic info on possibly related installations. Pls mind that water could have been drawn directly from the spring, or the outlet now inside the church (17 m from the actual spring), so not from the well located another 130 m downhill.

The initial material looks like having been added by an interested local party, with no editing (or academic) experience: both this and the main article, Ancient Bath House of Nazareth, look similar - and similarly un-encyclopedic.

Issues:

• Is there any connection between fountain, bathhouse, and Christian tradition? That a bathhouse placed along an ancient road makes use of a good water source makes perfect sense. But that does not connect it in any way to the Marian tradition.
• Carbondating didn't offer any date older than the late-Crusader, or more likely, Mamluk period.
• Other archaeological work looks thoroughly inconclusive at best, and contradicting any pre-Crusader date at worst.
• 1st-century Nazareth was tiny and didn't reach so far (nor did it in the 19th c., for that matter). A "Roman bath used by Jesus" seems highly farfetched.

The material:

"Bathhouse"

Main article: Ancient Bath House of Nazareth

In the late 1990s, a local Nazareth couple, Elias and Martina Shama, were trying to discover the source of a water leak in their gift shop, Cactus, just in front of Mary's Well. Digging through the wall, they discovered underground passages that, upon further digging revealed a vast underground complex. A North American research team conducted high-resolution ground penetrating radar (GPR) surveys at a number of locations in and around Mary's Well in 2004–5 to determine appropriate locations for further digging to be conducted beneath the bathhouse. Samples were collected for radio-carbon dating and the initial data from GPR readings seem to confirm the presence of additional subterranean structures.

In 2003, archaeologist Richard Freund stated his belief that the site was clearly of Byzantine origins: "I am sure that what we have here is a bathhouse," he says, "and the consequences of that for archaeology, and for our knowledge of the well, are enormous."

Carbon 14 dating was done on 3 samples of charcoal, each was found to come from a very different time period, indicating the bath house had been used in multiple periods, and at least was used sometime between 1300 and 1400 CE. Arminden (talk) 13:22, 12 April 2023 (UTC)

References