When Muslims saw Mary

 

Catholic content-creator interviews Eastern Orthodox scholar abour Oriental Orthodox miracle witnessed by thousands of Muslims.

Yes, really. And they even mention Persinger´s speculations about earth lights and tectonic stress! Now, *that´s* a blast from the past (bring back Boomer science)! 

I admit that I never heard (or probably never heard - some of the photos look vaguely familiar) about the Zeitoun Marian apparitions, which took place above a Coptic church in Egypt during a period of several years around 1970. The original witnesses were Muslims, and since Christians are a minority in Egypt, it can be safely assumed that many in the large crowds which gathered ouside the church were followers of Islam, too. Nasser´s secular government decided to play it safe and apparently declared the apparitions to be genuinely supernatural! 

The Orthodox scholar Travis Dumsday (who has written an entire book on the topic) argues in the clip above that no convincing naturalist explanation has ever been put forward. He discusses the "tectonic strain" hypothesis at some length, apparently because its originator Michael Persinger tried applying it to the Zeitoun situation. 

Dumsday and his Catholic interviewer Cameron Bertuzzi also discuss theology at some length. For instance, why can´t Protestants accept Marian apparitions? There is a lot of conflict in the commentary section on precisely this issue. I get the impression that while Bertuzzi has no problem claiming Coptic apparitions for Catholic apologetics, Dumsday is somewhat more cautious about Fatima, no doubt because of the heavy Roman theological baggage surrounding it. (He doesn´t say it, but "errors of Russia" could, I suppose, be interpreted as a reference to Eastern Orthodoxy!) Note also that the Coptic Catholic Church, a pro-Rome breakaway from the Coptic Orthodox Church, accepted Our Lady of Zeitoun. So Bertuzzi´s positive appraisal of her could be seen as part of the Uniate project. 

While the Zeitoun apparitions are interesting to be sure, I think the theological angle is rather weak. After all, would Bertuzzi accept similar apparitions of al-Khidr, Krishna or the Three Nephites? Maybe, but I suspect he would like to use the same strategy as his Protestant critics in the commentary section and explain theme as demonic!

Finally, it´s not clear to me what exactly the crowds were really seeing. Even Dumsday tacitly admits that the best photos of "Mary" are also the most problematic ones...

Still, worth the while watching.