IN that example you claim she is not dead - because she was resurrected - and of course we find no support for that in the Bible
Either you’re claiming that people who die but are resurrected are still dead, which is a non-sequitur, except in the case of those who were resurrected temporarily but not taken into heaven immediately, for example, Lazarus, or you making an argument from silence which is fallacious, because many Christian doctrines are not explicitly contained in the text of Scripture (although with regards to the Theotokos being in Heaven this is not actually the case, as has been discussed elsewhere in this thread).
On the contrary you argue that before someone is found to be a saint it is valid right up until you find them to be a saint. The question remains.
Once again, you seem confused on the issue itself. Until we have certain knowledge that someone is saved (which we have immediately in the case of martyrs; also the circumstances of the Dormition of the Theotokos made it
immediately clear what had happened with regards to her), and thus alive, we assume they are reposed, and pray for them, so that they might be saved according to God’s mercy at the Last Judgement, since such prayers do no harm if they are in fact among those alive in Christ, and furthermore insofar as there are definitely saints in Heaven whose identity we are unaware of, that is what the Feast of All Saints is for (which is also the name day for anyone who is not named after a known existing saint or a saint commemorated on the liturgical calendar, except in some of the Eastern Orthodox churches such as the Greek Orthodox where in the case of women named after flowers, their name day is Pentecost Sunday (Whitsunday), which is particularly lovely.
As I said before, I reccommend that we begin from first principles, since apparently I have failed to communicate to you a number of basic aspects of the Orthodox and Patristic faith, and thus you are misinterpreting my remarks using an interpretive model based on a mixture of anti-Roman Catholic polemics and certain Roman Catholic doctrinal statements which are themselves easily misunderstood, and other Roman Catholic publications which are obsolete, but these are irrelevant in the case of the Orthodox, and indeed largely irrelevant with regards to the Roman Catholics insofar as the RC faith can be better understood if one first understands Eastern Orthodoxy.
*Eastern Orthodoxy, to be clear (and I would note Ellen G. White did not discuss it in any detail, and does not appear to have been aware of its existence apart from the Roman Catholic Church, which is understandable since during her life the only significant populations of Orthodox Christians in the US were in Alaska and parts of Pennsylvania and in certain urban areas not known for having large Adventist populations) is the ancient church from which the Romans separated themselves in 1054 because we would not accept Papal Supremacy, and also Oriental Orthodoxy, which became alienated from the Chalcedonians under Emperor Justinian following a mass persecution (which there is some reason to believe Justinian did not personally command, as he had been known for his warm disposition towards the Oriental Orthodox, adding an OO hymn to the EO liturgy, marrying a Syriac Orthodox woman, St. Theodora, who as Empress saved countless lives, and for his Theopaschitism, yet all of a sudden we have records of Emperor Justinian renouncing Theopaschitism and embracing the rival Apthartodocetist movement (not to be confused with the ancient heresy of Docetism), and persecuting the Oriental Orthodox seems very strange. But at any rate the effect was to completely alienate and isolate the Oriental Orthodox for several centuries, and likewise the Church of the East became isolated both geographically and because of its fourth century association with the Nestorius, although in the fifth century it rejected Nestorianism in favor of a Chalcedonian-derived Christological model articulated by Mar Babai the Great.
Now the temptation exists for Western Christians to regard the Eastern Churches as unimportant, but this is inadvisable, not only because the Eastern Churches are numerically, in the case of the Eastern Orthodox Communion the second largest denomination, and in the case of the Oriental Orthodox Communion, somewhere between seventh and fifth place in terms of denominational size, depending on how one counts the Reformed and Pentecostal Christians, but also because of the fact that the Eastern Christians account for the majority of Christian martyrs, particularly of martyrs not killed by other Christians in sectarian violence, due to the combination of the Islamic persecutions and the Communist persecutions and persecutions by Buddhists, Hindus and adherents of various unpleasant Pagan and Animist religions that persisted outside the shrinking borders of the Roman Empire. But most importantly, as churches which were never under the control of the Pope of Rome, and as extremely conservative churches, which in several cases were isolated for many centuries with no contact with other Christians, even of their own communion in the case of the Mar Thoma Christians of India, these churches stand as a reliable independent witness as to the beliefs of the Early Church (it additionally helps that many of them natively speak dialects of Greek, Aramaic, Armenian, the Slavic languages, Georgian and the Ethiopic family of languages, which enables easier learning of Koine Greek, Old Testament Aramaic, Gallilean Neo-Aramaic, Syriac Aramaic, Classical Armenian, Classical Georgian, Church Slavonic and Ge’ez, which along with Hebrew, Latin and Coptic are the languages in which the most important theological texts were written or originally translated into (specifically, the New Testament is written in Greek with an Aramaic substrate, and ancient translations into the aformentioned languages, the Syriac Peshitta and Vetus Latina being particularly interesting, the Old Testament in Hebrew and Aramaic, and with ancient translations into Greek and Ge’ez made centuries before the birth of Christ, and then the Patristic corpus, particularly the liturgical texts.
A knowledge of the ancient liturgical texts actually offers the best insight into the beliefs of the Early Church since the Early Church operated on the basis of Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi. Thus I study both the ancient manuscripts and also the liturgies of the Orthodox churches, the Assyrian church and certain Western Rite liturgies which have not changed much (and where they have changed, it is easy to document what changed, when, and why, because we have Patristic commentary in support of this).
What I think is interfering with your ability to analyze this issue is that, firstly, you haven’t read the ancient liturgical texts, and secondly, coming from an aliturgical church, aren’t aware of the implications of liturgical worship both in terms of doctrine and praxis, or what the significance is, for example, of a book being included in the New Testament canon (which is in some respects more important than what you seem to think, yet which also does not by any means imply that prior to canonical inclusion, that the book was unread or unknown, particularly since the early church had an open canon, and did not move to a closed canon until St. Athanasius forbade the liturgical use of books not in his protocanon, and the catechetical use of books he did not allow for that purpose (such as the Shepherd of Hermas), and the Church of Rome later anathematized the use of books outside of the Gelasian Canon, which was based on the Athanasian protocanon, and this marked the beginning of a partial transition from an open canon to a closed canon.
Interestingly the Lutheran churches have an open canon.
However, if a book is canonical, but not read in the lectionary, this is also an important distinction; the judge of the relative importance of books of Scripture to the early church and in the liturgical churches of the present can be ascertained from the frequency with which they were read in Church or quoted in Patristic homilies.
In this respect it is clear that the four canonical Gospels are the most important Scriptures and the center of Sacred Tradition, from which everything else that we regard as Holy Tradition radiates. Thus I have a particular issue with churches which do not have at least one Gospel lesson every Sunday.
