[1] The house was discovered in the 19th century by following the descriptions in the reported visions of Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774–1824), a Roman Catholic nun and visionary, which were published as a book by Clemens Brentano after her death.

During the drafting of the Second Vatican Council document Nostra Aetate, Maronite Catholic Archbishop Pietro Sfair highlighted the House of Mary and Marian devotion as a matter of shared interest between Christians and Muslims.

[5] Archbishop P. Sfair of the Maronite Rite (Rome) considered the reference which the declaration De non christianis made to the Muslims'adoration of the one and remunerating God as insufficient.

Marian tradition holds that some form of running water used to flow like a canal in the smaller room where the Virgin Mary slept and rested, leading to the present drinking fountain outside the building structure.

[7] Emmerich was ill for a long period of time in the farming community of Dülmen but was known in Germany as a mystic and was visited by a number of notable figures.

[8] One of Emmerich's accounts was a description of the house the Apostle John had built in Ephesus for Mary, the mother of Jesus, where she had lived to the end of her life.

When the case for Emmerich's beatification was submitted to the Vatican in 1892, a number of experts in Germany began to compare and analyze Brentano's original notes from his personal library with the books he had written.

[11] On October 18, 1881, relying on the descriptions in the book by Brentano based on his conversations with Emmerich, a French priest, the Abbé Julien Gouyet discovered a small stone building on a mountain overlooking the Aegean Sea and the ruins of ancient Ephesus in Turkey.

[15][16] They learned that the four-walled, roofless ruin had been venerated for a long time by members of the mountain village of Şirince, 17 km (11 mi) distant, who were descended from the early Christians of Ephesus.

Saint Epiphanius of Salamis in the fourth century was the first author in mentioning the traditional faith of the Assumption of Mary in body and soul to the Heaven, and coming from Ephesus.

Like many other patristic authors, he based this assumption on John 19,18-30, with Jesus on the Cross asking to the Apostle and Evangelist to take care of the Saint Mother of God into his home.