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Recently, Joe Rogan interviewed Texas State Representative James Talarico, who tried to use the New Testament account of the Annunciation to argue for pro-abortion politics.
Robyn Walsh, of “Team Bart Ehrman” took exception, as she should. Unfortunately, she took a wrong turn in explaining the Annunciation.
In this episode, walks us through what Luke really says in his account of the Annunciation and reveals why it doesn’t mean what Robyn (or James) said it does.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
ROBYN WALSH: Does Mary consent to her conception in the Gospel of Luke?
Well, Mary’s conception isn’t mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. Mary’s conception occurred in the womb of her mother several years before the Gospel of Luke begins.
I think what you mean is, “Does Mary consent to Jesus’ conception in the Gospel of Luke.”
ROBYN: Hi everybody. My name is Robyn Walsh. I’m a scholar of New Testament and early Christianity and part of Paths in Biblical Studies, and I’ve been sick this whole week.
Robyn has previously described herself as a member of Bart Ehrman’s team, and here she says she was sick last week.
Yeah, I totally sympathize. I was sick all last week, too. I just got back from Italy, and I got a chest cold coming back.
I think it has something to do with sitting in a long metal tube with recycled air from coughing people for 10 hours straight.
Anyway, I totally sympathize with being sick last week.
ROBYN: I spent a lot of time on the couch scrolling, TikTok, I admit it.
Yeah, I don’t do TikTok, and I don’t spend time on my couch, but I still sympathize.
ROBYN: And I came across the following clip. We’re going to do something a little different today. I’m going to show this clip and then I want to talk about some of the issues that it raises.
Okay, let’s get into it!
* * *
Howdy, folks!
Remember that you can help me keep making this podcast—and you can get early access to new episodes—by going to Patreon.com/JimmyAkinPodcast
Introduction
So Robyn plays a clip of Joe Rogan talking to Texas state representative James Talarico.
JOE ROGAN: What do you think is the biblical evidence to support the opinion of being pro-abortion?
JAMES TALARICO: Mary is probably my favorite figure in the Bible, the mother of Jesus, and she is an oppressed, peasant, teenage girl living in poverty under an oppressive empire as a Jew, and she has a vision from God that she’s going to give birth to a baby who’s going to bring the powerful down from their thrones. God asks for Mary’s consent, which is remarkable. I mean, go back and read this in Luke. I mean, the angel comes down and asks Mary if this is something she wants to do, and she says, if it is, God’s will, let it be done, let it be happen. So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories, that creation has to be done with consent. You cannot force someone to create. Creation is one of the most sacred acts that we engage in as human beings, but that has to be done with consent. It has to be done with freedom, and to me that is absolutely consistent with the ministry and life and death of Jesus.
So James Talarico is a Presbyterian, and he is reportedly a former pastor, which means he ought to know this passage from Luke 1 better than he does, because he’s not remembering what happens in it completely correctly.
And I’m not even going to go into his attempt to use this passage in the service of pro-abortion politics.
No one denies that women should only conceive children that they consent to conceiving. To deny that would be to advocate rape.
But that’s a separate question from whether you can kill a child after it has been conceived.
According to Texas Right to Life, James has a 0% pro-life voting score, and frankly, I find Talarico’s attempt to use the mother of Jesus to support the idea of killing children in the womb to be disgusting.
Mary’s Statement in Translation
But that’s not what we’re here to discuss today. The reason Robyn plays the clip is to set up a discussion of whether Mary is actually consenting to Jesus’ conception in the Gospel of Luke.
ROBYN: The reason I found this particular clip so interesting is that I came across it and I was so struck by the idea that Mary would consent or that consent as a concept would be something operational for the New Testament, that I immediately went back to the text and I went back to my study Bible, but I also went back to the Greek.
Okay, so what did you see when you read your English study Bible?
ROBYN: So I’m looking at Harper Collins, study Bible here. That’s my English. Go-to NRSV, your revised standard version Bible. And so the angel appears to Mary and says to her quote, so this is the English translation here, the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you, therefore the child to be born. Sometimes there’s a note here that it says to be born of you, so just in the generative will be holy. He will be called son of God.
And then the angel talks about Elizabeth, nothing’s impossible with God if Elizabeth can conceive. And then here’s the line. Then Mary said, here am I the servant of the Lord. Let it be with me according to your word. Then the angel departed from her. So if I read that English translation and I am thinking in a contemporary sense about the problem, the issue, the political matter, the interpretation, biblical interpretation around the concept of consent, a very modern debate for us, and this time in space, obviously then you can read that passage certainly that way.So Robyn acknowledges that you can read this passage as Mary consenting to become the mother of the Son of God.
So what’s the issue?
ROBYN: But I want to be clear that that is a later interpretation in translation of a passage that is being put to use for contemporary purposes. What’s interesting is that this later interpretation of this text is being tactically used as a justification for a particular kind of legislative action or perspective.
Robyn is raising a good point here. People often read biblical texts and then rush to apply them to contemporary questions that the original biblical text was not trying to answer.
And we don’t want to do that. We don’t want to press the text beyond what we can properly infer from it.
But people often abuse the text in exactly this way.
If it even sounds like it’s on kinda-sorta the same subject that we’re interested in, people will assume that it’s trying to answer a modern question that people have—whether in theology or politics or science or something else—and then offer the text as proof of some modern position, even if that is not what the original author was trying to do.
People of all different persuasions do this. Atheists do it, agnostics do it, Jewish people do it, Catholics do it, Protestants do it, Presbyterian former pastors from Texas do it.
This is a common human failing, and Robyn is right to point it out.
In this case, Robyn is responding to James Talarico’s attempt to use Luke 1 to support pro-abortion policies, and she’s right to question how he’s handling the text.
However, her line of questioning is going to concern whether Mary consented to Jesus’ conception.
She’s already acknowledged that if you read an English translation of Luke with the question in mind of whether Mary is consenting to Jesus’ conception, you can read it that way.
ROBYN: You can read that passage certainly that way.
But she’s also right when she says:
ROBYN: It’s not the case that the ancient text always can bear that interpretation.
Correct. Modern people often misinterpret ancient texts—either because of a translation problem or because they are reading the text through the lens of their own ideas, and that causes distortion.
Mary’s Statement in Greek
So what do we find if we look at this text in the original language?
ROBYN: And if you go back and look at the Greek for the first chapter of Luke, I think it’s a lot messier. If you think about the ancient Mediterranean world than that particular interpretation and translation would lead you to believe. Many, many discourses stories in the ancient Mediterranean world had mortal women conceive the children of Gods. This happens in the Greek and Roman pantheon. This happens in Egypt. This happens all around the ancient Mediterranean, and certainly Christianity as such is borrowing from a motif that you find elsewhere. And so it’s not so exceptional in the case of Jesus, when you think about what’s going on in the first century, in the ancient Mediterranean world where this kind of story was all over the place.
Okay, here Robyn has slipped a groove. She starts by saying we’re going to look at the Greek of the passage in Luke 1.
ROBYN: if you go back and look at the Greek for the first chapter of Luke . . .
But then she abandons the text of Luke and starts talking about other religions.
ROBYN: Many, many discourses stories in the ancient Mediterranean world had mortal women conceive the children of gods.
So Robyn is going on a detour from talking about the Greek text of Luke 1. But, hey, Robyn’s been sick, so I’ll cut her some slack on that.
Aliens and Atlantis!
She gets into more problematic territory when she says:
ROBYN: And certainly Christianity as such is borrowing from a motif that you find elsewhere.
Yeah, that doesn’t follow. Just because Christianity shares a motif that is found elsewhere, that doesn’t mean Christianity is borrowing the motif from elsewhere.
Robyn is ignoring the possibility of independent origination, and this is a mistake commonly made in many circles.
For example, ancient astronaut theorists have noted that they have pyramids in Egypt and that they also have pyramids in Mesoamerica, and they’ve proposed that these pyramids must have a common origin.
Like maybe aliens taught the ancient Egyptians and the ancient Mesoamericans to build pyramids.
Or maybe—if it wasn’t aliens—it was refugees from Atlantis.
But it’s just a mistake to assume things like this, because similar things can have independent origins.
There are only so many basic geometrical shapes that you can use to construct buildings with ancient technology, and the basic pyramidal structure is one of them.
This shape also looks like a hill, and hills were important in both Egypt and Mesoamerica.
In Egyptian belief, the world began with a primordial hill known as the BenBen that rose out of the waters of chaos, and this is reflected in Egyptian pyramids.
While in Mesoamerica hills were things that you went up to meet the gods. That’s why they have a temple to the gods at the top of Mesoamerican pyramids.
But you don’t have temples for meeting gods at the top of Egyptian pyramids. Instead, in Egypt, pyramids were used as tombs, and all the action is inside the pyramid instead.
If you take these differences into account—among other factors—most archaeologists have concluded that the Egyptian pyramids and the Mesoamerican pyramids have different origins.
So—Robyn—don’t be like those ancient alien and Atlantis theorists and assume that just because a motif appears in more than one place that it must have a common origin.
While they may have had stories of the gods fathering children by human women in other cultures around the Mediterranean, none of these cultures were Jewish.
And there would have been significant resistance in Jewish circles to the idea of God having a Son by a mortal woman.
So we have reason to propose an independent origin for the stories about the birth of Jesus compared to the birth of divine offspring in other cultures.
Back to Mary’s Statement in Greek
But let’s get back to Mary’s statement in Greek.
ROBYN: And so the text in Luke when you look at the Greek, really corresponds with what you would expect in an ancient Mediterranean context. So just to kind of break it down for you what the angel says, and he’s using the future tense here. He has appeared to Mary, and he’s not so much saying, do you mind if this happens? He’s saying, here’s what’s going to go down. This is going to happen. Then this. He’s not really asking for her opinion. He’s just kind of being like, he’s listing the facts. This is what’s going to go down. So Mary says, she uses this word, idou, which just means kind of look. In this case, behold, it’s a word that often starts sentences in Greek. It’s almost sometimes sort of idiomatic. I think that people are like, look, and then blah, blah, blah. So we see this word a lot, but idou.
Then she says that she is the word in Greek is doulos, and here it’s doule, but that she’s, the word is in Greek is Lord the kuriou, but she’s the doulos or the doule of the Lord, Lord, meaning almost like king here, it’s being translated as Most High, but it would be the word for the Lord, the guy in charge. But the word dolos means slave. It means somebody who’s enslaved. It gets translated, sort of softened in the English, a servant of God, but she is enslaved to God. She is a slave of God. So whatever you say, okay, it’s not so much consent.
So there’s a bunch of stuff here, and we’ll go through it bit-by-bit and break it down. First, Robyn says:
ROBYN: What the angel says, and he’s using the future tense here . . .
This is true. When Gabriel shows up, he uses the future tense and says what will happen to Mary—meaning in the future.
I often point this out, because many people assume that what he’s talking about is happening as he’s describing it.
So he says you will conceive a Son, and bang! People think she becomes pregnant that moment.
But this is not what the grammar of the passage suggests. Gabriel uses the future tense to describe what will happen to Mary in the future, not at this very moment.
So, points to Robyn for pointing that out. However, the conclusion she draws from it is more problematic.
ROBYN: He’s not so much saying, do you mind if this happens? He’s saying, here’s what’s going to go down. This is going to happen. Then this. He’s not really asking for her opinion. He’s just kind of being like, he’s listing the facts. This is what’s going to go down.
It’s true that Gabriel is stating what’s going to happen in the future, but Robyn is leaving out an important aspect of the context. We’ll see what that is when I go back through this passage.
Next, Robyn says:
ROBYN: So Mary says, she uses this word, idou, which just means kind of Look. In this case, behold, it’s a word that often starts sentences in Greek. It’s almost sometimes sort of idiomatic. I think that people are like, look, and then blah, blah, blah. So we see this word a lot, but idou.
I’m not sure why Robyn makes a big deal of the word Idou. I don’t see what it adds to her argument.
But what she’s referring to is when Mary responds to Gabriel and says:
Luke 1:38, ESV
And Mary said, “Behold [idou], I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
Robyn is correct that you can translate the word look or behold, but she doesn’t handle its nuance well. She makes it sound exasperated, like “Look!”
ROBYN: Look . . .
But it’s problematic to translate it that way because we don’t use this word to begin sentences except when there is a note of negativity, like, “Look, I told you to stop by the store on your way home.”
And idou doesn’t require that negativity in Greek. If you check the standard Greek dictionary known as BDAG—for its editors, Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich—you’ll see that it is a particle that draws attention to what follows.
So its function is drawing attention to what follows—or stressing it—not conveying exasperation or frustration.
That’s why, in older English, they would translate it “behold,” meaning “pay attention to what I say next.”
Unfortunately, we don’t use behold to begin sentences in contemporary English, but if I were to give it a more neutral contemporary English translation, I’d be tempted to use, “Hey, look” as in, “Hey, look, I’m the servant of the Lord! I’m on the same page as you are. I agree.”
Robyn then turns to the phrase translated “servant of the Lord,” and she explains the original Greek in a rather confusing way. In Greek, the phrase translated the servant of the Lord is:
Luke 1:38, ESV
And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord [hé doulé kuriou]; let it be to me according to your word.” And the angel departed from her.
Hé is the definite article, so it means “thus.”
Doulé is the feminine form of the word doulos, which means servant or slave.
And kuriou is the genitive form of the word kurios, or “lord,” so kuriou means “of the Lord.”
Hé doulé kuriou thus means “the servant of the Lord” or “the slave of the Lord.”
And this is the distinction that Robyn is calling attention to.
ROBYN: The word dolos means slave. It means somebody who’s enslaved. It gets translated, sort of softened in the English, a servant of God, but she is enslaved to God. She is a slave of God’s. So whatever you say, okay, it’s not so much consent.
So—if we set aside the detour into the meaning of the word idou—Robyn has two arguments for why Mary shouldn’t be seen as consenting to Jesus’ conception in this passage: First, Gabriel uses the future tense to announce what will happen, and second, that Mary says she is the slave of the Lord.
Mary’s Statement in Context
Now let’s go back through the exchange in Luke 1 and see what we find when we read it in context. It begins this way:
Luke 1:26-27, ESV
In the sixth month [of Elizabeth’s pregnancy,] the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.
Okay, so Gabriel shows up and appears to the Virgin Mary. What happens next?
Luke 1:28, ESV
And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”
So Gabriel appears and immediately says two positive things. First, he gives her a positive greeting, which is rendered O favored one in this translation, and second he says the Lord is with you.
But it can be kind of startling to have an angel show up out of nowhere, and so Mary doesn’t initially process how positive this message is. Luke says:
Luke 1:29, ESV
But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.
Now it’s up to Gabriel to reassure her, and so we read:
Luke 1:30, ESV
And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”
So the angel is continuing to be positive, and he’s building up to sharing some exciting news with Mary, which is what he now does. He says:
Luke 1:31-33, ESV
“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
So, all kinds of good stuff here. Mary is going to conceive in her womb, she is going to bear a son, he will be great—meaning a very important person—and he will be called the Son of the Most High. God will give him the throne of his father David—meaning Mary is going to be the mother of the long-awaited Messiah. How exciting is that! Her son will reign over the house of Jacob—or Israel—forever, and his kingdom will never end.
So, Gabriel shows up with an astonishingly positive and exciting message for Mary.
But Mary has a question:
Luke 1:34, ESV
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
Or—to translate it more literally from Greek,
Luke 1:34
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I do not know man?”
Well, Gabriel is ready to answer that, and he says:
Luke 1:35, ESV
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God.”
So this is even more exciting. Not only will Mary be the mother of the Messiah, she’ll be the mother of the Son of God himself!
And Gabriel is packing additional evidence to prove that this will really happen. He says:
Luke 1:36-37, ESV
“And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
So don’t think it’s impossible for you to have a son, Mary, just because you’re a virgin. Nothing is impossible for God, and he’s already given a miraculous child to your relative Elizabeth, so he can give one to you, too.
Luke 1:38, ESV
And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
And the angel departed from her.
So that’s the whole context for Mary’s statement that we are discussing.
Robyn’s First Argument
Now let’s consider that in light of Robyn’s first argument, which was that Gabriel—
ROBYN: He’s not so much saying, do you mind if this happens? He’s saying, here’s what’s going to go down. This is going to happen. Then this. He’s not really asking for her opinion.
He’s just kind of being like, he’s listing the facts. This is what’s going to go down. He’s saying, here’s what’s going to go down. This is going to happen. Then this, this. He’s not really asking for her opinion. He’s just kind of being like, he’s listing the facts. This is what’s going to go down.
Robyn is correct that Luke does not present Gabriel saying, “Do you mind if this happens”—or words to the same effect.
So in a strict sense, Gabriel never asks for Mary’s consent. He never poses any questions to her.
But he’s also not doing what Robyn says, which is just listing facts that are going to happen in the future, irrespective of what Mary thinks about them.
Instead, Gabriel is relentlessly positive.
Luke 1:28-37, ESV
And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”
But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.
And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”
“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
He says, “O favored one, the Lord is with you!” “You have found favor with God.”
Gabriel is nothing but positive toward Mary and—putting it in human terms—he’s excited about the wonderful news he has to tell her!
you will conceive, you will bear a son, he will be great, he will be called the Son of the Most High. God’s going to give him the throne of his father David. He’ll reign over Israel forever. His kingdom will never end. So you’re going to be the mother of the long-awaited Messiah! How great is that!
And don’t worry about the fact that you don’t know man. The Holy Spirit will come upon you. The child will be called holy—the Son of God! Nothing is impossible for God!
So Gabriel isn’t just telling Mary what’s going to happen in a matter-of-fact way. He’s as excited as an angel can be to deliver this wonderful news to Mary, and he assumes that Mary will understand it to be just as wonderful as he does.
That presents a different picture than the one Robyn gives us.
ROBYN: He’s saying, here’s what’s going to go down. This is going to happen. Then this, this. He’s not really asking for her opinion. He’s just kind of being like, he’s listing the facts. This is what’s going to go down.
Yeah, no. Gabriel is not just listing facts. He’s sharing joyous, wonderful news, and he expects Mary to be just as excited by this news as he is.
Robyn’s Second Argument
Which leads us to Robyn’s second argument, which concerns the last part of the text in Luke:
Luke 1:38, ESV
And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant [or slave] of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
Robyn argued that this shouldn’t be read as Mary giving consent to the angel’s message because
ROBYN: She says that she is the doulos or the doula of the Lord, but the word dolos means slave. It means somebody who’s enslaved. It gets translated, sort of softened in the English, a servant of God, but she is enslaved to God. She is a slave of god’s. So whatever you say, okay, it’s not so much consent, and I don’t mean to be flippant in kind of my interpretation, but when she says, behold I’m enslaved to God, it’s like, yep. So then let it happen. Then you just told me what’s going to go down? Yeah. It’s not so much consent as acknowledgement that this is what’s going to happen, really, whether she wants to or not, frankly.
Frankly, I think Robyn is misreading the nuances here. Let’s start with the word doulos or—in the feminine, doulé, which Mary applies to herself.
This term can be translated either slave or servant. It can also be translated other ways, like bondservant, handmaiden, and others—because terms usually have a semantic range that can correspond to multiple other terms, especially when it comes to English, which has an unusually large vocabulary.
Now, it’s true that English translations often soften the word doulos by translating it as “servant” rather than “slave,” but there’s a good reason for that.
Particularly in the last 200 years, the word slave has acquired new connotations in English that it didn’t use to have.
Today, the term slave is a highly loaded word. In fact—in just the last few years—some people have even begun avoiding the word and saying things like “enslaved person” or “somebody who’s enslaved”—
ROBYN: Somebody who’s enslaved.
to avoid saying the word slave. That’s an illustration of how charged the word has become.
And because of recent historical experiences—such as American slavery—the word has also become tangled up with evils like racism, so all of the negative connotations of racism get transferred to the word slave.
It’s thus no surprise that English Bible translators would look for a term that doesn’t have the same highly negative connotations that the word slave has for many English-speaking readers today.
Because—in the ancient world—doulos did not strike people the way the word slave strikes us today.
In the first place, people weren’t crossing oceans to get slaves, so the slaves were the same color as everybody else in society. They often were people who had just gotten into too much debt or who lost a battle in wartime, and they looked just like everybody else. So the evils of racism were not associated with this concept.
And second, slavery was accepted in their culture, so it didn’t carry the social stigma that it does in ours.
No, being a slave wasn’t preferred. It was better to be your own boss as a free person, but slavery also wasn’t regarded as cruel or unusual. In the Roman world, even slaves owned other slaves.
Slaves also could earn money and become wealthy, and they sometimes had what would be regarded as high-status jobs in the modern world—like being teachers, doctors, accountants, and entertainers, meaning that some slaves were celebrities, just like we have entertainer celebrities today.
It also was often a temporary condition for many slaves, as it was very common for slaves to be manumitted, upon which they would become what were known in Latin as Liberti or = Freedmen.
Freedmen—or former slaves—could even vote, become Roman citizens, and stand for certain political offices. They typically took the name of their former owner as a sign of gratitude, and their former owner became their patron in Roman society and would look out for them and do them favors.
Also, free-born children of former slaves had full status as fully free citizens.
This hope of being freed and having your children be fully free citizens was part of what kept slavery palatable in the Roman world. It’s what made it acceptable to many, which is part of why it lasted so long.
So no, slavery was not the same in the Roman world as what the word conjures to our ears, and so biblical translators have tried to find alternatives for how to render doulos and doulé in English in a way that reflects the different connotations slavery had in the first century compared to the connotations it has today.
One way they’ve done this is by using another term that’s derived from the Latin word for slave. That word is Servus, and it gives us the English word = Servant. You can even hear how servus and servant sound the same.
But servant doesn’t have the sharply negative connotations that slave does to modern English-speaking ears. Like being a servus in the first century, being somebody’s servant is not the ideal condition. Most people would prefer to be their own bosses.
But being a servant doesn’t have the harshly negative connotations for us that being a slave does, and so biblical translators have often used servant instead of slave because it has connotations more like the Greek doulos and doulé did for the ancients.
There’s thus a good reason why English translators often use servant, and you can’t just translate every use of doulos as “slave” without changing the connotations it had for the original audience.
This is something Robyn is ignoring in her argument.
She’s also ignoring the fact that there were fictive or metaphorical uses of the term in the ancient world.
For example, in 1 Samuel 20, David is talking to Jonathan, and he describes himself as Jonathan’s servant or slave. David says:
1 Samuel 20:8, ESV
Therefore deal kindly with your servant [‘ebed], for you have brought your servant [‘ebed] into a covenant of the Lord with you.
This uses the Hebrew equivalent of doulos—or ‘Ebed, which also means = Servant or Slave.
While in the Septuagint Greek translation of the Old Testament, it uses the term doulos itself:
1 Samuel [1 Kingdoms] 20:8, Lexham English Septuagint
So act compassionately with your servant [doulos], because you brought your slave [doulos] into a covenant of the Lord
So we’re clearly talking about the same concept.
But it’s clear that this is not a literal usage, because David was not literally the slave of Jonathan.
The two were fast friends, and neither owned the other. In fact, David was going to be the future king, and Jonathan knew and accepted this. So David was actually in a higher position than Jonathan.
Thus, this is a fictive or metaphorical usage that doesn’t correspond to literal slavery. Instead, it’s a form of politeness where someone who is not literally a slave is describing himself as one to convey politeness.
We used to have the same thing in English. It’s where we get the word “Mister” which comes from the word master.
So in the past, English-speakers would refer to others as “Master” as a sign of politeness, even though they were not a slave and the person they were showing this politeness to was not literally their master.
Over time, we started pronouncing master as mister, giving us the modern honorific for most men.
The same thing is how we got missus. That’s based on the older word mistress—the female equivalent of master. And it was also used for politeness toward women, even if you were not their slave and they were not literally your mistress.
So whether it’s Master, Mistress, Mister, or Missus, we have the same kind of fictional or metaphorical uses of terminology to signal politeness, even when we’re not literally anybody’s slave.
Well—whether you’re in the ancient world or the modern one—if there’s anybody you want to be polite towards, it’s God. Thus, in the Psalms, we read:
Psalm 116:16, ESV
O Lord, I am your servant [‘ebed];
I am your servant [‘ebed], the son of your maidservant [’amah].
You have loosed my bonds.
So, out of politeness, people would also refer to themselves as servants or slaves of God, even though this usage was fictive or metaphorical in that God didn’t literally control what you did every moment of the day the way human masters could with their slaves.
God may have given us a set of laws to live by, but those laws didn’t govern every moment of your life, and God also gave you free will to decide what to do for yourself unless he’d also given you a specific law or mandate for what to do in a particular case.
We find the same fictive or metaphorical usage in the New Testament. It even applies within the Christian community. Thus, in Mark 10, Jesus tells the disciples:
Mark 10:42-44, ESV
“You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. . . . and whoever would be first among you must be slave [doulos] of all.
But this is clearly another fictive or metaphorical reference. Jesus is not saying that if you want to be a good Christian, you must literally sell yourself into slavery to all the other Christians.
In fact, Jesus himself is known for saying that “No one can serve two masters” (Matthew 6:24, ESV). So he’s not telling people they need to literally sell themselves into slavery to multiple other Christians.
Instead, he’s saying that they need to adopt an attitude of service to other Christians, so this is another fictive or metaphorical reference.
The same thing is true with God in the New Testament. For example, at the beginning of Romans, St. Paul describes himself by saying that he is:
Romans 1:1, ESV
Paul, a servant [doulos] of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God.
This is another metaphorical usage. Everybody knew that Paul was not a slave of Jesus Christ in the ordinary sense.
Paul may have thought that Jesus paid a price on the Cross such that he bought the entire world in some sense, but Jesus wasn’t a regular slave owner the way others were. He didn’t direct what Paul was going to do every moment of his life the way someone might tell their household servant, “Do this task for the next hour, then do this other task for two and a half hours after that.”
Instead, Paul is emphasizing the fact that he was a servant or slave of Christ in a spiritual or metaphorical sense.
Paul even recognized a paradox involving metaphorical states of freedom and slavery. In 1 Corinthians 7, he writes:
1 Corinthians 7:20-22, RSV
Everyone should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a slave is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a slave of Christ.
Paul says not to worry about it—never mind the fact—if you were a slave when you became a Christian, though if you can gain your freedom, do so.
He then says something that only makes sense if you recognize the difference between literal and metaphorical freedom and slavery. He says:
1 Corinthians 7:20-22, RSV
Everyone should remain in the state in which he was called. Were you a slave when called? Never mind. But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity. For he who was called in the Lord as a [literal] slave is a [metaphorical] freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was [literally] free when called is a [metaphorical] slave of Christ.
For he who was called in the Lord as a [literal] slave is a [metaphorical] freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was [literally] free when called is a [metaphorical] slave of Christ.
If you took all that literally, it would not make sense. Someone can’t be both literally a slave and literally free at the same time.
What Paul is saying is that, if you’re a literal slave in this life, you’ll also have freedom in Christ. And if you have literal freedom in this life, you also have a bond of service to Christ, so there is a fundamental spiritual equality between free and slave.
You may literally have one status in this life, but you also have a different spiritual status in Christ. As Paul elsewhere says,
Galatians 3:28, ESV
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.
So, with that as background, what does it mean when Mary tells Gabriel:
Luke 1:38, ESV
And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
Is Mary speaking in a literal sense or in an extended or metaphorical sense when she says that she’s a servant or slave of the Lord?
It’s obviously the latter. God is not directing all of the individual actions of Mary’s life the way a literal, earthly slave owner might. He’s given her autonomy—or free will—to make her own decisions.
Oh, and—uh—one more thing.
COLUMBO: Just one more thing, madam, just for my reports, just a detail. I hope you’ll understand.
It has to do with the mood of the verb Luke depicts Mary using in this passage. When Mary says Let it be to me according to your word, the verb translated “let it be” is in the Optative Mood.
We don’t have a grammatical form for the optative mood in English. Instead, we use auxiliary words and phrases like “Let,” “May,” and “If only.”
The name optative derives from the Latin Optativus which means = To Have Wished. So—for languages that have the optative mood—you use it to express a wish—something you desire.
So when Mary says, “Let it be to me according to your word,” she’s expressing a wish or her desire. That’s why it gets translated in English with “Let it be to me.”
Luke is thus portraying Mary as expressing what she wishes—what she desires to happen.
Conclusion
So Robyn’s arguments that Mary’s consent is not really being given in this passage don’t work.
Gabriel is not simply saying
ROBYN: Here’s what’s going to go down. This is going to happen. Then this. Then this.
No, Gabriel isn’t just listing facts to Mary.
Luke 1:28-37, ESV
And he came to her and said, “Greetings, O favored one, the Lord is with you!”
But she was greatly troubled at the saying, and tried to discern what sort of greeting this might be.
And the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.”
“And behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus. He will be great and will be called the Son of the Most High. And the Lord God will give to him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”
And Mary said to the angel, “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”
And the angel answered her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God. And behold, your relative Elizabeth in her old age has also conceived a son, and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing will be impossible with God.”
He’s sharing important, exciting news with her. She’s going to be the mother of the long-awaited Messiah, her Son is going to inherit the throne of David, his kingdom will last forever, and the child will be born without a human father, because nothing is impossible for God.
As I said—Gabriel is as excited as an angel can be to share this news. He expects that Mary will be excited to hear this news. And Luke indicates that Gabriel is right! She is on board with this plan!
It wasn’t the case of
ROBYN: She is a slave of gods, so whatever you say, okay, it’s not so much consent as acknowledgement that this is what’s going to happen really, whether she wants to or not, frankly.
Again, that’s a misrepresentation of how Luke portrays Mary’s response.
Luke uses multiple techniques to show that she fully agreed with this plan.
First, she uses the word, idou, which is commonly translated “behold” and is used to call attention to or stress what follows.
So she says,
Luke 1:38, ESV
And Mary said, “Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
Or—if you want to translate idou in more contemporary English, she says
Luke 1:38
And Mary said, “Hey, look, I’m the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.”
So—of course—let it be to me according to your word—using the optative mood to indicate that this is Mary’s wish or desire.
Luke thus indicates that Mary is fully on board with what Gabriel has just announced to her. She uses idou to call attention to the fact that she’s a servant of God, so of course she wants what God wants. And then she uses the optative mood to express her wish that what Gabriel has just said comes true.
Luke thus uses multiple devices on the linguistic, grammatical level to indicate how much Mary approves of this plan.
Luke may not have depicted Gabriel explicitly asking for Mary’s consent, but Luke makes sure we know that Mary fully consented to this plan. She consented anyway!
Robyn has misrepresented this as Mary passively acknowledging that’s going to happen, when Luke has indicated that she fully agreed.
Now, I want to compliment Robyn for noting—correctly—that you can read common English translations of the passage as Mary consenting.
I also want to compliment her on noting that things can read differently when you look at the Greek and that we need to be very careful in reading later messages into a text based on our own ideas.
Like James Talarico’s horrible misreading of the text as support for a pro-abortion political position.
JOE ROGAN: What do you think is the biblical evidence to support the opinion of being pro-abortion?
JAMES TALARICO: Mary is probably my favorite figure in the Bible. The mother of Jesus, God asks for Mary’s consent. So to me, that is an affirmation in one of our most central stories, that creation has to be done with consent.
As if the idea of not raping women turns into a generalized license to kill children who have already been conceived.
Yeah, Robyn was absolutely right to question James Talarico’s absurd inference from this text, but—unfortunately—she took a wrong turn.
She failed to realize that—when you carefully study the Greek text—you see that Gabriel is sharing exciting news with Mary that he expects her to consent to, and then Luke indicates that Gabriel was right.
Mary does consent. She did agree with the plan to become the mother of the Messiah, and Luke makes it abundantly clear, in multiple ways, that she consented to this plan.
So, Robyn, points for raising some of the right cautions, but not so many points for the execution in this case.
* * *
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God bless you always, and, Robyn, I hope you’re feeling better!!
VIDEO SOURCES:
Robyn Walsh video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAOunZnQ77o