By Father Chris Kappes
“Blessed rather are those who hear the Word of God and keep it” (Luke 11:28) in light of Luke 1:29: “And when she heard the word, she was troubled”
Introduction
A classic place to start for puzzles concerning Mary is the seemingly disparaging and classically contested passage of what I will designate the Marian Gospel of Luke:
My English Translation Luke 11:27–28:
Critical Text:
As Jesus happened to be saying these things, some woman in the crowd called out to him, “Blessedis the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed.” He replied, “Even more are they blessed who hear the word of God and keep it.”
Ἐγένετο δὲ ἐν τῷ λέγειν αὐτὸν ταῦτα ἐπάρασά τις φωνὴν γυνὴ ἐκ τοῦ ὄχλου εἶπεν αὐτῷ· Μακαρίαἡ κοιλία ἡ βαστάσασά σε καὶ μαστοὶ οὓς ἐθήλασας· αὐτὸς δὲ εἶπεν· Μενοῦν μακάριοι οἱ ἀκούοντες τὸν λόγοντοῦ θεοῦ καὶ φυλάσσοντες.
This passage in our English-speaking experience might give the impression to slight Mary and leads to the understandable question why Christians would give Mary honor without reserve. After all, sometimes –though she is elsewhere praised– does not Jesus appear to want rank something above her maternity?
We need the Bible’s framework or context, i.e., a first-century historical perspective if you will, for making sense of this passage, especially for us who don’t listen to and speak Greek as a living language. Christian Bible-compilers put together Sunday services the Scripture selection above in lectionaries, or official biblical selection, used for singing aloud the Scriptures in church.
The lectionary compiler doesn’t always give us a continuous chapter and verse reading day-by-day. The most important interpretation of the passage above is hinted at by its Greek-speaking compiler in the Byzantine lectionary (the foundational text behind the King James Version of the Bible, as an aside). For the feast of the entry of the child Mary into the temple (November 21), these plural “people” are who “hear the word of God and keep it” are the main focus of the Gospel.
This strange, since the Greek speaking compiler did not choose a Gospel explicitly naming Mary mother of Jesus. To understand the wordplays picked up by the lectionary compiler, we should turn to Luke who tells us at the beginning of his Gospel (Luke 1:1–3):
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things […] as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word (ὑπηρέται τοῦ λόγου) […] I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account […] so that you may know the security of the words regarding which you were catechized (ἵνα ἐπιγνῷς περὶ ὧν κατηχήθης λόγων τὴν ἀσφάλειαν).
Clearly, we are supposed to draw from this, late in the first century, that somebody was an eye-witness to Mary’s pregnancy, birth, and Jesus’s infancy. We also notice that Christians are supposed to be “servants of the word” as people “catechized in the word.” For Luke, Mary alone would have been the only witness interviewed for her Annunciation.
Joseph must have presumably been dead by the time of Jesus’s crucifixion. This already portends a “Marian” angle to Luke’s storytelling of the Gospel. As patristic lives of Mary assert in the Middle Ages, the Apostles wrested control of the Palestinian Christian Church from Jesus’s relatives who were constantly a source of tension, not only for Jesus, but for the rest of the Church.
The Evangelists designate Jesus’s extended family as troublemakers for his ministry quite often in more than one Gospel. Luke’s story is similar to an earlier one we find in Mark. While it might be tempting to assume that Luke gives an expanded version of Mark’s story, it is also plausible that Jesus’s close and extended family were anything from excited to ambitious to follow him around on more than one occasion, whether to be saved or to capitalize on the Jesus-celebrity as their blood relation. Mark (3:31–34) recounts:
Then Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived. Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him. A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”
This is very close to Luke’s point that to be blessed is not principally or morally a matter of biological conceiving or physical lactating but of responding to a call or to knowledge of what God wants someone to do. Still, Jesus has sometimes been interpreted that he’s not excited to see a crowd of people identified first with his mom then with his relatives.
Luke seems to build on this or know of another instance where this happened. In fact, the latest Gospel, closest to the time when Church historians tell us that Jesus’s blood relatives where trying to take over the Jerusalem church in virtue of their bloodlines, as in John 7:5:
“For even his own brothers did not believe in him.”
From Mark to John, the dishonorable moments are note in Jesus’s extended family; as Eusebius reminds us around 300 AD (citing historians who lived in the second century) there was a constant tension whereby the relatives of Jesus tried to ride on his coattails in the 30s AD either surviving, or raising their own family members, always to seek positions of honor, causing trouble for the Apostles and the Evangelists who wanted to convey that real heroes of the Church were equally outside of blood relations of Jesus (not family members with charisms and personally appointed by Jesus among his family to be Apostles).[1]
With this first-century mindset, we can understand that a tension continued until the first destruction of Jerusalem AD 70 and even into the second destruction of the Jewish nation around 132 AD at the Bar Kochba rebellion. Only after this time do preoccupations about Jesus’s blood relatives trying to cash in on Jesus’s stardom finally come to a tragic end by death, enslavement, or exile from the Jerusalem Church by pagan Roman oppression and violence (as also reported by Eusebius).
1. Mary in Luke’s Gospel to Hear the Word of God and Keep It
One of Luke’s prophecy fulfillments shows a relation between the antetypes or imperfect historical anticipations of Jesus and Mary; namely, Abraham and Sarah and how their New Testament realities fulfill perfectly prophecy of Abraham having a child who will be called “Wonderful” (Genesis 18:14; Luke 1:37), something even greater than the child to be born to Sarah.
Abraham is the first figure to undergo the pattern of the Annunciation in the history of salvation as a preparation for the real thing. This “lesser” Annunciation in Genesis 18 is pretty straight forward: (1.) Abraham is at his tent, (2.) He looks up, (3.) He sees a vision of three young men who are one God by name, (4.) he falls down and he washes their feet and afterwards provides them with a meal under the shadow of the oak of Mamre, (5.) at that moment he’s announced that he’ll have a child of promise whom he understands is in some way related to Isaac but the prophecy keeps things wide open so that only a final child called “Wonderful” will fulfill the typological Annunciation.
Sarah, too, gets the chance to appropriately respond at her announcement or Annunciation at a tent, by the angels, about a child of promise, but is rebuked for being in some way less than credulous. As such, we get the impression that the double Annunciation didn’t go as well as it could have and that Sarah missed out on something.
Next, in Luke 1, we see that Zechariah, like Sarah has an Annunciation and instead of immediately answering with faith, he answers with something less than puzzled trusting faith, but rather full-fledged doubt. His rebuke is to be denied the ability to speak at the announcement or Annunciation of the Precursor of the child named “Wonderful.” The all-important point here finally is manifest, the angel accused him, not unlike Sarah (Luke 1:20):
“You didn’t believe in my word(s) (οὐκ ἐπίστευσας τοῖς λόγοις μου).”
The first person to whom the word or words of the Lord in Luke’s Gospel came and were heard is by someone who does not keep them!
Luke expects us, when getting to the Gospel (11:28), to already apply the answer key for the question: “Who are the ones who hear the word and keep it?” After all, the reader wants to be blessed like them! Well, we must read on to find out even more: Next, we turn to Mary.
The angel tells her (using the Septuagint reading of Genesis 18:14), that a child called “Wonderful” will be born with the name of Jesus and that she is to be the Mother by a miraculous Sarah-like conception but of an even more impossible manner; the manner predicted in Judges 12 and Isaiah 7:14; namely of both a Nazarite and of a virgin (from her youth with a perpetual Nazarite vow common to the New Testament period); she will bear the one called Wonderful. Like Abraham, a shadow – or rather overshadowing – will mark the place where Mary meets the Trinity of persons, but this overshadowing is predicted to happen by Gabriel inside Mary’s womb, unlike Sarah whose encounter with overshadowing was outside.
What is the response of Mary? It is a puzzled but faithful “yes,” which is found pleasing to God. The key is as follows (Luke 1:29), even if we use the truncated and possibly less authentic critical edition of the text that reads:
“She was disturbed by the word and reasoned about what kind of greeting this could be (ἡ δὲ ἐπὶ τῷ λόγῳ διεταράχθη καὶ διελογίζετο ποταπὸς εἴη ὁ ἀσπασμὸς οὗτος).”
She heard the word of the Lord just announced by Gabriel and kept it!
In this vein, we can be critical of the critical edition. Typically, a principle still employed most often by individual critics to this passage is: lectior brevior potior, or “the shorter reading is the more convincing” reading. This is based on the now entirely erroneous assumption that copyist errors in antiquity more often add words or phrases to an original text of the Bible whenever they make mistakes or edit it.
Since multiple studies have time and again proven this false, since the early twentieth century, it remains to be seen when this will affect the critical edition of Luke 1:29. The predominant error is one of omission or subtracting words by copyists in cases like this. There are two competing readings that are among the oldest and most universally found. The first is as follows:
Manuscript
Translation
Protevangelium of James (around AD 150 preserved in Bodmar Papyrus V from the early 4th century)
And when Mary heardshe waivered within herself (Ἡ δὲ ἀκούσασα Μαρία διεκρίθη ἐν ἑαυτῇ λέγουσα)[2]
Diatesseron (Used in churches near Antioch and East from about AD 170 until the fifth century)
And when she saw she was agitated by his word
Codex Vaticanus (4thcentury; Egypt[?])
And she was troubled by his word
Codex Sinaiticus (4thcentury; Egypt[?])
And she was troubled by his word
Byzantine text form (used from the 4th century)
And when she saw him she was troubled by his word
Gothic (proto-German) of the Arians in the region of Bulgaria around AD 314
And when she saw him she was troubled
Codex Alexandrinus (5th century; Constantinople[?])
And when she saw (idousa)she was troubled by his word (ἡ δὲ ἐπὶ τῷ λόγῳδιεταράχθη καὶ διελογίζετο)
Codex Bezae, f. 184v(5th century used in the King James Version)
And ΗΝ [= error] when she saw [him] she was troubled by his word
Syriac Peshitta (5thcentury AD, used in the Assyrian Church)
And when she saw him she was agitated by his word
Bohairic (4th century of the Coptic Orthodox Church extent in 9thcentury manuscript)
And when she saw him she was troubled by his word
This impressive array of witnesses in the East or Greek, Syriac, and Coptic, represents the areas of Asia Minor, the areas East of Palestine, and Egypt. On the other hand, there are the competing witnesses of the Western Tradition. In addition to the “she saw tradition,” we have the “she heard” tradition that is known in the East, as early as the Protevangelium of James, putting the Latin tradition on firm footing and predates the late-second century Diatessaron of Tatian:
Latin Manuscript
Translation
Old Latin (represents a translating about AD 250 before St. Jerome)
And when she heard(audisset) this, she was troubled by his word
Jerome (AD 382-384)
And when she had heard, she was troubled at his word
Codex Bezae, f. 185r(Latin; 5th century translation)
However [= interpretation of error HN] she was troubled over the word
Codex Fuldensis (9thcentury translation from Tatian’s iatessaron)
And when she had seen (uidisset) she was troubled at his word
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (about AD 1000)
But she was fearful that she saw such power
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (about AD 1000)
When Mary saw him she feared and trembled. (quem videns Maria expavit et contremuit)[3]
Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew (about AD 1000)
After this was seen, Mary very exceedingly feared and trembled (Hoc viso Maria nimium expavit et valde conterrita est)[4]
Given the copyist tendency to make mistakes in shortening the text and given the near-universal attestation of some participle (“having seen/heard”) in the same spot of this verse, whether in Greek, Syriac, Coptic, Latin, or Gothic, we surmise that “after she saw” should be – based upon the evidence so far – the more correct reading or the assumed “original text” so-called. However, there are other arguments in favor “she heard” to be the so-called original. The first argument might be constructed as follows:
- The transmission of “she saw” may be due to an unclear reading around the second century for Luke 1:29. The Protevangelium cited Luke in Greek around AD 150 as “she heard,” but a difficulty must have arisen to interpret the passage in at least one subsequent Greek family as “she saw” (idousa) some decades later.
- In another Greek family or perhaps Latin translation (Old Latin) from the same family from which the Palestinian Protevangelium is based read the passage as: “she heard” (akousasa).
- Codex Bezae (Greek) shows signs of a nonsensical error in this place (HN, instead of H), which provides circumstantial support for an illegible corruption circulating in Greek.
- The difficulty of the Luke 1:29 reading led to some Greek copyists in Egypt to omit the illegible word accounting for today’s critical reading based upon lectio brevior potior.
- An early solution in Greek was a harmonization by reference to the intertextual source for Luke 1:29a, namely Proverbs 16:14 (“she saw”)
- Around 250 AD the clearly read: “akousasa,” was correctly interpreted as “she heard” (uidisset) into Latin. This will be justified by a literary wordplay made by St. Luke to be discussed.
- This Greek reading was confirmed by Jerome’s comparison of Luke with the Greek manuscripts (around AD 383) available to him in Rome.
- The Greek transmission streams led Syriac tradition – due to influence of the Byzantine text form – to maintain “she saw” and for Egypt to admit two competitive readings: (1.) an omission or shorter reading, or (2.) “she saw,” while the Latin transmission maintained the correct “she heard” except for Bezae which perplexed the copyist in the parallel Bezae Greek text with its nonsensical “HN,” but possibly confirming some Greek illegible word had once upon a time been in the text.
- The Latin translation of Tatian confirms the Syriac testimony to “she saw.” Interestingly, the Latin fragments of the Protevangelium of James preferred “she saw.” We lack understanding their sources and dates of these translations. So, they are not critically relevant and yet they do represent a separate stream of reception of Luke 1:29 having a longer reading of the verse.
Why privilege the Latin reading of Jerome, since it requires a more complicated hypothesis for transmission? After all, such an hypothesis requires weighty evidence to warrant preferring it over the simpler hypothesis that the original reading of Luke 1:29 is: “After she saw.” In answer, given the fact that it is inherently rational to suppose a corruption led to the omission of some word in Luke 1:29a, then a copyist must try to figure out the correct word. One way to do so is to know the intertext or Old Testament Scriptural model for Luke 1:29. Let us look:
Proverbs 6:14; 12:25:
A fearful word troubles a just man’s heart, but an good announcement gladdens him (φοβερὸς λόγος καρδίαν ταράσσει ἀνδρὸς δικαίου, ἀγγελία δὲ ἀγαθὴ εὐφραίνει αὐτόν).
KJV Byzantine Text for Luke 1: 27-30; 2:9:
ἀπεστάλη ὁ ἄγγελος […]πρὸς παρθένον […]καὶ τὸ ὄνομα τῆς παρθένου Μαριάμ. 28 […] εἶπεν· Χαῖρε, κεχαριτωμένη, ὁ κύριος μετὰ σοῦ. […] 29 ἡ δὲ ἰδοῦσα ἐπὶ τῷ λόγῳ διεταράχθη καὶ διελογίζετο ποταπὸς εἴη ὁ ἀσπασμὸς οὗτος. 30 καὶ εἶπεν ὁ ἄγγελος αὐτῇ· Μὴ φοβοῦ 9 ἡ δὲ Μαρία πάντα συνετήρει τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα συμβάλλουσα ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳαὐτῆς.
When we compare the source for Luke’s vocabulary and moral theology, we see Mary is made afraid that “God-is-with her” as someone who is “just” (full of grace). But, subsequently the angel explains the “good news” and her just heart rejoices leading to her fiat and to the Magnificat. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae allows us to exclude any meaningful for competitive literary sources in comparison to Greek Proverbs using the same lemmata or root words so Proverbs and Luke together in such a small space.
But how does this justify: “she saw”? The reading passage before and after LXX Proverbs 6:14 reads in Greek: “He gives a wink with his eye (Proverbs 16:14)” and after the passage it reads: “The eye of the haughty is his unjust tongue…” (LXX Proverbs 16:17). Here, supposing that the copyist knew the greater context employing a metaphor of looking with the eye and the working of the human eye.
From this, it seems plausible that the copyist inferred as “she saw.” The applicability of Proverbs is not implausible, as in the early infancy Gospels (just like the annunciations in Genesis 18 and Judges 13, as St. Luke cites them obliquely in Luke 1) also call to mind that the angel looks like a man. The infancy Gospels sometimes note that the angel’s a handsome young man and that Mary acts modest in his presence.
After all, she’s a Jewess alone and was approached by a young man (an angel) who’s showering her with compliments. Mary, like in Proverbs, is discerning scary from glad news as she tries to discern whether she’s speaking to a haughty young man or to an angel.
A final argument is stylistic. The Luke 1:29 phrase: “when she saw, she was troubled” does not exactly occur in Greek paradigms of literature. Given the fact that Luke’s rather decent command of Greek and his original composition of Luke 1 (held by scholars today), then we expect him more likely to use Greek idiom when not quoting a Semitic source.
In this case, ἀκούσας ἐταράχθη was witnesses as formulaic as early as the polished writer Xenophon (Anabasis and Agesilaus) and was picked up in the Septuagint (LXX), as in Deuteronomy 2:25; Esther 4:4 (ἐταράχθη ἀκούσασα); Judith (ἀκούσαντες … ταραχθήσονται) and especially the infancy narrative of Matthew 2:3 (ἀκούσας … ἐταράχθη) and used frequently in Josephus (5x), a contemporary of St. Luke. Josephus is all the more relevant, in that he translates several of his phrases from Hebrew into Greek. In short, there is a long history in both Greek and Jewish-Greek literature (Biblical and secular) for expecting “to hear and to be troubled.” This strongly favors the reading in the Protevangelium and Latin biblical tradition.
Finally, given the earliest attestation of “she heard” and that it would have been the predicted reading according to Greek paradigms, we then are able to see more clearly the wordplay that St. Luke means to convey in his Gospel:
Luke’s Usage of Logos in his Gospel
Translation
Luke 1:1-3
Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things […] as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word(ὑπηρέται τοῦ λόγου) […] I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account […] so that you may know the security of the words(λόγων)regarding which you were catechized.
Luke 1:20
[Zachariah] You didn’t believe in my word(s)(οὐκ ἐπίστευσας τοῖς λόγοις μου).
Luke 1:29; 1:45
And when she heard the word, she was troubled […] [Elizabeth said:] Blessed is she who believed (ἡ δὲ ἀκούσασα ἐπὶ τῷ λόγῳ διεταράχθη […] μακαρία ἡ πιστεύσασα)
Luke 10:39
Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and heard hisword (ἤκουεν τὸν λόγον).
Luke 11:27–28
As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, “Blessedis the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” He replied, Blessed rather are those who hearthe word of God and keep it.
A comparison of St. Luke’s usage of this vocabulary is meant to make a point in his narrative. There is a strict parallel between Luke 1:29 and Luke 11:28. First, the usage of wordby St. Luke is restricted and used as the message given to his reader that must include numerous events and doctrines of Jesus.
The first event concerns Zechariah’s failure to accept the angelic message, whereas Mary is uniquely able to hear the message and to believe it (later to guard it in her heart). Luke presents Mary Magdalen as the second person in history to hear and to believe. This likely accounts for Mary Magdalen being the first witness of the resurrection for St. Luke.
Thus Luke 11:28 is a statement by Luke that men and women can indiscriminately be like Mary and Mary Magdalen by hearing the word and keeping it or believing in it. The artistry in St. Luke’s Gospel strongly suggests that the contested reading ought to be “she heard,” since this more perfectly illustrates Jesus’s otherwise puzzling comparison of his Mother and all believers.
Additionally, when Mary gave her breast for him to suck as the baby Jesus, Luke writes: “Mary guarded all these reports (namely what the angels spoke/worded (λεγόντων)[ἀγγέλων]), storing them up in her heart (Μαρία πάντα συνετήρει τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα συμβάλλουσα ἐν τῇ καρδίᾳ αὐτῆς).[5] So, when the prophetess Elizabeth recounts by the Holy Spirit what happened at the Annunciation, Elizabeth utters: “Blessed is she who believed (μακαρία ἡ πιστεύσασα)” (Luke 1:45). The obvious conclusion that Jesus in Luke wants us to draw is that, rather (μενοῦνγε)[6] than being blessed for a series of biological praises, Mary should rather (μενοῦν) be declared blessed as the first who heard the word, who then believed unlike Sarah and Zechariah. It was Mary’s antecedent righteousness (unlike Abraham), being “full of grace” even before seeing an angel of the Lord, that ensured that she would make the best of all possible responses: “Hearing the word of God and keeping it.”How did she become blessed? She became the Mother of Jesus. If we take Luke to be expanding our information about Mark’s Gospel (adding on some more recorded conversations), then we are even led to believe that anybody who hears Jesus and responds to the will of God, will be honored in the same manner as Mary; namely, they will have a share in the graces she experienced as one full of grace.[7] We tend to identify this with justification or being in a state of righteousness, justice, and friendship with God.
These conclusions merely fall in line with a similarly close patristic reading of the vocabulary and evidence by the polyglot scholar the Venerable Bede:
But the woman pronounces blessed not only her who was thought worthy to give birth from her body to the Word of God, but those also who have desired by the hearing of faith spiritually to conceive the same Word, and by diligence in good works, either in their own or the hearts of their neighbors, to bring it forth and nourish it; for it follows, But he said, Yea rather, blessedare they that hear the word of God, and keep it.[8]
But she was the mother of God, and therefore indeedblessed, in that she was made the temporal minister of the Word becoming incarnate; yet therefore much more blessed that she remained the eternal keeper of the same ever to be beloved Word. But this expression startles the wise men of the Jews, who sought not to hear and keep the word of God, but to deny and blaspheme it.[9]
2. The Byzantine Lectionary and the Second Person to Hear the Word of God and Keep It
At this point, Luke’s Jesus was actually complimenting Mary by means of wordplays on “the word” and “keeping it.” The Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire used Greek in its church services and the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic churches of the Greek world still use the very same lectionary texts that started to get solidified around 600 AD.
But the Annunciation feast had likely been around since 448 AD in Constantinople (instituted by Archbishop Flavian) and was officially made a Church holiday on 25 March 560 by Emperor Justinian I. Because two other Marian feasts, to mention the most ancient ones, already read from large portions of Luke 1-2, the compiler of the post-sixth century edition of the lectionary at the capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Church (Constantinople) likely had to figure out a new Gospel selection to pick for the newer feast of the entry of the child Mary into the temple. Hence, by making the same attentive reading of Luke’s Gospel, notice what the compiler of the service book does for the Mary-Gospel on November 21st; it’s quite strange!
The compiler gave selections weirdly as follows: Luke 10:38-42:
As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and heard his word (ἤκουεν τὸν λόγον). But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!” “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed—or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”
Now the compiler jumps forward in the Evangeliary or lectionary-Gospel book to 11:27,28:
As Jesus was saying these things, a woman in the crowd called out, “Blessed is the mother who gave you birth and nursed you.” He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hearthe word (οἱ ἀκούοντες τὸν λόγον) of God and keep it.”[10]
The other major person named in honor of Mary (viz., Mary Magdala) also heard the word of God and kept it undistracted! Like Mark’s Gospel, she uses her “will” or “chooses” to be listening to Jesus’s word. If all the popular Mary Gospel-passages were already taken by the lectionary, could not this Medieval Mary-feast day best choose this passage to fill out Luke’s Marian Gospel exhortation by reading about Mary II or Mary Magdalen – imitating Mary I or Mary, Mother of the God-man Jesus?
However, a last puzzle remains: We might expect a Luke to refer to the two believing women earlier in his Gospel by writing: “Blessed (μακαρίαι) are the lady-hearers(αἱἀκούουσαι) of the word of God who obey it.” Jesus’s point is something else, namely, that Mary, mother of Jesus, is the first of many disciples (e.g., Mary II) and that everybody (including men) at today’s meeting with Jesus has the vocation to be a mini-Mary and receive her blessing of justification![11]
Conclusions
Luke opens his entire Gospel hoping that any reader will key in on “the word” and “the words” to which a Christian is called to be the servant. Immediately following, Mary’s dignity and vocation are unsurprisingly at the center of Luke’s Marian Gospel, as the first servant of the word who holds at her Annunciation the word in her heart and chose the word in an act of will: “Let it be done to me according to they word” in her heart.
Elizabeth, under the influence of the Holy Spirit, prophetically recounts that this moment resulted in: “blessed is she who believed (μακαρία ἡ πιστεύσασα)” (Luke 1:45). Mary’s merit was not in physical conception, rather (μενοῦν) blessed is she who heard the word and believed! Mary proves to be the very key to understanding Luke’s wordplays, then Mary Magdalen’s vocation to the word by wordplay (though not explicitly “blessed” like Mary), and finally even we are extended the Christian vocation to be mini-Marys in Christ by responding in will to our knowledge of the word of God by faith or believing.
The only people Luke wants to exclude from Jesus’s happy place are his bossy relatives who try to capitalize over and against the Apostles in virtue of the bitcoin known as their bloodline, as if church leadership were a birthright to tyrannize the early Church without either the charisms of the Spirit, or the personal election by Jesus, to lead his church.
[1] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, book I, chapter 7, paragraphs 11–14 (https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250101.htm).
[2] The 1958 discovery the Protevangelum of James in an early 4th century papyrus and a subsequent 2011 discovery of another 4thcentury fragment raise the profile and utility of the document for its citations of Scripture, putting them earlier than Biblical manuscripts of St. Luke (chapter 1) and Fathers of the Church. The point here, however, is not that – standing alone – it is assumed to be the original reading of Luke 1:29a, but rather this reading of Luke 1:29a in the Old Latin and Jerome’s Vulgate are justified in the oldest Greek allusion or citation to Luke 1:29a. Thus, the argument stands on multiple and early attestation, not principally upon the Protevangelium.[3] Arundel, PsMatthew, 34[4] Ibid,35[5] This insight is explicitly in Augustine of Hippo, Of Holy Virginity, in P. Schaff (Ed.), C. L. Cornish (Trans.), St. Augustin: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises(Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company 1887), 3:418:
Mary is more blessed in receiving the faith of Christ (Luke 1:46), than in conceiving the flesh of Christ (Luke 1:35). For to a certain one who said, “Blessed is the womb, which bare Thee” (Luke 11:27) He Himself made answer, “Yea, rather, blessed are they who hear the Word of God, and keep it” (Luke 11:28). Lastly, to His brethren, that is, His kindred after the flesh, who believed not in Him (John 7:5), what profit was there in that being of kin? Thus also her nearness as a Mother would have been of no profit to Mary, had she not borne Christ in her heart (Luke 2:19) after a more blessed manner than in her flesh.
[6] The Byzantine Text-Form in the Evangeliary or Lectionary preserves the reading μενοῦνγε.[7] John Chrysostom, who was not overly ready to exaggerate Mary’s holiness, gives this interpretation, as can be found in Thomas Aquinas’s, Catena Aurea: Commentary on the Four Gospels, Collected out of the Works of the Fathers: St. Luke, ed. J. H. Newman (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), 3:409:
In this answer He sought not to disown His mother, but to shew that His birth would have profited her nothing, had she not been really fruitful in works and faith. But if it profited Mary nothing that Christ derived His birth from her, without the inward virtue of her heart, much less will it avail us to have a virtuous father, brother, or son, while we ourselves are strangers to virtue. (Homily 44: on Matthew)
[8] See Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 3:408–409.[9] See Aquinas, Catena Aurea, 3:409.[10] If Luke wanted to speak about the earlier women alone, he would have wrote: “μακαρίαι … αἱ ἀκούσασαι (blessed are the ladies who heard…).”[11] The application of this verse to all men and women is an insight noticed as early as Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Tatian’s Diatesseron (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 3:195:
“Blessed is the womb that bore you.” He took blessedness from the one who bore him and gave it to those who were worshiping him. It was with Mary for a certain time, but it would be with those who worshiped him for eternity. “Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.”
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