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. F... Read more on Catholic.com