05 — Luke and the Theotokos

Of the four Evangelists, it is Luke who gives the Church her fullest portrait of the Mother of God. The Annunciation, the Visitation, the Nativity and the shepherds, the Presentation with Symeon’s prophecy, the finding in the Temple — and, above all, the Magnificat — survive only because the third Gospel preserved them, and from these chapters flow the scriptural roots of the dogma of the Theotokos and the great body of Orthodox Marian hymnography. These files set out the Lukan infancy narrative as the Church’s richest written source for the Theotokos, and then the Magnificat as her oldest and most-used canticle.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle and Evangelist)

If the later Byzantine tradition loved Luke as the first to paint the Mother of God (see 04 — Luke the Iconographer), the Church had loved him first and longer as the Evangelist who painted her in words. Almost everything the New Testament tells us about the life of the Virgin before the Passion comes from Luke 1–2: the angel Gabriel’s greeting, her fiat, her flight to Elizabeth, the birth in Bethlehem, the rites of purification and presentation, and the loss and finding of the twelve-year-old Christ in the Temple. These two chapters are the scriptural quarry from which the Akathist, the canon of the Annunciation, and the daily singing of the Magnificat are all hewn. This section treats them under two heads: the infancy narrative as a whole, where the title Theotokos and the dogma defined at Ephesus (431) find their scriptural ground; and the Magnificat in particular, Mary’s song of reversal and praise, as it lives in the worship of both East and West.

Files in This Section

File Description
The Theotokos in Luke The third Gospel as the richest New Testament source for the Mother of God: the Annunciation and kecharitomene (Luke 1:28); Mary’s fiat (Luke 1:38); Elizabeth’s “mother of my Lord” (Luke 1:43) as the scriptural root of Theotokos; “all generations shall call me blessed” (Luke 1:48); the Nativity and the shepherds; “she kept all these things” (Luke 2:19, 2:51) and the patristic inference that Mary is Luke’s source; Symeon’s sword (Luke 2:35); the dogma of Ephesus 431.
The Magnificat Mary’s song at the Visitation (Luke 1:46–55): the Church’s oldest canticle of the Theotokos, sung at Orthros and at Vespers; its dependence on the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1–10) and the Psalms; its theology of reversal (Luke 1:51–53); the Orthodox refrain “More honorable than the cherubim”; and the textual question of the “Elizabeth” variant.

See Also

  • The Third Gospel — the literary design of the Gospel that opens with the infancy narrative
  • The First Iconographer — Luke’s portrait of the Theotokos in image, as the later tradition tells it
  • The Spirit and the Poor — the theology of reversal and of the lowly that the Magnificat announces
  • The Theotokos — the Mariological dogma defined at Ephesus (431) for which Luke 1 supplies the scriptural ground
  • Holy Scripture — the Orthodox doctrine of Scripture within which the Gospel is read

References

  • Brown, Raymond E. The Birth of the Messiah. Updated ed. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
  • Fitzmyer, Joseph A. The Gospel According to Luke I–IX. Anchor Bible 28. New York: Doubleday, 1981.
  • Gambero, Luigi. Mary and the Fathers of the Church. Trans. Thomas Buffer. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999.
  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969.