What Did the Angel Gabriel Say to Mary at the Annunciation?

What did Gabriel say to Mary, line by line in Luke 1?

Gabriel speaks to Mary three times in Luke 1:26-38, and Mary answers twice, once with a question and once with consent. Luke dates the visit to "the sixth month" of Elizabeth's pregnancy and names the town, Nazareth in Galilee.

He also records that Mary is engaged to Joseph, "of the house of David." The promise of "the throne of his ancestor David" in verse 32 depends on that detail, because Luke traces David's line through Joseph (Luke 3:23-31).

Gabriel gives Mary a sign she never asked for. Her older relative Elizabeth, "who was said to be barren," is six months pregnant, and in the next scene Mary sets out to see her (Luke 1:36, 1:39).

Why was Zechariah struck silent when Mary was not?

Both people ask Gabriel a question, and on the page the questions look close: Zechariah asks how he can know that this will happen (Luke 1:18), and Mary asks how this can be (Luke 1:34).

Gabriel gives the reason himself: Zechariah will be mute "because you did not believe my words" (Luke 1:20). The charge is unbelief, and the wording of each question shows where it lies.

Zechariah asks for proof that the promise will come true. Mary takes for granted that it will and asks how, since she has no husband yet.

Ambrose of Milan drew the contrast in the fourth century, in a comment Thomas Aquinas preserved in his Catena Aurea. Zechariah "refuses to believe that which he says he does not know," while Mary "avows herself willing to do that which she doubts not will be done, but how, she is anxious to know."

The silence is also the sign Zechariah asked for. He wanted to know how he could be sure, and being unable to speak is how he knows, until he writes "His name is John" on a tablet and his speech returns (Luke 1:63-64).

The Temple scene also opens during prayer at the hour of incense (Luke 1:10), which recalls how Gabriel reached Daniel "at the time of the evening sacrifice" in Daniel 9:21. Luke's first Gabriel scene begins in the same setting of liturgical prayer where Gabriel last appeared in the Hebrew Bible.

Hagar, Sarah, and Samson's mother: the older birth announcements Luke echoes

Luke writes both Gabriel scenes in a form Israel's scriptures had already used for promised births. Raymond Brown's analysis, summarized by the Jesuit scholar Felix Just, finds five steps in the announcements of Ishmael, Isaac, Samson, John, and Jesus: an angel appears, the hearer is afraid, the message is given, the hearer objects or asks for a sign, and a sign is given.

Set side by side, the older stories explain why Luke puts two annunciations in one chapter. John's birth fits the old pattern of a mother past hope, while Jesus's birth goes beyond it.

The older messengers also keep their names back. Manoah asks the angel's name and is told, "Why do you ask my name? It is too wonderful" (Judges 13:18), whereas Gabriel names himself to Zechariah and adds, "I stand in the presence of God" (Luke 1:19).

In Genesis 16 and Judges 13 the messenger is the angel of the LORD, whose words at times merge with God's own, so that Hagar says she has seen God. Gabriel in Luke never speaks as God; he speaks for God, under his own name.

How does the Qur'an tell the annunciation to Mary?

Surah Maryam gives a short parallel account in 19:16-21. Mary withdraws from her family "to a place toward the east" behind a screen, and God sends "Our Angel," in Arabic ruhana, literally "Our spirit," who appears to her "as a well-proportioned man" (Sahih International).

Her first words are a plea for protection: "I seek refuge in the Most Merciful from you." He answers that he is "only the messenger of your Lord" sent to announce "a pure boy," and when she asks how, since no man has touched her, he replies that God says, "It is easy for Me."

Early commentators cited by Ibn Kathir, among them Mujahid and Qatadah, say the unnamed "Our spirit" of these verses is Jibril, the Qur'an's name for Gabriel.

A second telling in Surah Al Imran (3:42-47) has "the angels," in the plural, speak to Mary and name the child "the Messiah, Jesus, the son of Mary." The Qur'an has no Joseph in the story and does not call the child Son of God, as Luke 1:35 does.

Zechariah's scene is told differently as well. In Qur'an 3:41 and 19:10 he asks for a sign, and the sign he is given is silence, three days in 3:41 and three nights in 19:10, with no word of punishment.

Why is Mary reading or spinning in pictures of the Annunciation?

Luke says nothing about what Mary was doing when Gabriel arrived, so artists took the detail from two later sources, and the choice usually shows which church the image comes from. Eastern icons give her a skein of purple yarn, while Western paintings from the Middle Ages on usually give her a book.

The yarn comes from the second-century Protoevangelium of James. There the priests choose seven young women of David's family to make a new veil for the Temple, and the lot for "the true purple and the scarlet" falls to Mary. She is first greeted by a voice while fetching water, then goes home, sits down to spin the purple, and the angel appears (chapters 10-11). A twelfth-century icon at St Catherine's Monastery on Sinai keeps that moment: Mary sits enthroned with the purple yarn in her hand, and a beam of light carries a dove down toward her.

The book is a Western addition. Dorian Llywelyn, S.J., surveying Annunciation images for the Jesuit journal Thinking Faith, dates its first appearance to the ninth century and says the reading Mary had become the standard picture by the late eleventh. Ambrose, writing around 377, had called Mary "most studious in reading," and when medieval writers asked what she was reading, Ambrose's answer usually prevailed: Isaiah 7:14, "a virgin shall conceive," the same verse Matthew quotes after Joseph's dream.

The dove on a beam of light, as in the Sinai icon, is the one element of these pictures taken from Luke. It illustrates Gabriel's answer to Mary's question: "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you" (Luke 1:35).

How does the Angelus pray the Annunciation?

The Angelus is a short Catholic devotion that retells the Annunciation in three lines, each followed by a Hail Mary, and it is traditionally said at 6 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m. when a church bell rings. The Catholic Encyclopedia calls it a practice "in honour of the Incarnation repeated three times each day."

Each Hail Mary opens with Gabriel's greeting from Luke 1:28 joined to Elizabeth's words from Luke 1:42. Someone who keeps all three hours therefore repeats the angel's line nine times a day.

The closing prayer asks that those "to whom the Incarnation of Christ thy Son was made known by the message of an angel" may be brought "by his Passion and Cross to the glory of his Resurrection." From Easter Sunday until Pentecost, the Regina Caeli is said in its place.

The custom grew out of an evening bell. A synod at Gran, in Hungary, mentioned three Hail Marys at the evening bell in 1307, Pope John XXII attached an indulgence to the practice in 1318 and 1327, and the morning and noon bells came later.

Popes still lead the Angelus at noon on Sundays from a window above St. Peter's Square, which keeps Luke's scene in a weekly public prayer.