The nitpicker's guide to Journey to Bethlehem – part two

Dec 27, 2023

∙ Paid

Mary is asleep, and apparently dreaming about Joseph, when Gabriel appears.

This is interesting, because when Gabriel wakes Mary up, he has to clarify that she is not dreaming any more. But we know that Gabriel will eventually speak to Joseph in a dream—and, as depicted in this film, Joseph will already be dreaming about something else before Gabriel intrudes on that dream.
So is there a reason Gabriel speaks to Joseph within his dream, but not to Mary within hers? Is there a reason Gabriel has to wake Mary up, but not Joseph, before he can speak to either of them?
Incidentally, one interesting difference between the two Nativity stories in the gospels is that the angels always speak to people through dreams in Matthew, but they always speak to people who are awake in Luke.1
The gospels don’t say what time of day it was when Gabriel appeared to Mary. In many films and paintings, he appears to her during the day, when she is already awake. According to one influential 2nd-century tradition, he began speaking to her while she was out getting some water from the local well.

Mary is startled when Gabriel wakes her up, so Gabriel says, “Do not be afraid. I’m sorry I frightened you.”

Angels in the Bible often began their messages with some version of “Fear not” (e.g. Matthew 28:5; Luke 1:13, 30; 2:10).
In some cases, the angels were speaking to people who already had reasons to be afraid (e.g. when Paul was on a boat that was about to be shipwrecked in Acts 27:24). But in other cases, it seems that the mere presence of the angels itself was startling and unusual enough to frighten the people who saw them—so the angels had to begin by putting those people at ease.
I am not aware of any case in which an angel apologized for scaring someone.
Incidentally, the biblical Gabriel actually greeted Mary first and called her “highly favoured”, and it was only after she was “greatly troubled” by his words and what they might mean that he told her not to be afraid (Luke 1:28-30).

Gabriel says, “I am Gabriel, and I bring you good news.”

The biblical Gabriel doesn’t say these things to Mary, but he does say them to her cousin-in-law Zechariah in an earlier passage (Luke 1:19).

Gabriel says, “God has chosen you to have a son.” Mary replies, “That can’t be, I don’t have a husband yet.”

The biblical Mary says, more precisely, that she is still a virgin (Luke 1:34).
This tweak to her words feels a little reminiscent of how Paul wrote “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” in I Corinthians 7:1, and the original version of the NIV changed this to “It is good for a man not to marry”: a direct reference to sexual experience (or the lack thereof) has been changed to a more coy reference to marital status. (The current version of the NIV now renders that line of Paul’s as, “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.”)

Gabriel says, “This child will be the son of the almighty God, and you will name him Jesus, and he will be called the king of all kings.”

Gabriel’s words are a somewhat streamlined version of what he says in Luke 1:31-33, 35. Notably, the film omits any reference to the Holy Spirit, or to the specifically Israelite nature of Jesus’ kingship.
The film does, however, imply a much broader sort of kingship.
Historically, “king of kings” was a title used by Middle Eastern kings who had conquered other kingdoms in the building of their empires. In the Hebrew Bible it was used of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (Ezekiel 26:7, Daniel 2:37) and the Persian king Artaxerxes (Ezra 7:12).
In the New Testament, the title “king of kings” is applied to God (I Timothy 6:15) and, eventually, Jesus (Revelation 17:14, 19:16).

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