Christian Texts and History • Re: The Protevangelium of James

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However, just as scribes familiar with the Bible would know that the priests must be from the tribe of Levi so too would such scribes know that the Magnificat is similar to Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2 - a prayer of thanksgiving recited by an aging wife, long childless, who had finally been blessed with a child. Anyone who realizes this will also realize that Elizabeth too was such an aging first-time mother and the Magnificat, accordingly, fits her better than Mary - a realization that leads us to the conclusion that “Mary” is, from that point of view, the more difficult reading.

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Table summarizing apparent growth of Luke 1:

Stage 1: Birth of John the Baptist, no mention of Jesus; Elizabeth sings Magnificant.

Stage 2: Introduction of vv.26 – 45, on Mary, her pregnancy, and her meeting Elizabeth

Stage 3: V 46 changed to transfer Magnificant to Mary; v 56 left unchanged.

Thus, from three different directions - the varying evidence for the text of v.46 analyzed according to the lectio difficilior rule; the biblical context (the implied comparision of the singer of the Magnificant to Hannah) and the local context, namely, the implications of the formulation of v.56 – we have concluded that the Magnificat was originally understood to be sung by the mother of John the Baptist, not the mother of Jesus. Morever, we got to this conclusion by building on other evidence for the original independence of John’s movement, evidence that encouraged us to look for evidence that Mary was not, in fact, part of the original text of what is now Luke 1 - a quest that bore fruit in our recognition of the anomalous formulation of v.56.