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In Matthew's version, an unnamed angel brings the news to Joseph in a dream. Matthew delivers the important information straightforwardly enough--"fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost"--but he does so in a few brief lines, making the Annunciation proper just one in a sequence of such dreams and concentrating less on additional information about the event than on a series of citations regarding the prophecies the birth will fulfill. Scholars see this as an excellent indicator of Matthew's background and audience. A Jew living in a primarily Jewish community (either in Galilee or what is now Lebanon), he was brought up, like most of his neighbors, on the Jewish Scriptures (which Christians now know as the Old Testament). Making someone called Joseph a recipient of prophetic dreams would evoke an earlier dreamer of the same name: the Joseph whose sleeping visions of fat and lean cows in the Book of Genesis helped pull his people into Egypt and indirectly to their destiny at Mount Sinai as recipients of God's covenant laws. Matthew's Joseph too will soon move to Egypt, fleeing there to save the child who, according to Matthew, will both continue and replace God's compact with the faithful.
Luke's version of the Annunciation is very different. It is the one we are more familiar with, in which the angel Gabriel greets Mary with the lines Catholics have often recited as "Hail, Mary, full of grace." It continues with a much more complete description of what came to be known as the virginal conception, and goes on through Mary's acceptance: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word."
For centuries, Christians expended vast interpretive energies on that last phrase. Long-standing arguments between Catholics and Protestants revolved around whether Mary inherently possessed the grace enabling her to accept the divine will (making her more worthy of Catholic-style reverence) or was granted it on an as-needed basis. These days, however, some feminist readers like Vanderbilt University's Amy-Jill Levine, editor of the forthcoming Feminist Companion to Mariology, are more interested in what might be called Mary's feistiness. After all, Levine points out, the handmaid line does not follow immediately upon the angel's tidings that "thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and call his name Jesus ..." Rather, Mary poses the logical query, "How shall this be, seeing I know not a man?" Says Levine: "She asks, 'How's that going to happen?' And when his answer makes sense to her, she in effect gives permission." Was this what Luke had in mind when he put the scene down on papyrus? Probably not, but such readings may be an inevitable consequence of his daring decision to write from Mary's point of view.