Gospel of Luke and the "Hail Mary"
While the "Hail Mary" prayer is essentially straight from the Bible, Christians did not put the two verses together until the 11th century. An article published in Aleteia by Philip Kosloski In the Gospel of Luke, we find the two principal verses that make up the frequently used “Hail Mary” prayer. In fact, the first part of the prayer is derived from the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel greeted Mary by saying, “Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you!” (Luke 1:28) The next part of the prayer is taken from the Visitation, when Elizabeth greeted Mary with the words, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!” (Luke 1:42) Although the prayer is essentially straight from the Bible, Christians did not put the two verses together until the 11th century. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains that “in point of fact, there is little or no trace of the Hail Mary as an accepted devotional formula before about 1050. All the evidence suggests that it took ...
