Actually, the more I study this matter, the more impressed I become with the good translation skills and in-depth language knowledge of the KJV translators, though I do not assign to them what you appear to assign to Jerome: The plenary power to adjust an angelic communication to make it more memorable for the common folk. In fact, I suspect Jerome would reject such a claim about himself. I suspect he had some prior textual basis for his choice of words, such as he appears to have had for the Johannine comma as well.
But all that is a distraction. We are not debating the skill of the KJV translators. We are examining your “special pleading” for the eclectic use of κεχαριτωμενη. To continue then, you assert that:
"Graced" is the correct translation for Eph 1.6
Really? Only in the most technical sense. Nine out of ten people I know would have no idea what “graced” meant. They would think it had something to do with with graceful movement or beauty, etc., as in “she graced the room with her presence.”
And that’s the problem with translation work. The two languages don’t always map well one to the other.
For example, how do you translate “love” when the target language has no such word, when it doesn’t even have much of the concept either? Or even more concrete things, such as the language that has no word for “ship?” How do you explain the travels of Paul in that boat if they really don’t know about boats? It happens. And it can take some deep thought and creativity to get past those linguistic barriers.
So here, it may well have been a useful adaptation for a monarchical society to use “accepten” (middle English “to take, to receive”) as a way to express grace as a verb, where “graced” would have been unintelligible, and even more so in Tyndale’s day. Because for the King to accept or receive you was life itself (see Proverbs 16:15). If you were still in his “good graces,” you had his favor, and that was a wonderful place to be.
But as intriguing as that is, it still doesn’t get us to the main point. Under either phrasing in Luke 1:28, whatever the textual justification, does your “special pleading” from κεχαριτωμενη to infer the sinlessness of Mary from conception actually work, or doesn’t it?
I contend that it does not, because even if I were to give you what I see as your most important assumption, that grace produces sinless perfection, you could not demonstrate from this expression in Luke 1:28 that it tracks back to the moment of Mary’s conception. There is nothing in the participle or the aorist or the perfect which can tell you or anyone else a specific time this purported sinlesssness came to be in Mary’s life. It is therefore a permissible reading of your own chosen language that Mary was or could have been a sinner right up to when she met Gabriel.
It is the equivocal nature of the evidence that makes it impossible to serve as proof. This is essential to sound reasoning. A court cannot accept as proof of natural born citizenship a card that says “I live here now.” Even if the proof of present residence was true, it would NOT speak to conditions at the time of birth. The evidence is equivocal. It fits two or more conflicting scenarios. It doesn’t work.
And why you think the verb form provides that extra bit of evidence you need is completely unclear to me. Participles are a dime a dozen, so there’s nothing in that. The κε at the beginning is just a reduplicated consonant used to signal the perfect, which we have already discussed as not relevant to the ontological nature of the event it describes; when combined with the aorist it only shows the event is done and has some relevance to the present circumstances. It doesn’t tell you the event started, say, at conception, or that it means she could not commit sin subsequent to experiencing grace.
Even Paul would disagree with that last posit, because as one who had also experienced grace, he still wrestled with sin, and was not always successful:
Romans 7:22-23 For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members.
And again, I get that the counter to that is to make a special pleading that the grace Mary experienced was more absolute that what Paul experienced or what the believers of Ephesians 1:6 experienced. But it is precisely that, a special pleading:
“Special pleading is a form of spurious argumentation where a position in a dispute introduces favorable details or excludes unfavorable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations themselves. Essentially, this involves someone attempting to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exemption.”
See: https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Special_pleading.html
You have, thus far, IMHO, failed to show why Mary’s experience of grace (or divine favor etc) in Luke 1:28 is necessarily different from that of any believer as described in Ephesians 1:6. Instead, your unverifiable claim, as I understand it, is that she is an exception, unlike any other human besides Christ Himself, having received grace in such a way as to render her sinless from birth. Yet the textual basis for this claim is non-existent. Every part of the term κεχαριτωμενη can be explained adequately in terms of ordinary rules of inflection. The special pleading doesn’t work.
[Luk 1:30] should have "grace" also, this is another KJV mariophobic deception
Meh. Modern lexicons are based on very broad surveys of word usage, including literature both inside and outside the Biblical corpus. Paul elevated “grace” to theological significance well beyond its common meaning. But secondary meanings are still valid meanings.
Thus, if we are using “grace” like Paul used it, we necessarily imply an undeserved gift of God that overcomes our sins, but does not necessarily make us sinless. If we accept a less Pauline meaning, we must at least consider whether “favor” or some other more generic sense is exactly what was meant.
As for “favor” versus “grace” in the KJV, you cannot based your own translation work on the supposed flaws of other translators. That is simply irrational. The objective is to know what God has said. Like Paul said, even if some preach the word with less than the best motives, nevertheless, God’s word is being preached, and that’s the main thing.
But to be fair to the KJV translators, one can find a basis for the distinction without resort to unfounded accusations of anti-Mary-ism. If you look at each of the examples cited, you will notice a pattern, not absolute, but a definite trend. Whenever an individual is found dealing with God more or less directly, as a part of the historical narrative, that is where you are most likely to see “favor” versus “grace.” And you see that pattern across both Old and New Testaments in the KJV.
By contrast, when you see Paul and the other apostles diving off into theology 101, talking about believers as a class, rather than individuals in a narrative history, you see the term “grace” coming to full fruition.
So looking at this as a question about the English translators, we have Job finding favor with God (Job 10:12), Noah finding favor with God (Genesis 6:6-8), Abraham finding favor with God (Genesis 18:3-10), Samuel finding favor with God (1 Samuel 2:26), King David finding favor with God (1 Samuel 16:22), and of course Mary finding favor with God (Luke 1:30). So really this is probably nothing more complex than narrative style by the English translators, using this method to distinguish between grace per se (a theological term of art) versus specific historical instances of God selecting someone for some special purpose. Mary of course resides in both categories, but in Luke 1:28 she is a part of the historical narrative and is experiencing being chosen for a most amazing purpose. It fits the pattern.
Real tired. Nearly 3:30am here. Going to bed now.
Peace,
SR
You are very correct that the text of Luke 1:28 does not necessitate the Catholic doctrine on Mary; it witnesses to it. This is the case with all Catholic doctrine: the Church discerns the doctrine from its sacred tradition by looking at available historical knowledge of the life of the Church. The Church does not do what the Protestants do, read the scripture and in it find the doctrine. Rather, both the Holy Scripture and the doctrine are interrelated products of the Church.
Indeed one only reading Luke 1:28 may build theories that (1) Mary reached age of reason (one cannot sin before the intellect is mature enough to recognize sin), committed a unknown to us and unrecorded by St. Luke sin, then received the fullness of grace from Archangel Gabriel, and since then remained sinless thanks to that grace; or (2) Mary was sinless like any child, received the fullness of grace at some point, and in her old age the grace aired off and she committed an unrecorded unknown to us sin.
The reading that since the fullness of grace preceded the arrival of the angel it must have been there from her conception; and that grace does not go stale once received, and that God has the power to raise any kind of Mary He wants for His own mother, and probably would not want a sinner in that role -- that reading, the Catholic one, or rather that doctrine, had existed inside the Church even before Luke, under the dictation of the Holy Ghost, wrote his gospel.