But let me get to the point. Although the same or similar words, "full" or "filled" with grace, are used for Jesus, Mary, and Stephen, it does not mean exactly the same for all three. If it did, we'd be in the position of saying that the blessedness of Jesus, Mary, and Stephen are indistinguishable, identical -- which they are not, as I'm sure you'll agree.
How can they be distinguished, then?
The Greek grammar shows how.
"Kecharitomene" is applied to Mary, "pleres charitos" to Jesus and, "pleres pisteos" to Stephen. (I just looked that up in the Greek Interlinear NT online. Right. And "pleres pisteos" can better be translated "full of faith, or "full of belief.")
Kecharitomene is a Greek perfect, passive, participle, which could literally be translated "having been graced," since the root of the word is "charis", which means grace. Ephesians 1:6, which refers to Jesus Christ, uses the aorist, active, indicative echaritosen, meaning "he graced."
See the difference? Mary, passive voice, "She received grace"; Jesus, active voice, "He graced." This is due to the fact that Jesus is a Divine person; Mary is a human person, a creature and handmaid.
In Luke 1:28 "Kecharitomene" is nominative or titular, since it follows the greeting "Chaire" ---"Hail [name or title] --- thus the name would normally be capitalized in English translations.
The unique feature of "Kecharitomene" is that it is in the Greek perfect tense, denoting that the state of grace began in past time, by a completed action (hence "fully" accomplished), whose results continue in the present. A suitable translation to denote all these features might be "Fully-Graced One." The Greek passive voice denotes that Mary received the title from an outside source, in this case, Almighty God.
(BTW, "pleres pisteos" the term used for Stephen, also implies a gift from an outside source, that is, again, faith as a gift and initiative of God.)
All God-given changes of name or title in the Bible indicate the person's status as seen by God, the person's predestined giftedness in order to be equipped to play their role in God's plan:
It's the only place in the Bible --- the only place in all of Greek literature ---where the root word charitoo is used in exactly this way, as a form of address. It's unique. It doesn't make her equal to God (passive voice: it's been done unto her) and not identical to what's said of Stephen, because it's
This unique neologism Kecharitomene is the best Greek word that could have been invented by Divine inspiration to indicate Mary's sinlessness, her being equipped to play her role as the natural source of Christ's human nature, His flesh: human, yet untainted by sin.
It's brilliant. No other Greek formulation could have conveyed it all.
Please look at #267 — I meant to include you on this, too.
Sorry I don’t need or want a c/p “lesson” from you.
I’ve spent enough time studying Catholicism to recognize your efforts to be totally in vain for anyone wishing to live the Christian life.
All it does is NOT address the real issues and just fills spaces while waiting for Purgatory. Unless all of that screed your posted just came to your mind because of your studying fine, if not please cite a source of your c/p.
No more lessons in Catholicism though thank you, I am a Christian.
The exaltation of Mary by Catholics and Catholicism is getting more and more ingrained in followers of that belief system to the point that she (Not Mary, the mother of Jesus but the polished up and imagined “Mary” of the statues and Rosaries) has become more important and venerated than Jesus.
Stephan was full of grace and POWER, Mary just filled with grace and has no more power than any other human.
“This unique neologism Kecharitomene is the best Greek word that could have been invented by Divine inspiration to indicate Mary’s sinlessness”
The verse says nothing of being sinless. It says Mary received grace from God, since she would bear Messiah.
Never good to add to God’s words.
On the contrary, it is definitive proof of the sinful state of the person on whom it was given.
If Mary had not sinned, she COULD NOT HAVE experienced God's grace. Grace is not needed without sin.
It's only in the presence of sin where grace kicks in.
Where sin abounds, grace much more abounds.
Romans 5:20 Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more,
Calvinasaurusism at it’s greatest display!
It's disappointing you'd continue to repeat the same error filled information. In Romam Catholic terms me thinks you've committed a mortal sin.
Did Keating's work on this, or whoever's you copied, indicate the words used to describe Stephen are not verbs??
You will note in the passage regarding Stephen he was able, through God's blessing, to perform wonders and signs. Mary was unable to do so.
When there was no wine at the wedding she had to ask Jesus for help.
You've already been shown the Catholic Encyclopedia says there is "No direct or categorical and stringent proof of the dogma can be brought forward from Scripture."
Why do you persist in posting this misleading, false information when you've been corrected previously??
< You forgot so soon?
It is not as unique as you are making it out to be.
The same phrase had been used, but gender specific for a male, in one of of the books of what Roman Catholics refer to as Deuterocanon.
Do you not recall myself having posted to you that information -- with supporting links?
I remember yourself not replying. And here you are, going at it again.
Search back through your own comments -- what has been posted to you -- until you find it, so I don't have to. It was probably about a month ago, and took a bit doing (a lot of work) to find, assemble, and post the information.
You ignored it - or at least, did not reply. And now, due to yourself just now having repeated the same false-note claim that I'd previously corrected --you owe me the effort to go find the comment that was posted to you.
The very same phrase had been addressed to a man with the only difference being the gender. Everything else -- each Greek letter, letter-by-letter was IDENTICAL save for a SINGLE Greek letter indicating the word was being addressed to one of male gender, rather than female. I had posted both forms for comparison -- but you did not reply.
Go find it. It's in your "my comments" section on this web site. In short-term near future, I may, or may not have time to go fetch for you again, what had taken a bit of effort to find and assemble and was posted to you --that you now seem to have ignored, or else forgotten.
Today is the 6th of August. I have a brother who was born on the 9th. Two years ago he told me he had a dream where he died in a hospital, on his birthday. Guess where he is right now? Yesterday, he took a turn for the worse. Over the phone, he sounded horrible. What little information he could supply before hanging up was worrisome (and he has a mass of cancerous growth on his liver 10 centimeter x 11 long -- and it has also spread to other internal organs -- he's heavily sedated, etc.)
For the next few days I may not have the time to deal with Romanist, Marianist ERROR.
Fix your own, woman. I've already supplied the information, and as I said, I had supplied supporting links (to sources of Greek text & English translation). It was all there, placed right in front of you. Why do you persist in your error? Time to give it up, babe. Game over.
Don't make me come back and find it, and re-post it myself. I'll come down on it (your claims over this Greek term) with both feet, if I'm forced to re-post it. I had warned you that I would --had warned that if you did not respond, yet went on repeating the false claims -- that I would. I see that time has come.
Either go find it yourself (and provide to me some reply to that note) or get ready for incoming. I'll blow your position to smithereens. Already have, actually. If there must be a next time, then I'll make sure to keep hammering the points, bouncing the rubble. Do you really want me to go there? If not, give me an option -- respond to that previous comment that had been sent to you.
True to form, you keep posting propaganda which was countered time and again .
Hail, "highly favoured" is not a title, but a greeting which describes what she is due to being chosen to be an instrument of God, and the greeting is like as Daniel who is called by the angel, "greatly beloved." (Dan. 10:11) And unlike where the Lord does give people a new title/name to certain people, the Holy Spirit never uses this sppsdly new title again - or gives her other titles in stark contrast to the approx 900 of Catholicism - but continues to call her Mary.
The issue is not whether Mary was graced, even before the salutation, but whether Lk. 1:28 states was she uniquely full of grace. Which conspicuously does not say "plērēs=full," and The reason why it is not used in Lk. 1:28 is because that plērēs denotes "full" 17 other places in the NT., and thus plērēs charis (full of grace) is used of the One who was/is unmistakably full of grace and Truth. (Jn. 1:14)
And as even Keating admits, Luke 1:28 uses kecharitomene, which literally means "one who has been graced" or "woman who has been graced" (since the gender is female). It doesn't literally mean "full of grace," though that is defensible as a free translation. (http://www.jimmyakin.org/2005/10/kecharitomene_q.html)
As for Kecharitomene denoting that the state of grace began in past time even Catholic professor of biblical languages and 11 year vet of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Joseph Fitzmeyer, S.J. writes in the Anchor Bible (v. 28, pg. 345) “Though the pf. Pass. Ptc. Kecharitomenos is found in the LXX of Sir 18:17 in the sense of ‘gracious man,’ here is rather designates Mary as the recipient of divine favor; it means ‘favored by God,’ another instance of the so-called theological passive (see ZGB § 236). She is favored by God to be the mother of the descendant of David and the Son of the Most High.”
Thus since Sirach 18:17 says , 'is not a word better than a gift? but both are with a gracious [Kecharitomenos] man," than one could also argue, consistent with Cath reasoning, that such men uniquely always were gracious.
As for other technical arguments, once again here is an extensive examination of the basic argument by one who has quite a resume of scholarship, Robert Dean Luginbill, Ph.D. Greek:http://ichthys.com/mail-Mary-full-of-grace.htm
The phrase "hapax legomenon" is applied to the unique occurrence of a word in a corpus. It is not applied to the every specific form a word may take. In Greek, any given verb can potentially have hundreds of different forms (depending upon how one counts these). Therefore in any highly inflected language – like Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and virtually all of the ancient languages – trying to carry this concept which rightly belongs to core words over to individual forms is ludicrous. The word charitoo is not a true "hapax" in the Bible because it occurs more than 'once' (which is what hapax means), and because of the wide variety of forms any verb or substantive in Greek can manifest it makes no sense to apply this term to an individual form of a word and call it a "hapax" (or, alternatively, one can say such a thing, it's just that saying such a thing is meaningless). The point behind identifying a word as a hapax legomenon" (i.e., "mentioned/said only once [in the corpus]") is generally that one has very little information about what the word might mean precisely because it only occurs "once".
If a word is a "hapax" only in a particular author or specialized corpus but appears elsewhere in the language, then the value of this "uniqueness" is greatly reduced. When one has multiple contexts to judge from, one is not in the same position as in the case of a true "hapax" where there is indeed only one single context on which to base one's decision about what a word might mean. As the matter at hand actually stands, moreover, in the case of charitoo, we have an abundance of riches: 1) it occurs elsewhere in the NT; 2) it occurs widely in the literature elsewhere; 3) it is a simple verbal formation on a very well attested noun – so much so as to make its essential meaning so crystal clear that even if this verb only occurred here in all of Greek literature there would still not be any serious doubt as to its meaning.
Your correspondent does not really quibble with the essential meaning of the verb as reflected in every dictionary and every version, namely, "to bestow grace/favor upon". Where you correspondent falls down – and where he over-reaches the Greek scholars he is consulting – is in his attempt to take a simple verb form and make it bear a meaning it cannot bear. You mention that this fellow "really didn't mean that the Greek perfect form here meant that Mary was "perfect", but that is the essence of his argument. His translation is "Having been Graced with all Possible Grace both past present and future." Further he says that the "past" part means that "Mary was saved before ever falling in to sin". Clearly, this person's argument is entirely dependent upon making the perfect tense "magical" in the sense of infusing 'perfection,' even if he is trying to couch this lunacy in grammatical-sounding expressions:
Hi Dr. Luginbill--Once again, I have a question for you about "full of grace". You pointed out that Eph. 1:6 uses the same verb and it doesn't mean "full of grace" there, and therefore, "sinless". A Catholic correspondent has found this by some scholar or other; what do you think of his argument?
This argument is silly. Tense stems in Greek (and there are really only three which matter in such things: aorist, perfect, present) reflect 'aspect', which is something we have in English too (i.e., 'I go' = simple point action akin to the Greek aorist stem, vs. 'I am going' = repetitive action akin to the Greek present stem). These are not "magic", and investing them with layers of meaning invisible to the human eye and untranslatable into English is always a huge mistake (or a deliberate attempt to deceive). The Greek perfect has a meaning very similar to the English perfect, while the Greek aorist is very similar in meaning to the English past. By very similar I mean "essentially indistinguishable in the indicative mood". The only reason this issue of aspect even comes up is because Greek uses the different tense stems in places where we are no longer able to do so in English (i.e., while English users are generally unaware they even use a subjunctive, in Greek we can choose between present and aorist subjunctives in all contingent subordinate clause situations). This person's argument seems to rest entirely upon his quotation of Smyth. However, he misquotes Smyth by leaving out a critical part of the statement.
..If the perfect tense could do all the author claims, then every time it says anything about "knowing" in scripture (for oida is perfective in all of its forms), it would mean "knowing with a perfect knowledge that was conceived in eternity past": such a convention of translation would lead only to utter nonsense (cf. Acts 16:3).
More here , by God's grace.