Luke 1:37, read inside its own paragraph

Luke sets the scene in the sixth month of Elizabeth's pregnancy. Gabriel is sent to Nazareth, a city of Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph. He greets her, she is greatly troubled at the saying, and he tells her she will conceive and give birth to a son and call his name Jesus. She asks how, given that she is a virgin. He answers with the Holy Spirit and the power of the Most High, and then he offers evidence she can check: her relative Elizabeth, the woman Luke says was called barren, is six months pregnant.

Only after all of that does he say the line people search for. Then Mary answers, and the angel leaves. So the sentence has a job inside a scene. It closes the distance between an announcement Mary cannot verify and an answer she has to give. It is spoken to one person, about one situation that has already been named out loud.

That matters for how much weight the verse can carry. Gabriel is defending one specific claim, already made, to the one person he made it to.

The Greek behind the verse in the modern critical editions is short, and two words carry the argument: a verb of being unable, and a noun that can mean either a word or a thing.

The verb is adynateo. Thayer's lexicon, reproduced on Bible Hub, records that in classical Greek it means not to have strength or to be weak, and that it is always used so of persons. In the Septuagint and the New Testament it shifts to things, with the sense that something cannot be done. Thayer's entry cites exactly two New Testament places for the verb, Luke 1:37 and Matthew 17:20, and Bible Hub's lexicon summary on the same page calls those the only two verbal occurrences.

The noun is rhema. Thayer's entry describes it as something uttered by the living voice, a thing spoken. He also records that in the Septuagint it stands chiefly for the Hebrew dabar, which in Hebrew covers both a spoken word and the matter or event that the word is about. Thayer files Luke 1:37 under that Hebrew-influenced sense and points the reader to Genesis 18:14.

So the sentence is built around a word that can mean either the utterance or the thing uttered, and a verb that can mean either powerless or impossible. English has to pick one sense and print it, which is where the translations part company.

Here are the three public domain renderings, quoted in full.

King James Version: "For with God nothing shall be impossible." American Standard Version: "For no word from God shall be void of power." World English Bible: "For nothing spoken by God is impossible."

Two separate things produce that spread. The first is a manuscript difference. Bible Hub's parallel Greek page for the verse shows Stephanus Textus Receptus 1550, Scrivener's Textus Receptus 1894 and the Byzantine Majority Text reading para to theo, a dative that means with God. It shows the Nestle 1904, Westcott and Hort, Tischendorf and SBL editions reading para tou theou, a genitive that means from God. Thayer's entry on adynateo notes the same split.

The King James translators worked from the first reading, which is why their sentence is about what is possible in God's presence. The American Standard translators worked from the second, which is why their sentence is about what comes out of God's mouth.

The second difference is grammatical. Vincent's Word Studies argues that the King James joined the Greek negative and the Greek word for every together to produce the English word nothing, and that the two do not belong together. On his reading the sentence says that every word of God shall not be powerless. He calls the Revised wording, which the American Standard Version follows, the right one, and calls the King James handling an error at this point.

Commentators do not all agree with him, and the honest answer is that they still divide. The Expositor's Greek Testament states the disagreement plainly: some render it no word of God shall be weak or inoperative, others render it no thing, on God's part, shall be impossible.

That commentary judges that the from God reading seems to demand the first option, and it cites the scholar Field, who kept the impossible sense of the verb while adopting the from God reading and translated the line as for from God no word, or no thing, shall be impossible. The Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges gives the shortest version of the same correction, glossing nothing as rather, no word.

In the scene itself the two readings arrive at nearly the same place, because the thing in question is a thing God has just said through an angel. Away from the scene they pull apart. One is a statement about God's capacity in the abstract. The other is a statement about the reliability of what God has actually spoken. The second is narrower, and it is the one the older Greek copies support.

This is Luke 1:34 through 1:38 in the World English Bible, so you can see the sentence sitting where Luke put it.

Mary said to the angel, "How can this be, seeing I am a virgin?" The angel answered her, "The Holy Spirit will come on you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore also the holy one who is born from you will be called the Son of God. Behold, Elizabeth, your relative, also has conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her who was called barren. For nothing spoken by God is impossible."

Mary said, "Behold, the servant of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word." The angel departed from her.

Notice the last thing Mary says. The word she uses for word in verse 38 is rhema again, the same noun as in verse 37. Thayer's lexicon lists that occurrence under the sense of a promise. Her reply picks up Gabriel's own vocabulary and hands it back to him. Whatever the verse is about, Mary heard it as being about the specific thing she had just been told.

Genesis 18 has Sarah laughing behind a tent door at the news that she will have a son in old age. The World English Bible renders the answer this way: "Is anything too hard for Yahweh? At the set time I will return to you, when the season comes round, and Sarah will have a son."

Bengel's notes on Luke 1:37 print the Septuagint of that Genesis line, which uses the same verb and the same noun in the same prepositional frame, and he renders it as a question expecting the answer no. Jamieson, Fausset and Brown read Gabriel's sentence as a deliberate reference back to what was said to Abraham in the like case, offered to strengthen Mary's faith.

One detail travels with the Genesis version and does not appear in Luke's. Abraham is given a date. At the set time, when the season comes round. Gabriel gives Mary no timetable at all. He gives her a sign she can go and look at, which is Elizabeth, and he leaves.

This is the part almost nobody prints under the sunset photograph, and it is the part that decides whether the verse helps you or hurts you.

The verse attaches no condition to the hearer. There is no if in it. Mary is not told that her belief will make the thing happen, and Luke does not present her consent in verse 38 as the cause of anything. When Elizabeth blesses her a few verses later, in Luke 1:45, she blesses her for believing that there would be a fulfillment of the things which have been spoken to her. The believing comes after the announcement, as a response to it.

The verse is not a statement about human capability. The same verb turns up in Matthew 17:20 in a sentence about disciples and a mustard seed, and that is a different scene with a different subject. Reading the two as one promise flattens both.

The verse does not promise a pleasant outcome. Luke does not soften what Mary is agreeing to. A chapter later, Simeon tells her in Luke 2:35 that a sword will pierce through her own soul. The announcement was true and the cost was real, and Luke reports both without apology.

The verse says nothing about when. The Genesis line it echoes carries a date. This one does not. Any reading that turns it into a schedule is adding something the sentence never contained.

The verse also does not underwrite whatever a person can imagine. Bengel makes that argument directly in his notes here: a self-contradictory statement is not a word in the sense the verse is using, and God is not described as promising a thing and then repenting of it. That is a limit set by the text itself.

None of this is a reason to be hard on people who quote it the wide way. Someone facing a fourth failed cycle, or a scan they have been dreading for three weeks, reaches for the shortest sentence in the Bible that sounds like a door still open. That is a human thing to do. The narrow reading is the sturdier one, though, because it survives a bad result. Used as leverage on an outcome, the verse breaks the moment the outcome goes the wrong way. Read as a description of who God is, it holds.

Very few people arrive at this verse wanting a lexicon. They arrive carrying something: an infertility diagnosis, a scan, a court date, a child who has stopped picking up the phone, a layoff email that arrived at 4:40 on a Friday. It gets typed into phones at three in the morning by people who are not going back to sleep.

It also shows up on wedding programs, nursery walls, graduation cards and adoption announcements. Those uses are gentler and they are usually fine, because nobody in that setting is betting a specific outcome on the sentence.

The question worth asking before you lean on it is which of the two things you are doing. Are you saying something true about God, or are you trying to make a particular result more likely by saying it often enough? The first is what the verse is doing in Luke 1. The second is a heavier load than the sentence was built to carry.

The same Gospel that records Luke 1:37 also records a prayer of Jesus on the Mount of Olives that was not granted in the form it was made. Luke does not use the name Gethsemane, which comes from Matthew and Mark. The World English Bible has Luke 22:42 as "Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done."

Paul describes something similar in 2 Corinthians 12:8 and 9, where he begged the Lord three times that a thing would depart from him, and the answer he reports receiving is "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Neither passage treats the person praying as having failed at faith, and both sit in the same Bible as Luke 1:37, so any honest reading of the verse has to sit alongside them.

If your specific thing did not happen, the text does not hand you a diagnosis of why. Anyone who tells you it was your unbelief is going beyond what these passages say.

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If the reason you are reading a verse about impossibility at three in the morning is a scan result or a child, call your parish or church office when it opens and ask for twenty minutes in person with the priest or pastor by name. That request is ordinary and offices field it constantly.

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