What appears to have been an intentional mistranslation has led to us misunderstanding Mary’s status, and, that of Jesus himself.
. This and other pieces build upon the work of South African scholar Winsome Munro and are part of her soon-to-be-published book,. Smith talked to The Daily Beast about the project.
As Smith told me, “Any first-century reader, of any ethnicity, culture or religion, living under the Roman empire—a slave society where a significant segment of the population was enslaved and an empire that relied on enslaved labor—would have taken Mary’s self-designation as an enslaved woman seriously and as a declaration of her material or physical lived reality and not simply as a metaphor. And we should, too.
The problem is that this is not how English translations render the Greek. The New Revised Standard Version, for example, reads: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” The problem, Smith said, is that when translators approach the text they come to it with their own set of relatively modern culturally determined biases.
The question of Mary’s status has some important ramifications for how we think about Jesus himself. As Smith told me, “In any slave society, a child born to an enslaved woman is born enslaved” in other words “Mary’s child, Jesus, is born enslaved.” This facet of Jesus’s socio-economic status can explain other details in his biography, explained Smith. Take, for instance, the fact that Jesus did not seem to have been active before the age of 30. Under legislation passed in A.D. 4.