Luke 1:38 So Mary said, “Yes, I am a servant of the Lord; let this happen to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

The word translated ‘servant’ is doulos, ‘slave’.

It has been speculated (by Mitzi J. Smith, J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, and Professor of Gender Studies at the University of South Africa, followed by Candida Moss and Keith Giles) that Mary’s self-designation may imply that she was actually a slave (and Jesus himself a slave, as the son of a slave woman).…

It is a pity that Protestants, generally, do not honour Mary as they ought to.  The most obvious reason for this is that they are nervous about honouring her too much (or in inappropriate ways), as the Roman Catholic Church does.

So what should we make of the doctrine of the assumption of Mary?

Some notes from this article, by Andrew Goddard:

The belief that Mary was taken up, body and soul, to be with Christ in heaven, has its roots in legends that began to circulate in the church during the first several centuries of its existence.…