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).

For Smith, this

‘situates Jesus at the bottom of the society into which he was born. He lived in stigmatized flesh like so many other people during his lifetime and beyond, including Black people, people of color, poor people, immigrants, and so on…The injustice of the world is an injustice that Jesus himself experienced.’

Giles suggests that:

‘If Jesus was born a slave…it would make so many of Jesus’s sayings from the Sermon on the Mount resonate with greater authority and power… Jesus’s status as a former slave would have added immeasurable weight and power to his words and his audience would have accepted him as one of their own and not as an entitled free man who had no idea what the harsh realities of their life was really like.’

Such writers argue that this has contemporary relevance: Christians today are called to free God’s suffering and dehumanised people.  They are to share Jesus’ compassion for ‘the least of these’.

In support of this theory:

1. Smith and Moss maintain that the word in question (‘doulos‘) would unambiguously suggest to the ancient readers that Mary was a slave girl.
2. Up to one-third of the population in urban areas of the Roman empire were slaves.
3. The age of manumission of a slave from AD40 was thirty – the age of Jesus at the commencement of his public ministry.

But the idea has more novelty value than factual value.

1. The biblical grounds for a Jewish woman being the slave (rather than the wife) of a man are slender.  As David Cavanagh notes:

‘Because YHWH had freed Israel from slavery in Egypt, no Israelite was to be enslaved and limits were placed on any term of bound service an Israelite might enter into (Exodus 21:1-4; Leviticus 25:39-46; Deuteronomy 15:12-15). Special protections were accorded to female captive slaves (Deuteronomy 21:10-14), abusive masters would forfeit their slaves (Exodus 21:26-27) and slaves who had escaped into Israel were not to be returned to their masters (Deuteronomy 23:15-16). Similarly, slaves were to be included in Sabbath rest and in Israel’s worship (Exodus 20:10; 23:12; Deuteronomy 5:14-15; 12:12).’

2. Against Smith, who argues that Mary’s self-designation indicates a literal, and not a metaphorical status, we must insist that the metaphorical meaning is far more likely.  This is especially so because Mary says that she is the slave ‘of the Lord’, not of Joseph (see also Lk 1:48; 2:29).  The metaphorical use of ‘doulos‘ is attested in a number places in the LXX (1 Sam. 11:1; 25:41; 2 Sam. 9:6; 2 Ki. 4:16).  The metaphorical meaning is also found throughout the rest of the NT (Romans 1:1; 1 Corinthans 3:5, 9; 4:1; 2 Corinthians 4:5; 6:4; Galatians 1:10; Philippians 1:1; 2:6f; James 1:1, 2 Peter 1:1, and Jude 1; Hebrews 3:5; Revelation 1:1; John 13:16; Romans 6:18-19; 7:6; 1 Corinthians 7:22; 1 Peter 2:16).