Do you have any idea where the Hail Mary prayer is in the Bible? Someone told me it’s in Luke somewhere but I don’t know where, so if you know you’d help out a lot.
The beginning of the passage where Mary is greeted with this phrase is found in Luke 1:28ff. It was not originally a prayer, but rather a greeting from an angel to Mary. Praying to Mary using this phrase is a later Roman Catholic practice that finds no endorsement in this text. That practice reflects the later veneration of Mary as a heavenly intercessor for pray-ers who did not feel they could address their prayers to Jesus directly. This practice is in part based on a misunderstanding of Revelation 12, which refers to mother Zion (the people of God in a corporate female image) and also perhaps the mother of the Messiah, using a cosmic apocalyptic symbol.
—Ben Witherington III