Who is the most blessed woman?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Usually considered reconciled

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

On its face this looks like a contest of superlatives, but the linguistic spine of all three texts is a single Semitic idiom, and that is where the analysis must begin. The Greek of Luke 1:28 — εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξίν (eulogēmenē su en gynaixin), 'blessed are you among women' — reproduces almost verbatim the Septuagint construction applied to Jael in Judges 5:24 (εὐλογηθείη ἐκ γυναικῶν, eulogētheiē ek gynaikōn) and the formula applied to Judith in the Greek of Judith 13:18 (εὐλογητὴ σὺ … παρὰ πάσας τὰς γυναῖκας τὰς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς). The prepositional phrase 'among/above women' functions as a periphrastic superlative in Hebrew and its Greek calque: it singles out a woman as supremely honored relative to her sex, exactly as 'fairest among women' works in Song of Songs 1:8. So the question 'who is the MOST blessed woman?' is partly an artifact of reading three independent uses of one stock blessing-formula as if they were coordinated entries on a single ranked list.

The textual data also bear on the Lukan side. The longer reading of Luke 1:28 that adds 'blessed are you among women' (εὐλογημένη σὺ ἐν γυναιξίν) is absent from the earliest and best witnesses (P⁴, ℵ, B, L, W) and is widely judged a scribal harmonization imported from Elizabeth's later acclamation in Luke 1:42, where the phrase is textually secure. Metzger's Textual Commentary treats it as an interpolation; the NA28 brackets it accordingly. The 'contradiction' at 1:28 is therefore in part a product of the Textus Receptus and the KJV the question quotes. The substantive comparison stands at Luke 1:42, where Elizabeth's words to Mary echo the same idiom that crowned Jael and Judith.

Two harmonizing strategies deserve a fair hearing. The first, articulated by Joseph Fitzmyer in the Anchor Bible Luke, is linguistic: the formula is an intensifier, not an absolute ranking, so each woman is supremely blessed within the rhetorical frame of her own narrative without any of them displacing the others. This is the strongest move and it is largely correct as grammar. The second, common in Mariological literature, reads Luke as the eschatological climax that fulfills and supersedes the earlier blessings, making Jael and Judith typological foreshadowings of Mary. That is a coherent theological construal, but it requires reading Luke as deliberately overwriting Judges and Judith — a claim the text asserts nowhere and which the formula's idiomatic character does not require.

The more illuminating critical observation is literary and intertextual. Brittany Wilson and others have argued that Luke consciously evokes the Jael and Judith blessings precisely to invert them: where Jael and Judith are blessed for acts of decapitating, peg-driving violence against enemy commanders, Mary is blessed as the bearer of the prince of peace. Judith circulated widely in Greek-speaking Jewish circles by the first century, and Luke's demonstrable command of the LXX makes literary dependence plausible. If so, Luke is not contradicting the earlier texts but appropriating their honorific pattern and redirecting it — an act of allusion, not arithmetic competition.

Weighing this, the entry is best classified as overstated rather than as a hard logical contradiction. A genuine contradiction would require that the texts assert mutually exclusive propositions about the same referent; instead they apply a conventional superlative idiom to three different women in three different settings, none claiming the others are not blessed. The seam that remains is real but modest: the canon does deploy 'most blessed of women' more than once, and a flat-footed literal reading produces an apparent rivalry that the idiom itself dissolves. The apologist who insists on Mary's unique supremacy must demote the Jael and Judith uses to mere foreshadowing — a theological preference, not a textual datum — but the skeptic who calls this a square contradiction must ignore both the idiom and the textual weakness of Luke 1:28.

Where the critical reading lands: overstated; a Semitic superlative idiom applied to three women, compounded by a secondary scribal reading at Luke 1:28.