And it came to pass, as he spake these things, a certain woman of the company lifted up her voice, and said unto him, Blessed is the womb that bare thee, and the paps which thou hast sucked. But he said, Yea rather (μενουν), blessed are they that hear the word of God and keep it. (Luke 11:27-28; cf. 8:19-21)
This passage is a very strong verse against the high Mariology one finds within Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, as Jesus is downplaying Mary's biological relationship to him and instead, focusing on what is truly important--spiritual relationships. Furthermore, it does seem, as both a prima facie and even a secunda facie reading, to preclude Marian veneration.
In an attempt to counter the force of this verse, one Catholic apologist wrote the following:
What does Luke 11:27-28 say about Mary? Does it downplay her role? I will let a Protestant, Margaret Thrall, a Protestant scholar, explains what Jesus means:
“What you have said is true as far as it goes. But the blessedness of Mary does not consist simply in the fact of her relationship towards myself, but (menoun) in the fact that she shares in the blessedness of those who hear the word of God and keep it, and it is in this that true blessedness,”.(Margaret Thrall, Greek Particles in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1962), 35.” (Source: Are Catholic Traditions Unbiblical? An Examination)
This is instructive in how many pop apologists abuse the Greek language. When one reads Thrall’s section on μενουν and its use in Luke 11:28, she offers the above reading as one of three possible renderings, and ultimately rejects it for the “corrective” sense (i.e., “rather”). As Thrall herself wrote:
The meaning of the Lucan example is less easy to determine, as the precise significance of the saying is not very clear from the context, and all three classical functions of adverbial μέν ούν could be attributed to the particle here without any great difficulty. It might be strictly adversative, as in Romans: "On the contrary, this parental relationship is not in itself of any importance whatsoever. The people who are blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. " Or it might be assentient in the full sense: "Yes, certainly my mother is blessed, for the people who are blessed are those . . ." (cf. i 38). Finally, it might be corrective: "What you have said is true as far as it goes. But the blessedness of Mary does not consist simply in the fact of her relationship towards myself but in the fact that she shares in the blessedness of those who hear the word of God and keep it, and it is in this that true blessedness lies." The first two possibilities can perhaps be eliminated, however, on the grounds that when Luke wishes to express contradiction he uses elsewhere the phrase ουχί, λέγω ύμΐν (άλλ' ή), as in xii 51 ; xiii 3, 5; and when he expresses affirmation he tends to use the particle ναι, as in vii 26; x 21 ; xi 51 ; xii 5. This leaves us with μένουν as a corrective, "rather," as in Plato, e.g. εις σμικρόν γ' , έ'φη, χρόνον είρηκας; εις ουδέν μέν ούν, έ'φην, ως γε προς τόν άπαντα (PL R. 49& D) (Margaret Thrall, Greek Particles in the New Testament: Linguistic and Exegetical Studies [New Testament Tools and Studies, vol. 3; Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1962], 35)
