02_Feník Lapko_498-524_498-524 10/12/15 10:15 Pagina 500 500 JURAJ FENÍK – RÓBERT LAPKO 500 III. 2,22-35; IV. 2,41-52), leading to the conclusion (V) that it ap- pears entirely justified to speak of four annunciations in Luke 1‒2. The first annunciation represents the point of departure for the cen- tral portion of this article. I. Annunciation to Mary by Gabriel (1,26-38) The second episode in Luke, unlike the first, begins directly with the sending of the same angel under divine dispatch to Mary in the town of Nazareth. The encounter between Gabriel and the virgin is staged as the angel’s arrival to her, with the verb of movement used to express the action of the angel (1,28a eivselqw,n). Their dialogue begins with the angel’s greeting (1,28b). Mary’s reaction to what she hears is reported in the following verse (1,29). The divine envoy resumes speaking in 1,30a, and at this juncture the aspect of annunciation emerges. As was the case in the previous episode, the identification of the messenger (o` a;ggeloj), the ref- erence to the addressee (auvth/|), and the use of a verbum dicendi (ei=pen) converge to indicate that an annunciation is starting to un- fold. Its content is then teased out in 1,30b-33. After the assurance to Mary not to fear and the reference to her finding grace with God, the texture of the oracle (1,31-33) is woven out of a string of eight verbs in future tense with varying subject and content. This shows that Gabriel is in the process of delivering a message: he announces the performance of future actions by different characters. With Mary as the subject, the first three verbs (sullh,myh|, te,xh|, kale,seij) point to her future acts of conceiving, bearing, and naming the boy and so underline her unique and privileged role with respect to the child to be born. As the first piece of information in 1,31, the angel an artificially contrived designation for any other scene in the remainder of Luke’s narrative in which one character says something to another. Confined to the purview of Luke 1–2, the term captures the dynamic present in 2,8-20; 2,22-35; 2,41-52 — in addition to 1,26-38 — that consists of the appearance of a divinely-sanctioned messenger who addresses Mary on the identity of her son. Such articulation of the three texts serves both to distinguish them from other scenes in the infancy narrative and to link them with the first, angelic annunciation.