The ages of Mary and Joseph at the time of Jesus’s birth attracted a great deal of controversy in November 2017, after the Republican Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler defended the Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing a sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl at a time when he was thirty-two. Ziegler said:
“…take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus… There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.”
Ziegler claimed that this fact absolves Roy Moore from all blame for his alleged ephebophilia. This is, of course, preposterous. Even if what Ziegler says here were completely correct, that still would not mean it is excusable for men in their thirties today to have sexual relations with fourteen-year-olds. We live in a very different society from the one that existed in Galilee in the first century BC and, regardless of what people 2,000 years ago thought, in our society, it is completely unacceptable for a man in his early thirties to seek sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old.
If we leave aside the whole question of Roy Moore’s guilt, however, we must ask, “Is Ziegler correct about Mary’s age when she gave birth to Jesus?” In other words, was Mary really a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus? The truth is, we really do not know.
Difficulties in answering this question
There are several factors that prevent us from giving a definite answer to this question. Firstly, the gospels say absolutely nothing about the ages of Mary or Joseph at the time of Jesus’s birth or at any other time. If you search through the whole New Testament, you will not find a single reference to Mary or Joseph’s age.
Secondly, the birth narratives found in the Gospel of Matthew 1:18–2:23 and the Gospel of Luke 2:1–40 are contradictory and implausible. Consequently, modern historians generally regard these accounts as fictional stories invented by the gospel-writers or by their sources. This means that even what the gospels do tell us about the birth of Jesus is unreliable.
It is probable that Jesus’s mother’s name was Mary. The Gospel of Mark, the earliest and most reliable of surviving gospel, mentions in chapter 6, verse 3 that Jesus’s mother’s name was Mary. The same passage also mentions that Jesus worked as a τέκτων (i.e. a carpenter or some kind of craftsman); that he had four brothers, whose names were James, Joses, Judas, and Simon; and that he also had at least two sisters, whose names are not given.
There is little reason to doubt the accuracy of this information, especially since Jesus’s brothers are also mentioned by Paul in his epistles, which predate the gospels, and James, the brother of Jesus, is mentioned by the Jewish historian Titus Flavius Josephus (lived c. 37 – c. 100 AD) in his Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1.
ABOVE: Christ in the House of His Parents, a rather peculiar painting created in 1850 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. This painting attempts to envision a realistic scenario of Joseph and James working as carpenters. Jesus and Mary are portrayed as red-haired to mark them as Jews, since, in Victorian England, red hair was inextricably associated with ethnic Jews.
Was Jesus the eldest of Mary’s children?
It has been traditionally assumed, based on the story of the virgin birth, that Jesus was the eldest of all his siblings. The story of the virgin birth, however, was most likely made up by early Christians in effort to fulfill a mistranslated version of a prophecy found in the Book of Isaiah 7:14.
The original Hebrew text of this passage states that a young woman is with child and will bear a son. In the Greek Septuagint, however, the Hebrew word עַלְמָה (‘almāh), meaning “young woman,” is mistranslated as the Greek word παρθένος (parthénos), which can mean “young woman,” but usually means “virgin.” The prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 is not even about the Messiah either, but rather about the birth of King Hezekiah of Judah.
Nonetheless, in the first century AD, many people interpreted this prophecy as being about the Messiah. This led many early Christians reading the Greek Septuagint to believe that the Messiah was supposed to have been born of a virgin. Since Christians were already sure Jesus was the Messiah, they assumed that he must have been born of a virgin. The legend of the virgin birth grew from there.
Nonetheless, even if we reject the story of the virgin birth, it does seem likely that Jesus was the eldest child in his family, given that that passage from Mark 6:3 that I referenced earlier seems to suggest that Jesus’s siblings were still living in the home with their mother at the time when Jesus began his public ministry. If this is correct (and this is a big if), then this would at least seem to suggest that Jesus was one of the older siblings.
ABOVE: The Virgin in Prayer, painted in c. 1650 by the Italian Baroque painter Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato
The age of marriage for young women in first-century Judaism
If we assume that Jesus was Mary’s first child, then it is quite possible Mary may have been in her mid-to-late teenaged years when she gave birth to him. Women in ancient Mediterranean cultures typically married in their mid-teenaged years, shortly after puberty. Typically, they seem to have married between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Men, on the other hand, typically married in their early 30s. This meant that the groom was usually at least twice the bride’s age, sometimes even older.
In Jewish culture during the first century BC, women typically married at about the same age as other women throughout the ancient Mediterranean world (i.e. in their mid-teenaged years). Jewish men, however, seem to have generally married younger than their Greek and Roman contemporaries. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC) states in his Politics 1335a that eighteen is the ideal age for a bride and thirty-seven is the ideal age for a groom; Jewish rabbis, on the other hand, seem to have considered eighteen the ideal age for a Jewish man to marry.
In other words, if we assume that Jesus was Mary’s first child, then she probably would have been somewhere between fourteen and twenty years old when she gave birth to him. Jesus’s father, however, would probably not have been much older than his mother. Although it is certainly possible that Mary was a teenager and Jesus’s father a man in his early thirties, it is more likely that they were close to the same age.
Now there is a tradition that Joseph was an elderly widower and that the “brothers” and “sisters” of Jesus mentioned in the gospels were actually Joseph’s children by his former wife. This tradition, however, has no basis in the gospels or in any of the other earliest surviving Christian writings and was simply made up in late antiquity to justify the Catholic teaching that Mary remained a perpetual virgin and never bore any children after Jesus. The most parsimonious conclusion is that the “brothers” and “sisters” of Jesus mentioned in the gospels were his full siblings.
ABOVE: Painting by the Italian Baroque painter Guido Reni depicting Joseph holding the infant Jesus. In this painting, Joseph is portrayed as grey-haired and elderly in alignment with the tradition that he was an elderly widower—a tradition which has no basis in any of the earliest Christian writings.
