The Jewish province of Judea in Ancient Rome was an exceptionally conservative, religious place. Gender roles were strictly defined, as were expectations when it came to sex and marriage. Deuteronomy, as a part of traditional Jewish law, pronounced a brutal and strict punishment for women who fornicated:
“Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel.” So, it makes sense why a teenage Mary, after visiting her husband-to-be Joseph for several
Months and then becoming pregnant, would have not been merely in a lot of trouble with society, but facing death as a result of her supposed indiscretion. It also makes sense that if Joseph wasn’t the father, he would have wanted to dust off his hands and say bye-bye to his
Bride-to-be. That is, unless Joseph turned out to be precisely the kind of understanding, stand-up guy that he needed to be. The Bible uses a Greek word meaning “pledged to be married” to describe Mary and Joseph’s relationship in the time leading up to the birth of Jesus. Something between engaged
And married, and similar to “betrothed” this meant that Mary had passed along to Joseph’s rule from her father’s, but they were not yet allowed to have a sexual relationship. So, if Joseph noticed she was pregnant, whether he was the father or not, he could have exposed
Her and had her executed, even if only because he didn’t want to bear the shame of being implicated in a pre-wedlock pregnancy. Before they were betrothed, this right would have fallen to Mary’s father. Overall, the Bible doesn’t have much to say about Joseph, but his response to Mary’s unexpected
Pregnancy might be all we need to know about him and his character. Joseph didn’t rat Mary out, and in fact kept things hush-hush, planning at first to divorce her quietly, according to the book of Matthew. At this point Joseph hadn’t yet come around to accepting his divine fatherly duties, and
It’s understandable why he would have felt this way. Joseph also didn’t want to expose her to public disgrace, which is a nice way of saying that he didn’t want Mary murdered by rocks. Maybe not a high bar to clear, but it was still exceptional for the time.
Before Joseph could leave Mary, however, the book of Matthew states that an angel appeared to him, saying, “Fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name Jesus: for he
Shall save his people from their sins.” The passage goes on to say that this occurred as prophecy foretold. This heavenly intercession, similar to Mary’s visit by Gabriel recounted in the book of Luke, was all it took to make
Joseph a believer. The Bible says he was a God-fearing guy who, we presume, must have been acquainted with the prophecy. The next morning, Joseph woke up and did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him to
Do, and took Mary home as his wife. Easy-peasy. And just to be extra clear about the whole premarital sex issue, the passage in question goes on to say that Mary and Joseph didn’t have intercourse before they were officially, formally married. In the end, it seems that
The Almighty did a good job of choosing a couple to act as wards for His earthly incarnation. “The baby’s kicking. He’s strong.” “Like his mother.” Despite cinematic depictions to the contrary, this is all supposed to have happened when
Mary and Joseph were teenagers. We know this because only legal adults of ages 18 or higher were required to take part in censuses to pay taxes, which is why Mary and Joseph traveled to Bethlehem around the time of Jesus’ birth. And as the Bible goes on to say, this is around
The time when Emperor Augustus called for the aforementioned census, which more or less forced Mary and Joseph to stick together and not backpedal from their celestial commitment. It would have certainly been a scandalous affair for a young, pregnant, betrothed couple
To take to the road in those days, but Mary and Joseph did it, nonetheless. Mary accepted her role, and Joseph stuck by her side, claiming Jesus as his own child. They set off towards Bethlehem, and the rest of the well-known story unfolds: they find no room at the inn,
Settle into a nice nativity scene, get a visit from three wise men, and chill with some livestock. Despite a challenging, mystical start, Mary and Joseph stayed together, raising Jesus prior to him setting off to preach at age 30.
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The Gospel of Luke Luke investigated many of the earliest eyewitnesses of the life of Jesus and then composed this account. And the story begins up in the hills of Jerusalem. The place where Israel’s ancient prophets said that God himself would come one day to establish His Kingdom over all the earth.
In this city is the temple run by the priests and one of them, named Zacharias, was working in the temple when he had a vision that freaks him out. An angel appears and says that he and his wife will have a son. What’s this all about? Well Zacharias and his wife were told
Are very old. They’ve never been able to have children. And Luke’s setting up a parallel here, with Abraham and Sarah, the great ancestors of Israel because they too were very old and could never have kids. Yet God gave them a son – Isaac which is how the whole story of Israel began.
And so Luke’s implying here that God’s about to do something that significant for this people, once again. The angel tells Zacharias to name the son John and then he says that this son’s going to fulfill a promise of Israel’s ancient prophets that somebody would come one day
To prepare Israel to meet their God when He arrived to rule in Jerusalem because right now, Jerusalem is ruled by the Romans. Yes, specifically, it’s governed by a man named Herod who’s a puppet king under the Roman Empire. And so the Jewish people wanted nothing more than to
Be free and govern themselves in their own land. So this is shocking news. Everything’s going to change. God’s on His way. But how is he going to arrive? Well to find out, Luke takes us out of Jerusalem and then up into a a small town in the hills of an
Out of the way region called Galilee. There we find a young woman named Mariam or we call her, Mary. She was engaged to be married and then an angel appears to Mary saying that she’s going to have a son. She’s supposed to name Him, Jesus, which in Hebrew means, the Lord saves.
And He will be a King like David who will rule over God’s people forever. And then Mary asks, “Okay, well, how is this possible because I’m a virgin?” And she’s told that the same Holy Spirit that brought life and light out of darkness in Genesis, Chapter 1,
Is going to generate life inside her womb. God is about to bind Himself to humanity through the conception and the birth of the Messiah. And so Mary, goes from some back woods no name girl to the future mother of the King. Exactly. In fact, sings a song about
Had to go down to Bethlehem. There was a decree across the Roman Empire about new taxes. And so everybody had to go get registered in the town of their family line. There was so many visitors in Bethlehem. They can’t find a guest room.
And so the only place they can find, is a spot where animals sleep. Now, nearby, were some shepherds with their flocks. And an angel appears, which, of course, freaks them out. But, they’re to celebrate because tonight in Bethlehem, a Savior has been born. They’re told to go and find this baby.
And they’ll know that it’s the Messiah because He’s going to be wrapped up and laying in a grimy feeding trough. Then these shepherds, who aren’t very clean themselves, they go and find the newborn Jesus, in this really dingy place and their minds are blown.
They go home wondering, ‘What on Earth is about to happen?’ And this is all really strange. I mean, if God’s really coming to save the world, this isn’t how you would expect Him to arrive. Born in an animal shelter to a teenage girl, celebrated by no-name shepherds.
Exactly! I mean, everything is backwards in Luke’s story and that’s the point. He is showing how God’s Kingdom was first revealed in these dirty places, among the poor because Jesus is here to bring salvation by turning our world order upside down.
You’re probably familiar with the Nativity story. But the truth about Mary and Joseph, the two parents at the heart of the story, is often brushed aside when talking about Christianity’s main man, Jesus. But Mary and Joseph are interesting characters. Here’s the untold truth of Mary and Joseph.
In Mary and Joseph’s time, women’s purity was valued as a currency, something that would sweeten the deal between marriage negotiations in family. There were no paternity tests back then, if you wanted kids that you were sure were yours, the best insurance was marrying a virgin.
So imagine your girlfriend shows up after visiting her cousin for three months with a big ol’ baby bump. You can probably picture the reactions. “Pregnant? Holy crap!” Everyone, not just Joseph, was freaking out. Mary would have been considered damaged goods and not marriage material.
It didn’t help that she was claiming this was God’s baby. So Joseph planned to end their engagement. According to National Geographic, Joseph was just trying to not make the situation worse. But don’t think Joseph was insensitive for wanting to dump Mary because she was unexpectedly pregnant.
Breaking up was actually the classiest move Joseph could have made at that time. Think about the story of the Nativity as if it happened today: A teenage girl from an extremely conservative society gets engaged, visits her cousin, and comes back visibly pregnant.
Mary was an OG and kept to her story that the Holy Spirit had gotten her pregnant, but people were as skeptical of the idea back then as they would have been today. “I am the virgin Mary. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”
Joseph tried to be nice about it, Matthew 1:19 describes how he planned to separate from her quietly so the public wouldn’t shame her. But “shame her” is a nice way to say “stone her to death.” Deuteronomy 22:21 and the surrounding verses lay down the law that if a girl got intimate
While unmarried, she would be stoned to death for bringing shame upon her family. But Joseph didn’t want this to happen to her. Later on, the angel Gabriel visited him in a dream and reassured him that yes, Mary actually was going to have God’s kid.
So Joseph doubled down on his Good Guy stance and took on Mary as his wife even though she was pregnant. Tablet describes how Joseph has taken on newfound popularity in modern times as people have realized just how important he was to keeping Mary safe.
People have realized that without him, the birth of Jesus definitely wouldn’t have happened. Shocking! “Sweet baby Jesus.” Once the angel visited Joseph and confirmed that Mary was really going to have God’s kid, Joseph got on board immediately. But this also extended to after the birth of Jesus.
God, perhaps impressed by how cool Joseph had been throughout this whole ordeal, sent another angel to Joseph telling him that they had to pick up and leave immediately. He obeyed, and they fled what turned out to be a massacre of all kids in Bethlehem younger than two years old.
King Herod, whose name you may remember as one of the more popular Sunday School villains, had sent people out to kill any child who might be the Messiah after running into the three kings on their way to visit Jesus.
Apparently he was worried about another king trying to take his place, and you know how kings are about being kings. “I am the KING!” Joseph has been shoved aside in favor of the Virgin Mary in the eyes of a lot of believers,
Since she had to carry Jesus and bear the social stigma of the pregnancy. But that’s beginning to change. In 2003, Pope John Paull II spoke about Joseph setting an example as someone who believed in the messages he received from God but also stayed humble and didn’t seek attention as God’s stepdad.
The National Catholic Register sang his praises in 2011, recommending him as someone Catholics could go to for divine help in parenting. It’s explicitly stated in the Bible that Joseph and Mary didn’t consummate their marriage until after Jesus was born and they bailed to Egypt.
Which makes sense, since Mary was pregnant most of the time they were initially together. But even this viewpoint is pretty revolutionary in terms of how believers view Mary. There’s a healthy group of people, mostly Catholic, who believe that Mary never lost her virginity. Ever.
The “perpetual virgin” view of Mary is used as a way to honor her alleged holiness and purity as the mother of God. National Catholic Register points out that people who believe this theory do so partly because of the lexicon surrounding families at the time.
Whenever men are referred to as Jesus’s “brothers” in the Bible, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re Jesus’s brothers by blood. They could be his cousins or other family members, or maybe even just his friends. This is another story about the life of Jesus that may have been altered through the lens
Of pop culture. It’s quaint to picture Jesus learning how to build things out of wood with his dad. It’s like they’re alluding the imagery of the stable of his birth and his future death on a cross. It also fits the idea of Jesus’s beginnings being humble.
The Bible even tells a story of when Jesus was roasted in his hometown of Nazareth when he came back as an adult to perform miracles. They said things to the effect of, “Wait, how does the son of a carpenter know all these things?”
In the Ancient Greek that the Bible was translated from, Joseph is referred to as a tekton. According to A Greek-English Lexicon, tekton can mean a carpenter or wood-joiner but is commonly used to describe any craftsman or woodworker. Some theories allege that this means Joseph may have actually worked with stones or larger materials.
An author cited in the Telegraph claimed that Joseph may have even been a master architect who provided Jesus a comfortable upbringing. Sorry to disturb anyone’s assumptions, but Christ was not white. Jesus may have been played by white actors in a lot of films, but that’s definitely not
How it went down in real life. A breakdown from Live Science suggests that if Jesus took after Mary at all, he would have had olive skin and was probably of average height for the time. Mary probably looked like other Israeli Jews, or maybe with a slightly darker complexion.
She also would have been pretty average looking, since the Bible goes out of its way to specifically mention whenever someone is particularly attractive, and it didn’t do that with Mary. “I’m painting the birth of Jesus, as it was and always will be.” “Uh, no. Here’s how you’re going to paint me.
Serene, and gorgeous.” James Martin wrote in Slate that we can’t forget that Mary was probably 14 years old at the time when she gave birth to Jesus, something that was common for the time. She probably would have been arranged to be married around the time of her first period.
Just in case you needed your Nativity scene to be even more awkward. Mary had it harder than most women when it came to childbirth, even when you consider the time period. She presumably had Joseph to help her. But she had no experienced midwives, which were available to expecting mothers back then,
According to The Jewish Woman. Mary also, thanks to circumstances, had to give birth in a smelly place outside of her own town away from her family. That would be hard on anyone. But add on a difficult labor and it becomes a whole other story: In the Quran, Mary has
To give birth with her back against a palm tree for support. She says out loud, quote, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” “Congratulations Mary, it’s a boy.” “And you didn’t die during childbirth like most women during this time. It’s a miracle.”
Mary has a whole chapter about her in the Quran and is the only woman mentioned by name, according to the BBC. Her chapter talks about the birth of Jesus and the immediate aftermath. According to PRI, it also features a story about baby Jesus speaking up in his mom’s
Defense when people said she wasn’t a virgin. Guess if you have all the knowledge in the world, you really have all the knowledge. In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of paintings of Mary. The young mom of Jesus has been featured in probably more paintings than anyone who ever lived.
In a lot of these paintings, Mary’s portrayed wearing a light blue shawl or hijab. It’s a light, airy color, not unlike the robe worn by her son in the most expensive painting on earth, Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. But is Mary’s blue covering accurate to history? Probably not.
The Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge confirms that clothing for women Israelites was lighter and more brightly colored than men’s clothing. Assyrians of the time wore blue tunics as undergarments, but that was relatively far from Mary’s ‘hood. Aleteia describes how Mary’s blue covering is really an allusion to her purity and closeness to God.
She doesn’t wear the white of a saint or the red of a Jesus-killing emperor. Blue is the color of special woven tassels worn by Jews in that time to remind them to follow the Commandments. In short, Mary wears blue in paintings to symbolize that she is just that much holier
Than anyone else painted with her. In Catholicism, there are lots of books beside the Bible that people debate over in terms of authenticity. Some people dismiss them outright. Other people take them in consideration alongside the Bible. Some of these extra texts for Catholicism are called the apocrypha writings.
Catholic Culture describes them as documents that didn’t make it to the Bible compiled by people who wanted to know more about Jesus. Even if they’re not true, they say a lot about what people thought about Jesus and his place in the culture not long after he was alive.
If these writings can be believed, Joseph had a first wife named Melcha. According to The Catholic Dictionary, the apocrypha states that Joseph was a widower with six children, who asked to marry Mary after his wife died. This fits the pop culture image of Mary being much younger than him.
It also fits with the idea of Mary being a perpetual virgin but Jesus still having brothers and sisters. They could have been step brothers and sisters. If it’s true, it provides a very different image of Joseph: An older guy who’s already
Done the marriage and babies thing who has this new wife who’s pregnant somehow. But he still steps up to be stepdad of the year. One of the most consistent parts of the Nativity story is that Mary had to give birth to Jesus in a stable full of animals.
The town was full of people coming to Bethlehem, and apparently no one was nice enough to let a heavily pregnant woman take their adjoining suite. So they took the only space available. Now, people of that region at this time didn’t keep animals in stables the way we do today.
Think of a home in biblical times as the ultimate open concept home: People would sleep up in what was essentially the second floor while doing chores and other everyday work on the base floor. The base floor was also where the animals were brought in at night.
Newsweek reported that this was likely where Jesus was born, not in an entirely separate structure built outside of a house. What most likely happened was that Joseph showed up at his extended family’s house, was told that there wasn’t enough room in the sleeping quarters for Mary to give birth,
And so they had to make do with the gross basement where the animals hung out. It wasn’t so much people being monsters to a pregnant woman as much as Joseph’s cousin Fred arrived early and scored the last couch. Check out one of our newest videos right here!
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