Were Mary and Joseph Married or Engaged at Jesus’ Birth?
Mary and Joseph in the Bible
The atmosphere of our church service was pregnant with expectation: four candles of the Advent wreath and the colored lights from the tree and wreaths lit the darkened room. My wife and I were among the tens of millions gathered on Christmas Eve to rehearse the Nativity story again. As one of the readers read aloud Luke 2:5, I was struck by the New International Version (NIV) translation: “Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child.” Chronologically, the narrative had advanced some eight months from Luke 1:26-27, where it stated that Gabriel was sent to a virgin named Mary “pledged to be married to a man named Joseph.” The Greek verb mnēsteuō was translated identically in both verses.
The translation suggested to me that an unmarried Jewish couple was traveling a long distance unaccompanied by other family members. And the woman—still only pledged in marriage—was in an advanced state of pregnancy. If such a situation is still scandalous in the Middle East, how much more in first-century Judea!1
Were Mary and Joseph married or engaged when they traveled to Bethlehem? Seen here is a mosaic of the Journey to Bethlehem from the Chora Church in Istanbul.
Later I checked other translations of Luke 2:5. The English Standard Version (ESV) uses “betrothed,” an archaic Middle English word. The New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) uses “engaged,” while the New Living Translation (NLT) says “fiancée.” Again, these English versions suggest that the couple’s marriage was incomplete. This discovery led me into an in-depth word study as well as a look at ancient marriage. And what I found was surprising.
Matthew’s Gospel seems to be clearer. In the genealogy, Joseph is called the “husband of Mary,” who gave birth to Jesus (Matthew 1:16). Describing the background of their relationship, Matthew 1:18 reads, “His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph.” Here Matthew uses the same Greek verb as Luke. However, after Joseph decides to divorce Mary because of her unexpected pregnancy, an angel warns him in a dream not to do so. The angel advises him to “take Mary as his wife” (Matthew 1:20). When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel commanded him: He took Mary as his wife (Matthew 1:24). Luke’s version seemingly contradicts Matthew’s, according to present English translations.
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The Greek verb mnēsteuō is used eight times in the Septuagint (the third-century B.C.E. Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible). Four uses in Deuteronomy (22:23, 25, 27, 28) deal with the legal issues surrounding an engaged woman having illicit sexual relations. If the incident happens in a city (22:23), both the man and the woman are to be stoned to death; if a rape happens in the country, only the man is to be stoned. The man is considered guilty because he has violated another man’s wife (22:24).
In the three uses in Hosea, God himself is speaking. Regarding Israel’s future day of redemption in 2:16, God declares: “You will call me ‘my husband.’” Then he states in verses 19–20: “And I will take you for my wife forever; I will take you for my wife in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love, and in mercy. I will take you for my wife in faithfulness; and you shall know the LORD.” The NRSV translates “wife” here, while the NIV, ESV and New King James Version (NKJV) all read: “I will betroth you.” Because of the context wherein God declares that he is a husband forever, it is clear that his relationship with Israel extends beyond an engagement stage; they will metaphorically be husband and wife.
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The Hebrew verb aras, translated mnēsteuō in Greek, refers to Jewish marriage practice in which the groom contractually pays a bride-price (mohar) to the bride’s father (Genesis 34:12). According to Old Testament scholar Douglas Stuart, “This was the final step in the courtship process, virtually equivalent in legal status to the wedding ceremony.”2 According to the Mishnah Ketubbot 5.2, the betrothal would last a year, with the bride remaining in the home of her father. Recalling the legal texts in Deuteronomy mentioned earlier plus the equation of David’s betrothal to Michal as marriage (2 Samuel 3:14), we see that under Jewish law, a betrothed woman was considered to be married.
Returning to Joseph, he would have paid the bride price to Mary’s father at their engagement (Matthew 1:20; Luke 1:27). Despite his misgivings, Joseph then obeyed the angel’s command to marry Mary (Matthew 1:20). The time of formal engagement, whether a full year or not, had passed between them. So Joseph and Mary had begun to live together except for sexual relations (Matthew 1:25). Luke’s understanding of mnēsteuō must be expanded to include both the betrothal/engagement as well as marital cohabitation. Therefore a better translation of Luke 2:5 would be: “Mary his wife who was expecting a child.” (The NKJV attempts a hybrid with “betrothed wife.”) English translations that suggest the couple was still only in the engagement stage of fiancé/fiancée must be discarded. Joseph and Mary traveled to Bethlehem as a full husband and wife under ancient Jewish law.
Mark Wilson is the director of the Asia Minor Research Center in Antalya, Turkey, and is a popular teacher on BAS Travel/Study tours. Mark received his doctorate in Biblical studies from the University of South Africa (Pretoria), where he serves as a research fellow in Biblical archaeology. He is currently Associate Professor Extraordinary of New Testament at Stellenbosch University. He leads field studies in Turkey and the eastern Mediterranean for university, seminary and church groups. He is the author of Biblical Turkey: A Guide to the Jewish and Christian Sites of Asia Minor and Victory through the Lamb: A Guide to Revelation in Plain Language. He is a frequent lecturer at BAS’s Bible Fests.
Notes
1. Joseph Fitzmyer anticipated my questions by suggesting that readers and listeners should not be overliteral because the account does not intend to answer questions such as: “What was she doing on a journey with Joseph, if she were merely his fiancée or betrothed? And worse still, pregnant as well”; see Joseph Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I–IX (New York: Doubleday, 1981), p. 407. To ask such questions, according to Fitzmyer, is to miss the point of Luke’s story. But in liturgical use such authorial nuances are lost. He also notes that Luke never calls Mary the “wife” of Joseph and perhaps was not aware of Palestinian Jewish marriage customs. This blog post assumes that Luke, because of his knowledge of Jewish customs and possible interview with Mary herself (cf. Luke 1:2), used familiar marital language that had a broader semantic range than translators give it today.
2. Douglas Stuart, Hosea-Jonah, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 31 (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1987), p. 59.
This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on January 12, 2017.
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Do you really know anything about Jewish marriage? Even to this day, it involves a double ceremony – a betrothal (kiddushin or erusin) followed by a formal legal contract (ketubah, which simply means document). Usually these now take place together, one immediately following the other. A giveaway is that wine is blessed and drunk twice during the wedding service, once during each stage of the process.
In the past, however, the two stages could be separate. The orthodox view is that betrothal is binding, such that sex with a woman betrothed to someone else is adultery and a formal divorce is required in order to dissolve a betrothal. Betrothal can be achieved either by giving and receiving a bride-gift or by the couple having intercourse.
Only someone profoundly ignorant of Jewish law could have misunderstood what the gospels meant by “engaged” or “betrothed”. In fairness, this wasn’t <em.written down until the Mishnah was codified in the 2nd century CE but frankly it is basic Judaism 101 that any scholar of Jesus’s lifetime really ought to know.
Jesus was married for several factors: 1) As a Jewish Rabbi, he would not have been let in to pray in the Temple without being married. To this day, Rabbis are married and it would have been a scandal for Jesus to reach the age of his early 30s and not be so. The fact that the Church wiped it out is because they were rewriting Jewish history to be acceptable to pagans whose gods were not often married. The belief that he and Magdalene had a daughter, instead of a son, is further proof. Jesus came from a well-to do family. There were laws to follow.
All speculation.
The problem with using the texts contained in the finally codified canon of the church is that thet have been transformed over time by different translations, different scribes and changing theology. Case in point is at which point in history Mary Magdalene became a whore and Mary became immaculate in her conception.
I suggest reading “the Rise and Fall of the Bible” by Timothy Beal and “Misquoting Jesus” by Bart Ehrman to begin to understand the changing history of the gospels.
jesus was born of the “blessing” of the “holy spirirt” …. sure Gordon and not a miraculous birth
Mary and Joseph had to be engaged/betrothed or Isaiah prophecy would have been incorrect. The reason that Isaiah prophesied that an “alma” (young woman) and not a “betulah” virgin would give birth in Isaiah 7:14 is because in Jewish culture, a woman under her father’s guardianship would be “betulah”. However, a woman engaged/betrothed would be under her fiancé’s guardianship and would be “alma”.
Deut. 22:23 has to do with an engaged woman who is adulterous. She should be stoned. That is the “trap” of John 8 when the rabbis brought the woman caught in adultery to Jesus and said that the Law of Moses demands that we stone her, what do you say? Jesus agrees that she should be stoned–but stoning is not prescribed for regular adultery in the Scriptures–only adultery by an engaged woman.
Under Jewish law, there were only 4 ways to execute someone; stoning, beheading, strangulation and burning. The rabbis determined that since we are created in the image of God, so when the Scripture requires someone to be put to death but does not prescribe the manner of death, the rabbis determined that they should be strangled–to do the least amount of damage to the image of God.
Deut. 22:22 requires that the adulterous evil be purged–which would have the adulterous people strangled. The reason for a more violent death by stoning for adultery by an engaged woman is that her husband had not yet taken her virginity–a serious offense.
However, in John 8, the rabbis knew the history of Jesus–they knew that his mother had been engaged when she conceived him. They wanted Jesus to disagree (trap him) with the Law of Moses and not agree that the woman should be stoned because he would be “admitting” that his mother should have been stoned.
Matthew 1:18-25 says that Joseph was going to divorce Mary in secret as to not expose her to public shame… this was when they were engaged, way before Jesus’ birth which in the first century Israel was the same as married. If they hadn’t been married there would be no reason for him to consider divorce.
As to the wedding itself, the central and characteristic feature was the solemn bringing of the bride from her father’s home to her husband’s home on the date agreed upon, in which act the significance of marriage as representing admission of the bride into the family of her husband found expression. (Mt 1:24) This constituted the wedding in patriarchal days before the Law. It was altogether a civil affair. There was no religious ceremony or form, and no priest or clergyman officiated or validated the marriage. The bridegroom took the bride to his house or to the tent or house of his parents. The matter was publicly made known, acknowledged, and recorded, and the marriage was binding.—Ge 24:67.
Just a quick observation: The miracle in Isaiah 7:14 is not that a young woman or a virgin gives birth, all very ordinary, everyday stuff for a virgin birthing a first baby, the miracle is to Whom does she give birth……God incarnate…..!!!!
The question I have about Deuteronomy…..how do they know the woman has been adulterous with another man….because she got pregnant? It does not specify how others found out about the adultery or how they proved it…?
—anonymous
The passage in Deuteronomy deals with a woman who was raped. If it happened in the city it was not a “legitimate rape, She should be stoned because she did not scream loud enough