Now the birth of Jesus Christ happened this way: After His mother Mary was engaged to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child by the Holy Spirit. Then Joseph her husband, being a just man and not willing to make her a public example, had in mind to divorce her privately.
Matthew 1:18-19, Modern English Version (MEV)
Matthew here begins his record of the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus. Here, as well as in the other records, it's critical to remember that this is about Jesus, not Mary, Joseph, or the other players. While they pay important parts in the drama, they are not what the story is about. The story is about the circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus, who is called the Christ, the Son of God, our Lord and Savior. If we can keep that in mind, we should be able to avoid chasing rabbits as so many have done.
The focus of Matthew's narrative is on Joseph, the one player in this drama we know the least about. We don't know if he was young, old, or middle-aged. We don't know if he was single, widowed, whether he had children from a previous marriage, or if he was just starting out in life. Because of this some rather fanciful theories have been developed to help get over many of the difficulties this whole episode presents. However, there really doesn’t need to be any real difficulties at all if we'd stop attempting to superimpose our way of life today on the way of life for those in the days when Jesus was born.
In these modern times, humans mature in basically three stages: childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. What many fail to understand is that the concept of adolescence didn't come into prominence until around the turn of the twentieth century. Before that, a person went from being a child to being an adult literally overnight. We see this quite clearly in the Jewish Bar Mitzvah. Until a boy turned thirteen, his parents were held responsible for his actions. When the boy turned thirteen, he became responsible for his own actions. He became an adult. This was their Bar Mitzvah. The girls had something similar, their Bat Mitzvah, which took place at the age of twelve. This, of course, tends to make us moderns a bit uncomfortable, since we tend to consider the age of legally becoming an adult between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one. While God's Word is silent on their ages at the time, it is quite conceivable that both Joseph and Mary were not much beyond their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, although it is equally probable that Joseph was much older than Mary.
It would not have been completely out of the question to think Joseph may have only been thirteen or fourteen when all this happened. His actual engagement to Mary, in the customs of those days, could have been arranged by their parents as early as the day they were born. Pre-arranged marriages, in which the couple had no choice in the matter at all, were common. Whatever the circumstances surrounding the engagement of Joseph and Mary, we can assume that he was truly in love with her. We draw that conclusion from the words Matthew wrote which tell us, "Then Joseph her husband, being a just man and not willing to make her a public example, …" To be truthful, it is quite doubtful that an older man, particularly a previously married man, would have had that attitude toward her. He would most likely demand full justice and reparations from her parents for the shame brought upon him. I could, of course, be completely off base, but all this leads me to believe both Joseph and Mary were quite young and were most likely deeply in love with each other. Fanciful, maybe even hopeful thinking, but it's the best I can do.
