It would have been particularly fitting if 
Gabriel should have visited Mary
on the very eve of the home-taking ceremony.

The betrothal and marriage of Mary to Joseph (Part 1)

By Bernard Orchard

Christian theological investigations into the mystery of the Incarnation have tended to neglect the real possibility that the betrothal of Mary to Joseph may have been viewed by themselves at the time as a perfectly normal arrangement and that, when they entered upon it, they had been looking forward with righteous desire, like all devout Jews, to the time when God would give them the children they longed for, in order to fulfill his command to the descendants of Abraham to increase and multiply and thereby to share in the work of Salvation (cf. Gen. 1:28). Whilst many theologians have argued in the past that they each must have taken a special vow of celibacy before their betrothal in preparation, though unwittingly, for the Incarnation of the Son of God, I propose on the contrary that — since the Birth Narratives suggest that they had been entirely unaware of what was to come — the unique point about their betrothal, and subsequent celibate marriage to the end of their days, was that it was in Almighty God’s plan to reward their supreme virtue and faithful obedience to his Law with a Child beyond their human power to produce, and in truth beyond all their dreams, Christ the Savior, and thereby to make their marriage into the first sacramental union.

The First Evangelist relates that the coming-to-be of Jesus Christ was in this way: “While his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, before they came together, she found herself with child of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 1:18). From later apocryphal and heretical writings it is apparent how vulnerable the precious truth about Christ’s virginal conception is both to ignorant misrepresentation and to malicious misinterpretation. Even today, unfortunately, the common English rendering of the Greek euréthe with “she was found to be with child” has led some commentators to argue that sensationally someone must have noticed Mary being pregnant while not yet living with Joseph, though euréthe is best translated by the English reflexive “she found herself [with child].” The sentence therefore needs expounding if we are rightly to understand how the Holy Spirit intervened without exposing Mary to the risk of scandalous suspicion as to how she had conceived. For I take it as axiomatic that the Holy Spirit so arranged the Incarnation that the virginal conception of the Christ would raise no doubts about Joseph’s paternity and Mary’s absolute fidelity to him in the minds of their families and neighbors. This is corroborated by the fact that even three decades later these same people were still unable to accept Jesus as being anyone but the son “of the carpenter” (cf. Matt. 13:55).

There are therefore good grounds for holding that the Spirit must have so arranged the course of events that the angel Gabriel appeared to Mary no more than a few days before the date fixed for the completion of the nuptials, when Joseph would come in procession to her parental home and take her to his house, as this would have allowed virtually the full term to the Child’s birth to run its course after Mary had come to live under Joseph’s roof. A careful scrutiny of the birth narratives of both Evangelists suggests that probably only about a fortnight, if that much, elapsed between the Annunciation and Mary’s departure for Zechariah’s house, and that during this interval Mary had not only conceived but Joseph had already taken her to his home and the customary rituals been duly celebrated. Moreover, for reasons that will become clearer later on, it would have been particularly fitting if Gabriel should have visited Mary on the very eve of the home-taking ceremony.

Betrothal among the Jews was, and is, a solemn affair. It denoted the satisfactory completion of negotiations between two families and assumed the consent of the young couple concerned with respect to the financial arrangements for their marriage made for them and on their behalf by their respective parents. Contrary to modern western custom, with their betrothal their legal relationship to each other became already that of a married couple with all the consequences entailed, save that they were not yet living under the same roof and would not be doing so for an agreed period until the home-taking ceremony. In the case of a virgin this was often a year or more, not least in order to ensure that she had not been pregnant by another man.

Furthermore, though divorce had been reluctantly permitted by Moses, every observant Jewish family regarded the bond established between the spouses as unbreakable and lifelong; for the Lord God had declared in the Prophecy of Malachi: “I hate divorce” (Mal. 2:16). Hence when young Tobias got married to Sarah — the story appears to have been in wide circulation at the time of Mary and Joseph, although modern scholars still have problems with its textual history — he prayed on their wedding night: “Grant that I may find mercy and grow old with her”; and she said: “Amen” (Tob. 8:8), a prayer he had begun with a eulogy that echoed the creation account in Genesis: “O God of our Fathers . . . you made Adam and gave him Eve as his wife, as a helpmate and support. From them the race of mankind has sprung” (Tob. 8:5-6; cf. Gen. 2:18, 1:28, 3:20).

Mary and Joseph therefore would have understood the primal purpose of marriage as giving lifelong companionship to a man and his wife, and its salvific purpose as the raising of the children they hoped God to give them. And because Joseph was of the House of David and therefore knew himself potentially to be heir to the Promise that a son of David’s lineage would bring forth the Messiah, it is inconceivable that they should have regarded themselves as an exception to God’s ordering of marriage and so entitled to take vows of celibacy, for it would have meant denying the possibility of having been chosen by God as the parents of the Son of David.

Moreover, from the human and historical angle Mary and Joseph had no motive of their own for deciding to embark upon such a marriage, for at that time they had no notion of God’s plan for her to bring forth his Son. In any event, it is at last becoming generally recognized that it was impossible in practice in Jewish society for any couple even to think of a celibate marriage; and Catholic scholars have now acknowledged this to be so.

We may therefore assume that at their betrothal Mary and Joseph had no expectations and hopes for their marriage other than those of other Jewish couples and especially couples of the House of David.

Since we know from hindsight that Mary and Joseph were each given a unique vocation in respectively conceiving and raising the Divine Son of God, and since it is the common teaching of the Church that God invariably bestows all the gifts and graces necessary for everyone to fulfill his own specific vocation, we can be certain that Mary and Joseph had likewise been appropriately endowed by him to fulfill perfectly their part in the upbringing of his Son. Thus we may confidently assume that it was Divine Providence that guided Joseph in early manhood to hear about the virtues and qualities of the virgin Mary, so that his heart was filled with love for her, and he asked her parents — who according to a very ancient tradition were called Joachim and Anne — for her hand in marriage. And because this young couple had been destined to educate the Savior of humanity, we can also be sure that it had been the Divine Plan that they should both be as highly educated as it was possible to be in their country at that time and as was fitting for observant Jews. In any case, they belonged to a people who were undeniably the best educated nation on earth in all the things that really matter, for in their sacred writings, communicated by the Holy Spirit of God to their prophets, priests, kings and wise men, there is to be found everything that is essential for instruction in the true art of living, which resulted in the Jewish laws and customs being far superior to those of all other peoples. Few details about the Jewish educational system during that period have come down to us; but Joseph would certainly have received the thorough teaching that the Law of Moses required every father to impart to his son. As for Mary, proof of the excellence of her own knowledge of the Scriptures and her religious practice are demonstrated in her beautiful poem, the Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55; cf. 1 Sam. 2:1-10) — although many scholars these days prefer to consider it the composition of the Evangelist, as if Jewish women throughout history had not shown themselves capable of outstanding intellectual achievements! And so both Mary and Joseph must have been fully instructed in all this wisdom and well-equipped to dispense it to their son from his babyhood until such time as he was able to imbibe it himself. Indeed we learn from St. Luke (2:47) that already at the age of twelve he bore eloquent witness to the excellent quality of the teaching they themselves had been able to pass on to him, when he astounded the Doctors of the Law with the profundity of his answers.

But what sort of man in particular was Joseph, and what were his attractions in the eyes of Mary? In the Jewish society of those days, even though they lived a long way from Jerusalem in the “Galilee of the Gentiles,” as a young unmarried girl she enjoyed the companionship of other girls but would have met young men of marriageable age only at national feasts and family celebrations. It is unlikely that she would have had any opportunity for private conversations with Joseph and for personally assessing his qualities; but no doubt, his praises would have been sung to her in advance by her father. Matthew actually mentions two outstanding points in his favor of which her father must have told her: Joseph was a “just man” (cf. Matt. 1:19), a biblical term signifying not only moral integrity but full obedience to the divine will, suggesting his likeness to Noah who always did what was pleasing to God (Gen. 6:10), and so deserved the blessings of which we read in the Book of Proverbs. This virtue must have already shown itself in the young Joseph; moreover, he was a son of one of the families descended directly from king David from whom one day in the fullness of time the Jews expected that the Messiah, the Savior of his people, would issue.

In addition, since Luke tells us that John the Baptist, who was to be the Forerunner of the Messiah, had been filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb (cf. Luke 1:41), it is a common opinion of theologians that Joseph, being even closer to Jesus than the Baptist, had been similarly blessed and filled with the Holy Spirit in order to make him both the fit partner of Mary and the teacher of the Son of God. On the other hand, he was apparently neither wealthy nor powerful in the eyes of the world, merely an ordinary citizen with the respected position of a skilled craftsman in wood and stone in his own township. All in all though, he was certainly the most desirable bachelor that any pious maiden could have hoped to marry. Mary herself had been raised in the same spiritual tradition as Joseph and therefore is unlikely to have had any hesitation in trusting herself to a man of his holiness and breeding; and they may even have had a feeling that they had been made for each other.

Yet Mary does not seem to have been at all conscious in advance of her state of grace, namely her own Immaculate Conception, as the essential preparation for her divine motherhood, to which the angel referred when he addressed her with “Hail, O Full-of-Grace” (Luke 1:28). Nor did she or Joseph appear to have had any inkling of the respective roles that they were about to play in the Incarnation of the Divine Son, the most glorious gift of a child ever given by God to a husband and wife. Hence, unaware of what was to come, both of them must have entered upon their betrothal as virgins — the normal state of all those who in Judaism kept the commandments of God perfectly from their youth — in the expectation that God was leading them into a holy and fruitful marriage. This was indeed to happen, though not in the way they must have thought!

When the day of the betrothal of Mary to Joseph arrived, if we may presume that the ancient Jewish ceremony of betrothal had remained largely unchanged until the time of the first extant records, then it may have been the occasion for no more than a simple private ceremony. Probably the bridegroom-to-be in the presence of the two families presented his bride-to-be with a token, perhaps a ring, with some such formula as: “Behold, you are betrothed unto me with this ring in accordance with the Laws of Moses and Israel.” However, it was an occasion of paramount significance, for it was the establishment of the legal union that was destined to provide the proper setting for the Incarnation of the Messiah at the opportune moment, which I propose was when their time of betrothal was nearing completion about a year thereafter.

Meanwhile, on the chronology that I am suggesting, the second stage in God’s plan was to bring into existence the Prophet who some thirty years later was to be his official Forerunner and Herald. St. Luke’s Gospel account begins by recording the appearance of the angel Gabriel to the aged priest Zechariah, the husband of Elizabeth, likewise advanced in age and furthermore barren, in the Temple in Jerusalem at the hour of the incense offering, while the people were praying in the court without. The angel announced to him: “Fear not, Zechariah, for your prayer is heard and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son and you shall call his name John (Luke 1:13). He went on to say that his son was to be the immediate Forerunner of the long-awaited Messiah, although he did not disclose that the Messiah himself would be born to a relative of theirs.

What would seem to have made Zechariah and Elizabeth parents fit to bring forth and raise the Forerunner was that they too were just and blameless in observing God’s Commandments, as Luke relates. Yet on account of his and his wife’s advanced age Zechariah would not believe the angel and asked him for a sign. Gabriel therefore affirmed his authority as a messenger standing in the Presence of God and told him that he would be struck dumb and, because of his unbelief, be unable to speak until his words had been fulfilled. Elizabeth conceived as promised; but since she could not discuss with her husband the import of their child’s destiny as the Forerunner of the Messiah, she remained in seclusion to avoid all questioning, until in her sixth month (according to the Jewish reckoning) the surprise visit of Mary would reveal this young relative of hers to be pregnant with him and confirm the imminence of his Coming.

Meanwhile, the third stage in God’s overall plan for the entry into the world of the Messiah in the flesh marks a further gratuitous initiative on his part to demonstrate that the Incarnation is his own free and untrammeled intervention to save humanity from its hopeless condition. This time the angel Gabriel was sent to Mary, the Virgin who, unbeknownst to the world, had been prepared from all eternity to be the mother of the Savior and who had already become the solemnly betrothed wife of Joseph of the House of David, and was then awaiting the joyous moment when her husband would come with all his household and friends for the festive home-taking ceremony that would permit them at long last to live together and, as we would say today, consummate their marriage.

As I suggested above, the angel’s visit must have been timed to take place immediately before the actual home-taking, perhaps as late as on the eve itself, out of delicate consideration in order to ensure that no one might suspect that the conception of Jesus had predated the concluding nuptials, so that the date of his birth could cast no doubt on Joseph’s paternity and thus on the Child’s Davidic descent. At that time all the preparations for the home-taking procession and banquet would have been completed, the invitations sent out and accepted, and everything was in good order for the procession to Joseph’s home; and Mary was snatching a moment alone, perhaps her last one in her parents’ house. This then must have been the precise moment, chosen at God’s command, for the angel Gabriel suddenly and yet peacefully to come to Mary; and since he needed to dialogue with her, I suggest he appeared in visible form. Normally the advent of an angel induces a holy fear and consternation in the recipient of the visitation; but Mary had received the grace not to be flustered by it and readily listened with full attention to the greeting which was couched in terms of extreme courtesy and reverence: “Hail, O Full-of-Grace, the Lord is with you” (Luke 1:28).

As soon as Mary heard these words, she recognized the divine messenger for what he was and also realized that such a noble greeting portended a matter of great significance, for it was reminiscent of a special call to divine service as for instance when the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon (cf. Judges 6:12). And so, although in full control of herself, she was also profoundly apprehensive lest she should be unequal to whatever the Lord had apparently appointed for her. In the words of St. Luke: “She was greatly troubled at the saying and considered in her mind what sort of greeting this might be” (1:29). Gabriel did not leave her in suspense, but continued at once with: “Fear not, Mary, for you have found favor with God. And behold you will conceive in the womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus” (Luke 1:30-31). This was a marvelous promise of what they must have been hoping for: that God would give them a son as she and Joseph desired, and Mary must have welcomed the news.

However, the next utterance of the angel introduced a new and totally unexpected vista by adding that the Babe the Lord was going to give them was to be no ordinary child, “For he will be great, and shall be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father; and he will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and his kingship shall have no end (Luke 1:32-33). These words plainly indicated to Mary that she was going to conceive the long-foretold Messiah, since like all devout Jews she would have been familiar with the various prophecies about him; moreover, in view of her marriage to Joseph, a direct descendant of King David, she also expected the Messiah, the Son of David, would one day come from some member of Joseph’s family. But what must have startled her was the revelation that the Messiah was to be not only the Son of David but also the Son of the Most High, and, more amazingly, that he was to be the Son of God not in a metaphorical sense like all “sons of God” but truly and actually! For there to be no end to his own kingship in all the ages, as the angel had just revealed to her, the Child himself would have to be eternal like God his Father; and she would have realized that this was possible only if he possessed his Divinity. Having always been willing and ready to serve her Lord God in loving obedience in all circumstances, it now dawned on her that the vocation to which he was calling her was unique, making her the mother of his Son.

The significance of the angel’s annunciation must have weighed heavily upon Mary; but this was not the time to become emotional. There were still other matters to be considered; for while Mary expected that her husband Joseph, once she lived with him, might father the promised Son of David, it was impossible for him to be the begetter of the Son of God. Yet, since the angel had also been quite definite that her child was to be the Son of David, she could have been in no doubt that this would be so because of her marriage to Joseph from whom the child would take his Davidic descent. Remembering the prophecy of Isaiah (7:14) that the Messiah would be conceived and born of a “maiden” — a word which in her society among pious people could only mean a virgin — she therefore must have understood that God had chosen her to conceive this Divine Child as a married woman yet still in the virginal state, hence that she was to have no conjugal relations with her husband, who nevertheless would be the true father of the Son of God, and she would be his true mother, as Mary herself was to claim when she spoke of “Your father and I” (Luke 2:48).

Apparently, having realized that their son was not going to be begotten by Joseph, though still associating his conception with some form of practical human interaction, the only pressing question that Mary was unable to answer for herself was by what means it was to come about that she would be conceiving the Son of the Most High God. If we remember for example the lesser case of Samson’s mother who was told to drink no wine or strong drink and to eat nothing unclean (cf. Judges 13:4-7), it is easy to understand that Mary urgently needed to know whether she herself had to undertake any preparations and so was impelled to ask the question: “How shall this be, since I am not knowing a man?” (Luke 1:34). The mistaken exegesis of this question as signifying that she was concerned to safeguard her virginity has long served as the principal argument for assuming that Mary must have taken a vow of virginity; but with the correct understanding of Mary’s question this ground for postulating a vow of virginity does not exist. Gabriel immediately perceived Mary’s reason for framing her question as she did and promptly advised her: “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the One-to-be-born will be called holy, God’s Son” (Luke 1:35). This made everything clear to her; the Holy Spirit would transcend the normal process of begetting a child by taking possession of her womb and causing her to conceive God’s Son without human intervention. She realized then that not only was no action required by Joseph, but no preparations by her either, and that the Lord God would be blessing their marriage with the Son that they both were longing for, through a unique act of the Holy Spirit whereby the Most High would come to dwell within her. As the angel stressed, it was not because of any action on her part but through the intervention of the Author of Life himself that their Child would be uniquely holy, God’s own Son.

In order to aid Mary to comprehend her conception in the virginal state, Gabriel gave her as a sign that her elderly relative Elizabeth had over five months before conceived a son despite being barren, thus re-affirming that it is the Power of God’s every Word that will bring it about (cf. Luke 1:37). And so Mary, with total faith and confidence in the efficacy of God’s Word and her heart overflowing with rejoicing and gratitude, yet no less in awe, confirmed with a reference to the angel’s opening greeting by saying: “Behold God’s handmaid! May it be to me according to Thy Word” (Luke 1:38). For until the angel appeared to her, Mary must have believed that her vocation consisted, like that of all other women of God’s People, in becoming a good wife and mother of their children; but now she accepts God’s calling to be the mother of the long-awaited Messiah, God’s own Son. According to the teaching of the Doctors of the Church, as soon as she had said these words, she conceived by the Holy Spirit; and since this filled her with the Divine Presence, we may not go wrong if we assume that she became aware of it the moment it happened to her.

Early Christian writers, interpreting the Lord God’s words to Eve in the Garden, that “I will put enmity between . . . your seed and her seed; . . . and you shall bruise his heel (Gen. 3:15) as a messianic prophecy, and expounding the richness of the meaning of the Greek verb kecharitôméne as “full of grace” that Gabriel uses to address Mary (cf. Luke 1:28), have shown that by virtue of the fullness of grace God had endowed her with from the moment of her own conception, and through her perfect obedience to his will, Mary is to be regarded as the “Second Eve.” While the first Eve, the “Mother of all the Living,” involving her husband Adam, had rejected God’s sanctifying grace through disobedience to his command, thereby excluding themselves and all their offspring from God’s kingdom, the “Second Eve” — by God’s grace the “Sinless One,” like the first Eve before her disobedience — through her faithful obedience has been called to give birth to the Messiah, the Redeemer himself, who through the sacrifice of his own Blood redeems from their enslavement to sin and restores to God’s kingdom all those sons and daughters of Adam and Eve who believe in him. 

The second and concluding part of this article will appear next month. — Editor. 

Reverend Dom Bernard Orchard, O.S.B., (Ealing Abbey, England) is a founding member and first chairman of the World Catholic Federation for the Biblical Apostolate (now CBF). He was Promoter/General Editor of the first one-volume Catholic commentary on Scripture (A Catholic Commentary on Holy Scripture, 1953). His writings include Gospel Synopses (Engl. ed. 1982, Greek 1983) and a pastoral Life of Christ (1993). He is now consolidating his Fourfold-Gospel Hypothesis that seeks critically to defend the tradition of the Fathers and the Church concerning the apostolic authorship and historicity of the four Gospel accounts.