Biblical Profile: Was Mary a Second Wife?

INTERFOTO / ALAMY

In a hugely popular second-century gospel prequel known as the Protevangelium of James, a 12-year-old Mary is given in marriage to an elderly widower named Joseph. The work’s overriding concern to establish Mary’s perpetual virginity leads it to claim that the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus—mentioned several times in Paul’s letters and the Gospels—are children of Joseph from an earlier marriage, an interpretation that has been widely accepted in Catholic and Orthodox churches ever since.

Modern critical scholars find little in the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke to justify the idea of Mary’s perpetual virginity. Even in some Catholic circles it is now assumed that the brothers and sisters of Jesus were simply younger siblings. Film and television productions, such as The Chosen or Netflix’s Mary, reinforce a modern assumption that the “Holy Couple” were romantically attached, of a similar age, and entering their first marriage. But have we all been too hasty in dismissing the idea that Mary was a second wife?

Two clues in the Gospels suggest that we have. First is the number of siblings connected with Jesus. Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55–56 list four brothers—James, Joses/Joseph, Judas, and Simon (the last two names are reversed in Matthew)—and an unspecified number of sisters, though the plural suggests at least two of them. Including Jesus, this suggests a family with at least seven children.

If these were full siblings, then Joseph’s family was extremely large given the high infant mortality rates at the time, when a third of children died in their first year, and up to half before their fifth birthday. This would require Mary to have had at least 14 pregnancies, and quite possibly more (there may have been significantly more than two sisters). This is not completely impossible, but it does seem extremely high in an ancient context where poor healthcare and sanitation, not to mention frequent complications during pregnancy and birth, would all have taken their toll. Evidence from Egyptian papyri suggests that by the age of 30 a young man had on average only 0.8 living brothers, leading ancient historian Sabine Huebner to describe Jesus’s large family as “a very rare phenomenon.”¹ But if some of these siblings were from an earlier marriage (or multiple marriages)—Joseph’s earlier wives having died or been divorced—then the numbers would seem more reasonable.

A second piece of evidence is the curious reference to Jesus as the “son of Mary” in Mark 6:3. The setting is the synagogue in Nazareth where Jesus has come to preach. At first the townspeople hear Jesus gladly, marveling at his words. Then their admiration turns to discontent: “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary?” they ask.

It is often suggested that describing Jesus in this way was a deliberate slur, implying that his father was unknown or that there was something irregular about his birth. But insulting Jesus is not the issue: the villagers’ point is that they know everything about him, not that they despise him. Furthermore, historian Tal Ilan has shown that, on the rare occasions when men were known by the name of their mother, there was nothing shameful about it.² Quite the opposite: Men’s mothers tend to be named when they are of higher social status than their fathers, or where the women are well known, such that a reference to them adds honor to their sons.

More commonly, scholars assume that Jesus is referred to as the “son of Mary” because Joseph was dead, perhaps long dead, so that a reference to him no longer made any sense. Yet this is a curious explanation, especially in a patriarchal society where male lineage was so important. Memories in villages are long (even today), and no one would forget the name of a man’s father. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that sons were referred to in such a way on the death of their fathers. Joseph may well have passed away by the start of Jesus’s ministry, but this does not explain the curious way that Mark’s villagers refer to Jesus here.

The best explanation, in my view, is that Jesus was locally known as the “son of Mary” because Joseph was known to have had more than one wife. The point the villagers are making, once again, is that they know everything about Jesus, down to the precise identity of his mother. On the rare occasions when women appear in genealogies in the Hebrew Bible, it typically is to distinguish a man’s sons by one wife rather than another (the two wives of Lamech in Genesis 4:19–22, for example, or Adonijah’s matronymic “son of Haggith” in 1 Kings 1:5; 2:13). Presumably, Jesus was normally known as the “son of Joseph” but in Nazareth, where Joseph was known to have had two (or more) wives, he was sometimes further distinguished as the “son of Mary.”

Taken together, these two features strongly suggest that Mary was Joseph’s second (or subsequent) wife. Exactly how many children belonged to her, and how many to a previous wife, is impossible to say. All are simply known by the Greek term adelphoi (or the feminine adelphai), which refers not only to full brothers and sisters, but also to half-siblings, and doubtless reflects the blended nature of most ancient households.

Like many women of her time, then, Mary likely left her father’s house to become the second or subsequent wife of a man with an existing family. We might well imagine the difficulties she faced bringing up another woman’s children in a new and unfamiliar setting. Although it may be doubtful that the Protevangelium preserves any actual historical evidence here, on this point at least it may reflect a solid grasp of the realities of first-century life.