Also, how old was Joseph at that time?
This is unknown and subject to great debate. As the information and documents we posses today do not tell us there is no factual answer to this question.
Do you mean, according to canon? It can hardly be a GQ otherwise, since it’s uncertain whether a specific identifiable person corresponding to the biblical Jesus even existed.
Yes.
Mary was old enough to conceive and young enough that she had not yet been married off. Hence the assumption she was below 20 - since women tended to be married off fairly young in those times. not sure how true it is, but common wisdom says that puberty happened much later in those days (nutrition related?). So probably at least 15.
I second rat avatar.
But I’ll take a stab at it.
If Mary was indeed a consecrated virgin as some traditions claim, she would have been about 12-14 I believe.
Joseph is presumed to have been a widower with possibly already grown children.
and how old was God since Joseph had nothing to do with it.
Neither Matthew, Mark, Luke nor John give her age. Joseph’s either.
There is absolutely no indication of this in any of the four gospels.
The Gospels are not the full scope of Christian tradition.
No-I meant what I said because I was curious as to what his age was at that time.
It’s all guesswork. We know that she very likely was at least 12 because Jewish law forbid girls under 12 from being betrothed. That’s pretty much all we know. Early apocryphal accounts put her in her early teens and that’s definitely a realistic number because most girls did get married early and would have been married by 15 or so. The problem with that line of thinking is that most American women are married by 27, so if I were to pick a random woman, while I can say 'She’s likely between 18 and 27 when she got married," I might be right or I could be completely off-base because individuals have their own stories. Similarly, everyone presumes that Joseph was older, largely because in the gospel narrative he doesn’t get mentioned after Christ is an adult and is specifically excluded when mentioning family happenings (Christ does stuff with his mother and brothers, never a mention of Joseph) so it’s very reasonable to presume he had died (or run off I suppose, but Jewish law was pretty good about putting a clamp on such things) Therefore he must have been old when he married Mary so the traditional thinking goes OR of course, he could have been run over by a run away horse or fell off a roof or got tuberculosis. The old man narrative also served the Eastern Church well when they were advancing the theology of Mary, Ever Virgin since they were well aware that if he were a 17 year old, keeping his mitts off his wife would be a pretty unlikely thing, so the myth that he was an old widower who was looking for a young wife to take care of him became solidified. It also answered questions about Jesus’s ‘brothers’ if in fact Mary were ‘ever virgin.’ Those brothers were obviously Joseph’s from a previous marriage so they said. It fit the theology nicely, so it entered tradition. If we go back to our ‘likely age of marriage’ that we used for Mary though, it’s likely he was 16 or 17, certainly no older than 20.
So the answer to your question is that typically Mary is thought of as roughly 14 and Joseph as in his 30s or 40s, but it’s all based on complete and total conjecture.
No, indeed! The Gospels are boring. The Apocrypha is where the fun’s at.
There are three kinds of answers to questions like this.
- Scientific/historical: what age was she likely to be given her historical period and situation.
- What do the Gospels say (very often, nothing)
- What does Christian tradition say – this is a whole can o worms as there has been over 2000 years and every continent to make stuff up in.
The Bible mentions Jesus having brothers and sisters. Some doctrines insist that Mary remained a virgin forever, and is still virginal as a saint in Heaven. Only way to resolve this: Joseph already had children, and they became the step-brothers and step-sisters of Jesus.
A clue that is actually in the gospels, is the report that mother Mary was alive and present when Jesus died. From which one can deduce (assuming she lived not much lover than an average person in these times) she was not very old when Jesus was conceived. To put some (always questionable) numbers in: if Jesus died aged 30, and Mary did lot live longer than 70, then we deduce Mary was not older than 40 at Jesus’ conception. (So no big surprises here.)
Can you imagine the pressure on those other kids? “Your brother is the Son of God and you’re just a doctor.”
Temporal Fix, she almost certainly lived much longer than an average person of her time, given that she certainly reached childbearing age (and also didn’t die during childbirth, at least not for her first child). An average age of death of 35 doesn’t mean people getting to 35 and then dropping dead. It means half of people dying in infancy or early childhood, and the other half living to around 70.
Meanwhile, concluding that she was no older than 40 tells us basically nothing, since women go through menopause not long after that, and 40 would be an extremely unusual age at first pregnancy, in any era.
Well, to be fair…it was an ***extremely ***unusual pregnancy…
Actually, four.
- Let’s make popcorn.
Most Biblical scholars believe that Mary was in her mid-teens, for all the reasons already mentioned. As for Joseph’s age, that isn’t mentioned.