Last night I watched two of the three parts of the Discovery documentary Who Was Jesus? There was quite a bit that I liked about it, as well as there inevitably being claims and details that were problematic, inaccurate, or oversimplified. I liked that they visited a number of important sites and used CGI to show what the sites might have looked like in Jesus’ time, restoring the walls of buildings and their frescoes, for instance. I also appreciated the use of bones from first century Galilee to determine that malnutrition was widespread at the time in that region.
One example of a problematic claim that was made is that Jesus and Mary would have had their reputation tarnished if Mary had become pregnant while she and Joseph were engaged but before they married. This is, as far as I can tell, wrong, even though it is popular
with some scholars and in some circles. In modern cultures with values comparable to those in the New Testament’s milieu, as well as relevant ones from earlier periods in history, the evidence seems to indicate that the subsequent marriage of the parents was considered to legitimize the child. Everyone would assume that the child was conceived by the two parents who later married, and although this course of events may have been frowned upon, there is no reason to think that it would have affected the reputation of the child as an adult.
Of course, I may be biased. A few years ago I wrote an article on whether Jesus seems to have had the status as an adult of someone illegitimate. Do others have a sense of whether the idea that Jesus was born out of wedlock and had his status affected by it as an adult is becoming more popular? Is this something you have thought about? What is your view on the subject?
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