How did Mary meet Joseph?
The gospels of the New Testament do not say. Their engagement is an accomplished deed in the Gospel of Matthew: “When his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:18). The Gospel of Luke includes a similar passage: “In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called Nazareth to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David” (Luke 1:26–27). Both Matthew and Luke include a genealogy of Jesus: Matthew’s runs in descent from Abraham (Matt 1:1–17) and Luke’s in ascent from Joseph back to Adam, “son of God” (Luke 3:23–38). Beyond this, neither the earliest gospels nor any other writing of the New Testament describe the lives that Mary and Joseph led prior to their engagement. We do not know if theirs is a first marriage, second marriage, or something else. We do not learn anything about the households they come from. Who are their parents? Do they have siblings? We are not even told how old they are.
The Proto-gospel of James tackles many of the questions that the earliest gospels leave unanswered. It reports on Joachim and Anna, the pious parents of Mary. We find out that Anna’s conception of Mary involved divine intervention. And we learn more here than elsewhere about Joseph, an elderly widower.1 When the account begins, Joseph is much older than Mary. He has already been married (at least once) and has fathered children. Most important, the family gospel tackles the question that all couples, it seems, are required to answer at some point: how did the two of you meet?
“When Mary met Joseph” is not a romantic scene in the Proto-gospel of James. Joseph’s unhappiness is the first sign of trouble. According to the Proto-gospel of James, Joseph is selected by lot in the temple to take in Mary, a twelve-year-old girl. He is unhappy about it and only submits to the arrangement when the high priest threatens Joseph with a punishment of biblical proportions. Are these two really meant for one another? What motivated the author of the Proto-gospel of James to “fill in the gaps” of earlier accounts, to create a backstory in this way? Studies of this question usually focus on what the account says about Mary and how it illustrates her holiness. What if, however, the heart of the book lies elsewhere—not in the characterization of Mary but in the story of the entwining of her life with Joseph’s?
“Entwining” may be too strong a word for what happens between Mary and Joseph in the Proto-gospel of James. A recent study describes the bond between Mary and Joseph as “extremely ambiguous.”2 I agree and will argue that this ambiguity relates to the problem of knowledge. Sex is a particular kind of knowing that comes under scrutiny in the Proto-gospel of James. Mary and Joseph do not have sex and so they share in “carnal ignorance.” As the account unfolds, moreover, the meaning of carnal ignorance expands to encompass more than sex. This chapter investigates this theme in three stages. First, I discuss the scope of carnal ignorance in the Proto-gospel of James. This will involve framing the family gospel as a tale of bedtrick. Bedtricks are stories about sex that feature masquerade and mistaken identity, such as the dodgy marriage of Jacob and Leah in the book of Genesis (29:15–30).3 Second, the chapter takes up three key events in the Proto-gospel of James, all of which take Joseph by surprise and highlight how much he does not understand. Third, we turn to the juxtaposition of Mary and Joseph’s carnal ignorance with the sometimes violent and always nosy forms of public investigation into private matters.
The theme of this chapter is ignorance. Its argument is about the significance of choices in the narrative. In the face of uncertainty, Joseph and Mary must make decisions, choices that will determine the future of their relationship. This chapter on the Proto-gospel of James, like the next one on the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, investigates these choices. Will the pressure of public scrutiny break apart the fragile, strange relationship of Mary and Joseph? Or will they together press on, despite what they do not know? Will they, in other words, choose to be a family? By framing family as a matter of choice in the face of uncertainty, the family gospels propose a distinct model of the household, different from the patriarchal and ascetic models that other ancient Christian authors were championing at the time. To the welter of competing definitions of the household, the family gospels offer yet another model: in it, familial life is beset by imperfect knowledge of self and other. In the family gospels, the household is not a setting for acquiring knowledge but a place of confusion and misunderstanding. Acts of loyalty and love require boldness and courage under such conditions.
The Proto-gospel of James follows Mary and Joseph as they try to find a path together through a thicket of uncertainties. The drama of not knowing finally builds to a crescendo in a single decision of Joseph. When he chooses to face death in the water ordeal rather than betray the young, pregnant Mary, we catch a glimpse of the deep well of courage inside the elderly man as well as his true affection for the frightened girl. The Proto-gospel of James may not be a romance. Yet, against all expectations, it is a love story.
One of the things readers will notice in the Proto-gospel of James is the expanded role given to Joseph when compared to earlier gospels. In the Gospel of Matthew, Mary is found to be pregnant before she and Joseph live together (Matt 1:18).4 Joseph is above suspicion in the matter since he has had no opportunity to sleep with Mary. In the Proto-gospel of James, by contrast, Mary conceives after she has moved into Joseph’s house. It provides a scandalous opportunity for sexual activity where the Gospel of Matthew allowed none. Now readers of the Proto-gospel of James know that Joseph is not the father, but the family gospel leaves him vulnerable in a way that the Synoptic gospels do not. It becomes the basis for ensuing accusations against and investigations into the couple.
Within the narrative world of the Proto-gospel of James, Joseph’s struggle to come to terms with events is just as important as Mary’s. Joseph may play a minor, supporting role in the earlier gospels; in the family gospel, he is a costar, and without him, the tension of the storytelling dissipates. Using the character of Joseph as the prism through which to see what is important in the family gospel can be dismissed as special pleading. It may also be criticized for neglecting the focus on Mary’s body, which raises a set of clearly important issues around purity and boundaries in the Proto-gospel of James. Some things are lost when Joseph is brought to the fore. What is gained is a deeper appreciation of how at least some early Christians thought about the uncertainty of human relationships and the mystery of God. What the figure of Joseph offers, moreover, is a degree of character development. This claim runs contrary to the vast majority of treatments of the Proto-gospel of James: most see the characters, Mary in particular, as “one-dimensional.”5 But this is underreading. Joseph develops, even matures. Rather than living in dread of future humiliation, he learns to accept a strange, new present.
I concede that Joseph is not the most sympathetic character. He whines and complains. While Mary, an adolescent, may be forgiven for not understanding her purpose and significance, Joseph, a full-grown adult, seems singularly unperceptive. Despite heavenly reassurances and signs of divine providence, he turns on Mary at the first moment of crisis. Yet, the Proto-gospel of James does not simply hold up Joseph to ridicule. His perplexity advances a theological point about the difference between divine omniscience and the ignorance of human beings. So too it gives Joseph a chance at redemption, and he seizes the opportunity. In so doing, Joseph binds his own life to Mary’s.
Joseph’s weaknesses and strengths are illuminated through his time with Mary. To peer into the strange relationship of Mary and Joseph, to watch as they respond to the pressure of God having taken an interest in them—such are the driving concerns of the Proto-gospel of James. Heir to both the Synoptic nativity accounts and the Jewish scriptures, the family gospel casts sexual intercourse as a specific form of knowing and then uses it as a platform for examining the limits of human understanding. In the Bible, the term for “knowing” is a quasi-euphemism for sexual intercourse.6 Adam “knew” Eve, for example, and conceived a son, Cain, after being expelled from the garden of Eden (Gen 4:1). In the same way, the absence of eros is described as not knowing in both of the Synoptic accounts. Matthew and Luke both report that Mary and Joseph “did not know” one another (Matt 1:25; Luke 1:34).7
Biblical narrative typically gives the active role to men: men are knowers, women are known. At the same time, as literary critics have pointed out, biblical examples can sometimes pivot on the fraught question of who knows whom. Women may know far more about the sexual encounter than men, as in the example of Jacob and Leah. Promised Leah’s younger sister, Rachel, in exchange for seven years of work, Jacob finally completes his service and beds his new wife. The next day, Jacob is shocked to discover that he has been mistaken: “In the morning, it was Leah!” (Gen 29:25). Jacob believes he had sex with one person only to learn upon waking that he was with someone else. Why could he not tell that he held Leah in his arms? Why did he not know the difference? As Wendy Doniger observes, “The bedtrick is an exercise in epistemology.”8 And such stories inevitably connect the dots between other and self: “But the more pertinent question, coded in the story and relevant not just to incestuous bedtricks but to all bedtricks, is perhaps ‘How is it that you do not know who is in bed with you?’ Or ‘How is it that you do not know that you do not know who is in bed with you?’ Or better, ‘Who are you who do not know that you do not know who is in bed with you?’ Or, finally, ‘How is it that you do not know who you are?’ ” What begins as a question of ignorance, “How is it that you do not know who is in bed with you?” evolves into a question of identity, “How is it that you do not know who you are?”9 Tales of bedtrick, biblical and otherwise, raise basic questions about what kinds of knowledge and ignorance pass between self and other.
Like other stories of divine-human coupling, the Synoptic accounts of Mary’s pregnancy have been taken as a species of bedtrick, echoing not only the world of biblical narrative but also the love stories of Greek and Roman mythology.10 But the laconic storytelling of the Synoptic nativity stories leaves so much unsaid that such a connection will seem tenuous, even to sympathetic minds. Is it fair to suggest that the Joseph of Matthew feels tricked by Mary? Is it fair to call what happens to the pair in the Synoptic gospels a sexual masquerade?
The Proto-gospel of James, by contrast, spells out what may be found only between the lines of the Synoptic source material. It will not come as a shock to anyone that an early Christian book denies Joseph and Mary a robust sex life. But the Proto-gospel of James does something more. It dwells on and intensifies the ignorance of Mary and Joseph in a way that recalls biblical accounts of bedtrick. Joseph does not know how it happened, nor does Mary. In this way, the Proto-gospel of James picks up on and expands a claim that is stated outright in only two places in the Synoptic accounts: Mary and Joseph do not make love and thus do not “know” one another. Unlike Matthew and Luke, which do not spend any time exploring the epistemological depths of this pun, the Proto-gospel of James amplifies the usage of the Greek verb for “knowing” (ginōskō). The carnal ignorance of Joseph and Mary is not just about sex. It is doubled, affecting body and mind.
Mary and Joseph do not know one another sexually. Nor do they know one another in any other sense. What does the stacked ignorance of the Proto-gospel of James mean to its depiction of Mary and Joseph? We have already seen that questions about the relationship of Mary and Joseph lead to dramatic truth tests: think of the test of the “bitter waters” and Salome’s failed digital inspection. Now we turn to the heart of the matter—the not knowing that threatens to break apart the couple-hood of Mary and Joseph before it begins.
Does the Proto-gospel of James merely “fill in the gaps” of earlier Synoptic accounts? If so, then the process could be compared to adding pieces to an already furnished room. But the analogy does not capture the more radical approach of the Proto-gospel of James. While the family gospel inhabits the same room as the nativity stories, it rearranges the furniture, even replacing some pieces. It constructs, for instance, a different timeline of events for when Mary becomes pregnant. It combines details from Matthew and Luke in surprising ways. Mary places Jesus in a manger, a detail from Luke (2:7), in order to hide the infant from Herod’s bloodthirsty soldiers, a detail from Matthew (2:16–18). And it omits altogether the holy family’s “Flight to Egypt” (Matt 2:13–15), which preserves the infant Jesus from Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents.” Above all, the Proto-gospel of James adds confusion to the early relationship of Mary and Joseph. Angels visit the pair in the Synoptic accounts, delivering messages. In turn, Mary and Joseph are enlightened about their circumstances. Not so in the Proto-gospel of James, which states that Mary “forgets” the heavenly secrets that she has been let in on, and shows that Joseph refuses to accept divinely ordained outcomes.
Because it is a consistent theme of the Proto-gospel of James, the confusion of Joseph warrants close attention. Following Joseph attunes us to the way that the family gospel creates sympathy around his ignorance—sympathy, because what Joseph does not see coming, what takes him by surprise, are events that readers likewise may not anticipate.11 Three events come as a surprise to Joseph: being selected to take care of Mary, her pregnancy, and finally the public discovery of Mary’s compromised state.12 There is a pattern in these examples. First, a crisis emerges; next, a resolution to the crisis seems to fall into place; finally, the resolution is upended, leading to another iteration of the crisis. Time and again in these examples, Joseph finds himself in the awkward position of resisting the authority of priests and, perhaps, the designs of heaven.
Before Joseph comes on the scene, the Proto-gospel of James describes a crisis in the temple, one that we discussed briefly in Chapter 3. Here I present it in more detail. At the age of three, Mary had been welcomed into the temple for life. Now, with the coming of her twelfth birthday, her residency is in jeopardy as the onset of menstruation threatens the purity of the temple.13 A council is assembled; the single item on the agenda is Mary: “See, Mary has become twelve years old in the Lord’s Temple. What then shall we do with her, to keep her from defiling the sanctuary of the Lord?”14 Prayer is the next step: the council advises the chief priest, Zacharias, to seek an answer from heaven. Zacharias withdraws into the most sacred area of the temple, the Holy of Holies, and there seeks out divine assistance. Prayers do not go unanswered for long in the Proto-gospel of James, and Zacharias soon receives instructions from the angel of the Lord: “Zacharias, Zacharias, go out and gather the widowers of the people, and have each of them bring a rod; she will become the wife of the one to whom the Lord God gives a sign.”15 The solution to the problem of Mary is to marry her off, thus removing her from the temple.
Widowers are summoned, and Joseph, a carpenter, is among them. When he hears the trumpet, he “flings aside” his ax and sprints to the temple.16 The chief priest collects staffs from the widowers for the lottery and goes inside to pray. Afterward, the priest returns the staffs, and following the angel’s advice, begins to look for a sign. A dove flies out of Joseph’s staff and alights on his head.17 Presumably, this is the sign. The priest says, “You [Joseph] have been chosen to take the Lord’s virgin into your safekeeping.”18 Joseph objects and begins to list the reasons why it is a bad idea: “I already have sons and am an old man.” Besides, she’s still “a young girl.” Plus, he complains, “I’ll be the laughing-stock of Israel.”19 How different is the postlottery hesitation from his former display of ax-flinging obedience! Faced with refusal, the priest threatens Joseph with the grim tale of the biblical Dathan.20 One wonders if the priest overplays his hand. Once the bird lands on his head, Joseph’s leverage shrinks to nothing. He has been selected by a divine sign. That he wants to “fight the future” anyway says something perhaps about Joseph’s stubbornness or his capacity for denial or both.
Problem and solution: a pattern of crisis and (apparent) resolution emerge in this first example of surprise. Yet, important questions remain open. What is the nature of the relationship between Joseph and Mary? For some, the scene suggests a lawful marriage, and for others, the point of the episode is the opposite—that a lawful marriage does not take place.21 Within this murkiness, the only beacon of certainty is the old age of Joseph. The Synoptic gospels do not mention the age of Joseph. In this sense, the Proto-gospel of James “fills a gap,” but to what end? Some think it is intended “to suggest the improbability of sexual contact between the two of them.”22 But this theory is flawed, for later in the Proto-gospel of James, Joseph is accused of having sex with Mary, of having “defiled” her and “stolen her wedding rights.”23 Joseph’s age does not shield him from the suspicion of sexual activity.
In the wake of the lottery, Joseph seems embarrassed by the appearance of impropriety. The priestly resolution to the crisis is temporary. Joseph wants nothing to do with Mary. Joseph takes Mary back to his house and immediately abandons her, saying, “Mary, I have received you from the Temple of the Lord. Now I am leaving you in my house, for I am going out to construct some buildings; later I will come back to you.”24 He adds in conclusion, “The Lord watch over you.”25 Anyone can see that the match is terrible. Joseph is an old man; Mary is an adolescent. And Joseph believes that the pairing puts his reputation at risk. In these details, the family gospels add layers of problems to the Synoptic portrayals of the relationship of Mary and Joseph. In the earlier sources, readers are not given any reason to think that the pair is ill-matched. Factors such as age and social background are left out. In the Proto-gospel of James, Joseph is ashamed by the pairing. He already has sons, moreover, and thus the passing on of wealth and social values has been settled. Joseph treats with disdain his relationship with Mary because there is little incentive to do otherwise.
Erotic literature of the era, to which the Proto-gospel of James is sometimes compared, is preoccupied with the question of match-making. What makes a good couple? Is it a given—a question of background, wealth, status? Is it something achieved through tests of fidelity? How important is one’s surroundings? Consider the second-century romance of Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon, which tells the story of two young, well-heeled lovers separated by shipwreck, pirates, and other disasters. Their fidelity to one another is threatened throughout the story. Surviving these tests is important, but what gives the romance a happy ending is their wedding in Byzantium, a flourishing Greek city. The romance is about going home, about returning to a haven of stability in a dangerous and uncertain world. Joseph, by contrast, does not want to go home. He leaves at the first opportunity rather than stay and risk calling attention to his association with a twelve-year-old girl. With Mary now dwelling there, it is no longer a safe harbor but doubtful and risky.
From the start, the relationship of Joseph and Mary, whatever it is, seems poised on the brink of dissolution. Joseph refuses to stay under the same roof as Mary, which is why he is not present when Mary receives life-changing news of her own. An angel appears to her at a well and declares, “You will conceive a child from his Word.”26 Mary asks, “Am I to conceive . . . and give birth like every other woman?” The angel replies, “The power of God will overshadow you. Therefore the holy one born from you will be called the Son of the Highest.”27 This language from the Gospel of Luke would likely have been familiar to an early Christian audience. The Synoptic story of the annunciation almost certainly was. What is different in the Proto-gospel of James is its focus on how Joseph reacts to the news.
Mary mostly takes things in stride, so much so that she travels to see her relative, Elizabeth. And then confusion sets in. When Elizabeth spots Mary, she exclaims, “How is it that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”28 The greeting puzzles Mary because, as the Proto-gospel of James reports, “Mary forgot the mysteries that the archangel Gabriel had spoken to her.”29 Like Luke, the Proto-gospel of James describes the annunciation and the conception of Mary as an exchange of knowledge. Mary will be “overshadowed” or known by the power of God. At the same time, Mary receives knowledge. She learns from Gabriel that she has found favor with God. She learns that her son will be holy, a son of the highest, and that he will save his people from their sins. But the knowledge that Mary acquires does not remain with her. For as soon as she visits Elizabeth, she forgets Gabriel’s message. Mary’s amnesia is hard for some commentators to accept. One argues, “Mary only ‘forgets’ to communicate her mystery.”30 Another insists that “Mary does indeed comprehend her situation.”31 But later episodes indicate the opposite. Mary is unable to explain the circumstances of her pregnancy because she no longer can recall them. Alarmed by her expanding midsection, Mary scurries home to hide “in fear.”32 And it is there, in Joseph’s house, that the wheel of drama begins to turn, and a new crisis erupts.
The crisis is evident: Mary is pregnant, and she does not know how it happened. Six months later, Joseph finally returns home from work: “As he came into the house he saw that she was pregnant.”33 Joseph’s reaction does not redound to his credit. He flings himself upon the ground—as he did with the ax—and begins to cry.34 He lashes out at everyone and no one: “Who has done this wicked deed in my home?” He wallows in self-pity: “Has not the entire history of Adam been summed up in me? For just as Adam was singing praise to God, when the serpent came and found Eve alone and led her astray, so too has this now happened to me.”35 Joseph’s histrionics seem to drive Mary from the room. When Joseph rises from the floor, he must call her back.36 Then he berates Mary for her condition: “Why have you done this? Why have you humiliated your soul—you who were brought up in the Holy of Holies and received your food from the hand of an angel?”37
Before moving to the apparent resolution, we should linger for a moment over Joseph’s allusion to Adam and Eve. Ancient interest in the account of the Garden of Eden (Gen 3) by Christians and Jews serves as context to Joseph’s harangue in the Proto-gospel of James.38 In the second and third centuries, debates about the meaning of the story were widespread among Christians. As Elaine Pagels observes, Clement of Alexandria “rejects, above all, the claim that Adam and Eve’s sin was to engage in sexual intercourse—a view common among such Christian teachers as Tatian the Syrian, who thought that the fruit of the tree of knowledge conveyed carnal knowledge.”39 Earlier writings describe the union of Adam and Eve as a “great mystery” (Eph 5:31–32).40 Jewish interpreters took a different view, observes Daniel Boyarin: “According to the Rabbis, there was no Fall into sexuality in the Garden of Eden. On the rabbinic readings, Adam had had intercourse with Eve from the beginning.” In Genesis Rabba 18:6, the snake becomes “inflamed with lust for Eve because he saw Adam and Eve having intercourse with each other.”41 The background for understanding Joseph’s allusion is thus deep and wide.42 The biblical story of Adam and Eve evokes a set of issues around sex, knowledge, and self-understanding. And Joseph’s interpretation of the story as a bedtrick—that Adam was an innocent victim, unwittingly caught up in Eve’s deception—poses sharply the problem of not knowing. While he was away, Joseph suggests, Mary got in bed with another man. What follows this accusation is more doubt and confusion.
In tears herself, Mary replies to Joseph, “I am pure and have not known any man.”43 The phrase is lifted directly from Luke, where Mary asks Gabriel how she will become pregnant: “How will this happen, since I have not known any man?” (Luke 1:34).44 In the Proto-gospel of James, Mary’s statement is transformed. She does not utter it in wonder before the angel but in desperation in the face of her husband’s attacks. Joseph refuses to yield, repeating the question, “How then?” Mary admits the full scope of her ignorance: “As the Lord my God lives, I do not know how it got inside me.”45 She “weeps bitterly” as she puts up the defense, leaving both of them despairing and afraid.
Mary’s denials gesture to the different kinds of doubt and ignorance that the couple shares. One, Mary and Joseph do not know each other sexually. And, two, they do not know each other in any other sense. In six months of acquaintance, this is only the second time that Mary and Joseph have been together in the same place. And there is a third level of ambiguity: Mary does not know herself, which is to say, she does not know how she has conceived a child. Mary has forgotten her encounter with the angel, which means that Joseph’s interrogation can only leave him exasperated and, like Mary, “afraid.”
When Joseph accuses her of adultery, Mary fights back, protesting her innocence. “I have not known any man,” she tells Joseph. This identical statement, as was noted, appears in the Greek text of the Gospel of Luke (1:34), where it is Mary’s response to the angel Gabriel’s announcement of her impending pregnancy. In Luke, Mary’s claim refers to a state of virginity.46 In the Proto-gospel of James, “I have not known any man” refers to far more. In the family gospel, Mary addresses Joseph rather than the angel Gabriel. Her denial in the face of Joseph’s accusations, I propose, expresses a sense of alienation. Joseph does not know her, and she does not know him. That Mary and Joseph do not have carnal knowledge of one another serves as a platform for presenting a deeper problem. It goes beyond the mechanics of reproduction and summons up a picture of the chasm between self and other.
Mary does not know any man, including and especially the one standing in front of her. Nor does Joseph know her. I have suggested that Mary’s claim means something different in the Proto-gospel of James than it does in the Gospel of Luke. As already noted, the addresses are different: in Luke, it is the angel Gabriel; in the Proto-gospel of James, it is Joseph. Her protest of innocence is at the same time a confession of ignorance. She may be puzzled by the fact of the pregnancy, unaware of the mechanism by which she has conceived. But Mary is also ignorant in a broader sense. She does not know men. (Her knowledge of other women is also limited to a specific class: the temple virgins.) She has been raised by angels in the temple, and whatever interactions she has had with the opposite sex have been brief. Even when she is paired off with Joseph and given the opportunity to get to know him, the chance quickly dissipates as he promptly abandons her. It is not only that Mary can claim ignorance in the “biblical sense”; so too she can claim it in every other sense. She really does not know any man.
The Proto-gospel of James next gives Joseph a turn as Hamlet. In a soliloquy, Joseph weighs his options: “If I hide her sin, I will be found fighting the Law of the Lord; if I reveal her condition to the sons of Israel, I am afraid that the child in her is angelic [or holy], and I may be handing innocent blood over to a death sentence. What then should I do with her? I will secretly divorce her.”47 Joseph’s churning inner life becomes a multiverse of causes and effects: hide her sin or turn her in. Joseph opts for a third way: a secret divorce. Here the Proto-gospel of James follows the cue of Matthew: “Her husband Joseph, being a righteous man and unwilling to expose her to public disgrace, planned to dismiss her quietly” (Matt 1:19). Some have argued that the Synoptic passage implies the prospect of “honor killing”; if so, the threat is latent in Matthew.48 In the Proto-gospel of James, it is manifest: Joseph worries about handing Mary over to a death sentence.
Having reached a decision, Joseph decides to sleep on it. In his dreams, a solution takes shape. An angel appears, bringing a message of comfort: “Do not be afraid of this child. For that which is in her comes from the Holy Spirit.”49 At first, the visitation seems to settle the issue. The couple is rescued from danger. When Joseph awakes, he praises God and finally does what he was originally charged with doing by Zacharias: Joseph “watches over” Mary.50
But tranquility lasts only a few hours. Then there’s a knock at the door, and Joseph, this time without the benefit of divine counsel, is faced once again with a difficult decision.
“But Annas the scribe came to see him, and said, ‘Joseph, why have you not appeared before our council?’ Joseph replied, ‘I was tired from my journey and rested on my first day back.’ ”51 Annas turns and sees that Mary is pregnant.52 His timing is impeccable. Of all the surprises in the Proto-gospel of James, the unannounced visit of Annas wins the prize for verisimilitude. He is the nosy neighbor who shows up at exactly the wrong instant. It upends the angelic resolution to the problem and throws Joseph back into crisis management mode. He withholds crucial information from Annas, blaming his absence on fatigue.53 This may not be a lie, but is it the whole truth? Regardless, Annas does not fall for the misdirection. He takes one look at Mary’s belly and goes to report to the high priest, accusing Joseph of “defiling” Mary and stealing her “wedding rights.”54 This accusation is of course strange, given the earlier lottery that assigns Joseph to Mary.
The investigation unfolds like a police procedural, as the high priest interviews one suspect and then the other. He asks Mary, “Why have you humiliated your soul . . . You who were brought up in the Holy of Holies and received your food from the hand of an angel?”55 The question is nearly identical to Joseph’s earlier one. Mary, sobbing, reasserts her earlier oath and denial: “As the Lord my God lives . . . I am pure before him and have not known any man.”56 The priest next turns to Joseph, asking, “Why have you done this?” Now Joseph swears a denial: “As the Lord my God lives . . . I am pure toward her.”57 Dissatisfied, the priest invokes the Decalogue: “Do not bear false witness, but speak the truth.” “And Joseph,” the gospel reports, “kept his silence.”58 A life-and-death purity ordeal looms ahead for the couple.
Studies of the Proto-gospel of James often remark on patterns of repetition, pointing out parallels of biblical childlessness and the story of Mary’s parents. Some speak of a “law of duplication” (Zweiheitsgesetz) and contend that repetition is designed to connect the extracanonical gospel to the Septuagint.59 Recent studies tend to refer more often to intertextuality and midrash, mounting a similar case while making room for flexibility and irony. I want to suggest another purpose: narrative suspense. The priestly interview recapitulates the scene of Joseph’s harsh questioning of Mary and hence recalls not only that painful interaction but also the anxious reflection that follows. The questions remain the same, but Joseph’s role is transformed. Earlier he was in charge; now he must submit to hieratic scrutiny. Will he break under pressure? The multiverse, momentarily banished from view by angelic reassurance, suddenly rematerializes, and we are reminded of the choices that Joseph earlier entertained. One of them—“hide her sin”—is no longer on the table. The priest gives Joseph the chance to change his story—that is, to “turn her in.” Joseph refuses this dark possibility, even though he is overwhelmed by events and plagued by uncertainty. He opts instead for a third way by keeping his mouth shut and facing the ordeal with Mary.60
Let us dwell for a moment longer on the narrative dynamics of the scene. The priest’s question bridges back to Joseph’s sotto voce deliberations; so too it builds suspense. Bear in mind that the author of the Proto-gospel of James is not rigidly bound to the Synoptic source material. We could easily imagine another scenario: Joseph could have turned in Mary and watched the “drink test” from the sidelines. His mind would change once he saw Mary divinely vindicated. At every moment of decision, storytellers have an array of plotlines to follow. There is an openness to the scene that carefully raises the possibility of multiple futures; at the same time, there is an assurance in the notion that no matter what happens, no matter what Joseph decides to do, Mary will one way or the other give birth to the baby Jesus. Ancient Christians, reading for divine mystery, learned in the family gospel about the designs of God—about how the omniscience of heaven anticipates and outmaneuvers the limited perception and power of human beings. Readers may not know what Joseph will choose to do, but they do know that, no matter what, the will of God will be accomplished in the fullness of time.
In so doing, the Proto-gospel of James is biblesque, harkening back to the Jewish scriptures. It throws readers into the “ordeal of interpretation,” as Meir Sternberg calls it, an ordeal that nevertheless takes hold under relatively safe conditions.61 Sternberg’s poetics lays out the competing forces of suspense and antisuspense in biblical narrative. On one hand, “suspense would dovetail with the biblical line of making our hypothesis-construction run parallel to the characters.’ ”62 Uncertainty about the future, suspense, is perhaps the most effective tool in the writer’s kit for establishing “continuity between the human condition inside and outside the world of the text.”63 Joseph does not know what to do, and we do not know what Joseph will do. Suspense thus “universalizes the ordeal of interpretation.”64 Against this, however, is the author’s “overriding need to publish his [God’s] supremacy,” and “the generation of suspense throughout the tale would militate against our sense of the divine control of history.”65 Hence, “the attractions of demonstrating the human state of ignorance are at odds with the need to demonstrate superhuman knowledgeability.”66 In lesser hands, the desire to do both—to build suspense and to show order, to entertain and to prove—would result in storytelling that was neither fish nor fowl and thus disappointing. In the case of biblical narrative, and in examples of biblesque, like the Proto-gospel of James, the tension between these two modes offers an engaging give-and-take. We know some things and not others, and thus our viewpoint mirrors that of the intratextual characters.
The ensuing purity ordeal suddenly takes on new meaning. For the first time, Mary and Joseph face the same future. The priest orders both Mary and Joseph to drink the “water of refutation.” They do so—Joseph first, then Mary—and, to the astonishment of all, they both survive. What holds true for Joseph holds true for Mary. The priest lets them go: “If the Lord God has not revealed your sin, neither do I.”67
A bond between Mary and Joseph is cemented, not by surviving the water ordeal but in the moments before it is carried out, when Joseph discovers his true feelings for Mary. Recall that when Joseph first finds out about Mary’s pregnancy, tears of anger and regret separate him from Mary, and when Mary cries, Joseph’s rage is the cause. But later, during the priestly interrogation leading up to the ordeal, Joseph cries again. Here his sorrow reflects something else—a selfless and protective worry over Mary. The priest commands Joseph to “hand over the virgin.” Sensing the grave peril of the “death sentence” awaiting Mary, he begins “to weep bitterly.”68 Where Joseph had earlier shed angry tears over finding Mary pregnant, now he weeps at the thought of losing her. Although he may not know why or how, Joseph has fallen in love.
The Proto-gospel of James depicts Joseph as a man repeatedly taken by surprise. To what end? On one level, the answer is plain: surprise is a technique for involving the reading audience. It creates sympathy with and for characters. Like Joseph, we cannot always see what is coming. I have argued that a pivotal moment of the family gospel occurs when Joseph is most in the dark. What at first appears to be the resolution of the crisis—the angelic reassurance Joseph receives about the child Mary carries—turns out to be only a stopgap when a neighbor knocks on the door. Faced with the threats of the high priest, Joseph decides to stick with Mary, although he does not know whether he is making the right choice. Given the opportunity to turn in Mary, Joseph silently refuses. Thus, the larger purpose is achieved: Mary and Joseph may not know what the future holds, but they will face it together because of choices they have made.
As the Proto-gospel of James continues to unfold, the not knowing of Joseph and Mary comes into even sharper relief against the backdrop of larger forces looking for the holy family. The Roman emperor Augustus and the client-king Herod the Great, figures kept separate in the Synoptic birth narratives, are brought together in the family gospel. As we have already seen, the Proto-gospel of James is fond of doubles. So too are the Synoptic gospels. There are, to begin with, two accounts of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus and two distinct genealogies. In Luke, the most obvious set of doubles is the parallel of Jesus and John the Baptist.69 The in-tandem conceptions and births of the two boys organize and frame the narrative.
The Proto-gospel of James adds new sets of doubles. The story of the parents of Mary, Anna and Joachim, doubles the Lukan story of Elizabeth and Zechariah. Anna and Joachim likewise serve as doubles of Mary and Joseph. To these, the Proto-gospel of James presents a doubling of ruling authorities. What is kept separate in the Synoptic accounts is joined together in the family gospel: the seemingly benign Augustan census from Luke is followed immediately by Herod’s brutal investigation, the gruesome “Massacre of the Innocents,” from Matthew. While the couple at the heart of the story shares in carnal ignorance, they are pursued in the final chapters by powers that seek to know it all.
The pursuit begins after the water ordeal, when Joseph and Mary travel to Bethlehem to register for the imperial census. The counterpoint to the couple’s surrender to uncertainty is the depiction of the Roman appetite for meticulous recordkeeping and classification.70 Rome’s was an empire of knowledge, and the Gospel of Luke depicts it as bent on collecting information from all corners.71 Unlike Luke’s worldwide event, the Proto-gospel of James restricts the enrollment to “everyone from Bethlehem of Judea.” At the same time, the Proto-gospel of James goes a step further than Luke, for it summons up the ambiguity of Mary and Joseph’s relationship in the family gospel. Joseph wonders, “How should I enroll her? As my wife? I would be too ashamed. As my daughter? The sons of Israel know that she is not my daughter. This day of the Lord will turn out as he wishes.”72 Questions about the relationship have vexed Joseph from the start. The difference here is that Joseph perceives a divine purpose in familial ambiguity. The holy household remains mysterious. Neither Joseph nor Mary fills conventional roles, and the boxes on the census form cannot be neatly ticked off.
As the couple travels further on, emotional bonding and carnal ignorance are again put on display. On the way to Bethlehem, Mary is “gloomy” one moment and laughing the next. Joseph guesses that the baby is causing discomfort and asks, “Mary, what’s bothering you?” Mary explains that she’s had a vision of “two peoples”—one in mourning, the other rejoicing.73 As if to stress the point, in the very next line, Mary asks Joseph to help her down, for “the child inside me is pressing on me to come out.”74 Is Joseph wrong or right? Joseph may misread the source of the mood swings, but his show of concern is genuine. Joseph’s lack of insight into Mary’s interior life underscores the portrait of the couple as not knowing.
Joseph finds Mary a safe place, a cave, to deliver the baby and then goes in search of a midwife—not abandoning her, as before, but giving his sons to Mary for support. In Chapter 2, we discussed the foiled examination of Salome. Prior to this, Joseph encounters a different midwife who begins to interrogate Joseph about the identity of the woman in the cave. Still unclear himself about the nature of the relationship, Joseph replies, “My betrothed.”75 The midwife says, “Is she not your wife?” Perhaps Joseph hears a hint of disapproval in the question, for he finally gives up on withholding information and lays out the whole story for the midwife: “She is Mary, the one who was brought up in the Lord’s Temple, and I received the lot to take her as a wife. She is not, however, my wife, but she has conceived her child by the Holy Spirit.”76 Prior to the interview and ordeal, Joseph was troubled by not knowing. When he finds Mary pregnant and thinks he has fallen victim to a bedtrick, Joseph comes undone over a relationship that he has refused to be a part of. Now he accepts what he does not understand. Rather than fight the future, he settles into the fluidity of his present circumstances. His relationship to Mary is the question mark in the middle of Joseph just as the pregnancy is the question mark in the middle of Mary.
Augustus wants to know. The midwife wants to know. In this context, Josephus’s persistent wondering about his role (is he husband, father, something else?) and Mary’s (daughter, wife, something else?) poses an epistemological challenge. He takes Mary to a cave outside of Bethlehem, beyond the reach of the Augustan census. Without Rome there to count its inhabitants, to enforce familial roles, the roles of “husband” and “father” are ambiguous. Mary is his wife and she is not his wife. Joseph is her husband and he is not.
While the curiosity of the midwife or the census of Augustus might appear neutral or benign, the final regime of surveillance is anything but. Herod sends his soldiers out both to kill infants and to find the baby John. The agents of Herod arrive at the temple and interrogate Zacharias, the father of John, the husband of Elizabeth.77 The Proto-gospel of James conforms to the Lukan portrayal of Zechariah in some ways, but here it diverges. The death of Zacharias, father of John, which is not mentioned in the Synoptic gospels, is a key difference.78 In the wake of Herod’s anger at being duped by the Magi, Herod sends out soldiers to search and destroy infants. They confront Zacharias, the high priest. He denies knowing the whereabouts of his wife and infant son: “How should I know? I am a minister of God, constantly attending his temple.”79 As it turns out, Elizabeth and John have found a haven inside the mountain of God, which miraculously opened a cleft for their escape.80 Zacharias may or may not know to where they have fled, and perhaps he chooses not to know. He declares that he is dying as a martyr, and thus the spectacle immediately becomes part of the symbolic universe of Jewish and Christian martyr accounts. In such accounts, the death of the martyr is not a defeat but a victory, a transformation confirmed by miracles.81 The soldiers kill Zacharias, and his blood turns to stone as it spills over the altar.82 Zacharias’s self-professed ignorance results in an expression of divine power and knowledge.
Christians of course have this kind of body language at the core of their tradition.83 The apparent victory of the persecutor is suddenly overturned. The earliest narrative accounts of the passion of Jesus contest the meaning of Roman punishment. The canonical gospels still afford readers a glimpse of the perverse play in the crucifixion of Jesus. In the canonical gospels, the crucifixion of Jesus is one part irony and one part parody.84 Jesus is dressed in purple and given a crown of thorns by soldiers. When Pilate condemns Jesus as the “King of the Jews,” he is poking fun at the Jews under his control. But for Christians, the suffering of the cross becomes a sign of truth and power.85 “I preach Christ crucified,” Paul wrote to his followers in Corinth, “a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). Spectacles of violence, as we saw in Chapter 2, left meaning up for grabs. In the second and third centuries, the relationship between truth and flesh emerges as a common theme of early Christian martyr accounts.86 Zacharias’s death, at first a scene of death and defeat at the hands of Herod’s henchmen, is a sign of the power of God. The designs of heaven are illuminated by the replacement of Zacharias, Simeon, who, in the Gospel of Luke, comes to the temple when Mary and Joseph bring their newborn baby to Jerusalem for naming and circumcision (2:25–35).
In the Gospel of Matthew, Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents” threatens the family of Jesus. But Joseph is warned by an angel to take his family and flee to Egypt. The “Flight to Egypt” is omitted in the Proto-gospel of James. The most widely subscribed to theory for this omission is that the author of the Proto-gospel of James was aware that the association of Jesus with Egypt was a source of controversy and fodder for anti-Christian polemic. Opponents argued that the miracles of Jesus were nothing more than magic tricks, which he learned as a boy in Egypt.87 Here I want to suggest an alternative theory—that the Proto-gospel of James omits the “Flight to Egypt” in order to tell a different story that illustrates the courage of Mary. The holy family does not flee. Rather, making creative use of details from the Synoptic accounts, the Proto-gospel of James reports that Mary hides Jesus in a cattle manger.88 Earlier, an angel appeared to Joseph to allay his fears about Mary’s pregnancy. Here, angelic counsel is absent, and Mary must act to save her baby.
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Mary and Joseph’s relationship does not model conjugal harmony. It is awkward, at once ordinary and extraordinary.89 Rather than perfect harmony or oneness, the family gospel offers a series of doubles. First, there is the doubling of the pun on “knowing.” Mary and Joseph do not know each other sexually, nor do they know each other in any other way. This failure of understanding creates the most powerfully intimate moments of the account, when the couple must survive Joseph’s own doubts and suspicions about Mary. His fear of being caught in a humiliating bedtrick nearly separates the couple forever. Second, there is a doubling of the search for knowledge. The seemingly benign census of Augustus is paired with the cold-blooded investigation of Herod’s massacre. The writer of the Proto-gospel of James, inheritor of stories that are found separately in the gospels of Matthew and Luke, recognized in them a common problem. Zacharias’s ignorance of his family’s whereabouts echoes Joseph’s uncertainty about his relationship to Mary. And Mary’s bold and clever idea to hide Jesus in a manger from Herod’s soldiers runs parallel to Zacharias’s courage in resisting them.
Amid these doubles, certainty gives way to uncertainty. The problem of Mary’s virginity is in service to a larger concern about human beings and the use of sexual knowledge to construct difference, such as the difference between husband and wife, father and child, knower and known. Incomplete knowledge of other and self undermines hierarchies and the “given-ness” of markers such as husband-wife and parent-child. Interpersonal conflict and confusion, remarkably, gives Mary and Joseph room to maneuver. The relationship between Mary and Joseph is something that cannot be known by Augustan imperial counting.
But uncertainty does not weaken the bond between Mary and Joseph. In the Proto-gospel of James, the nature of the relationship between Mary and Joseph remains vague but rich in emotion. Together they brave doubt, scandal, and a potentially lethal ordeal. Their bond is forged in a crucible of miracle and courage, and their fidelity to one another scrapes away at expectations about what constitutes conjugal intimacy. For all of the problems that bedevil the relationship of Mary and Joseph, the Proto-gospel of James remains a story of family ties. It would not have mapped easily onto the hierarchical family model favored by some Christians or onto the model of chastity favored by others. It is an account of two people thrown together by forces beyond their control and comprehension. Although Mary and Joseph cannot understand it, God is in control of the events that they witness and in which they participate. Human perception is limited; omniscience is a divine quality.
The Proto-gospel of James is not an “infancy gospel” after all. It is a story about a family—a strange household, fashioned by chance and angels, and frustrating to ruling powers that want to know it all. Recently, Kate Cooper has also remarked on the “comic nosiness” of the Proto-gospel of James. Of course, I think Cooper is right: Rome is nosy; the priests are nosy; the neighbors are nosy. But I take issue with Cooper’s mild disparaging of the Proto-gospel of James, which she says lacks the “emotional realism” and “moral courage” of the Lukan infancy narrative.90 The Proto-gospel of James paints a rich and moving portrait of family life, one that can be said to expand on those qualities that Cooper admires in the earlier gospel. Joseph’s teary and silent “declaration” of loyalty to Mary in the Proto-gospel of James is a subtle and poignant depiction of courage in the face of the unknown.