“Although the theologically embellished birth narratives in Matthew and Luke develop a generation after Jesus, they preserve a historical core: Mary becomes pregnant before her marriage to Joseph, and Joseph is not the father.
“These implications, or outright charges, of illegitimacy are not limited to the New Testament Gospels. There is good reason to think this slander might have dogged Jesus and Mary their entire lives. It seems to just pop up, here and there. The Coptic Gospel of Thomas, a text that dates to the early second century, was discovered in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi codices in a jar in the sands of Egypt…. Saying 105 is the most interesting in this regard: ‘Jesus said: He who shall know his father and mother shall be called the son of a harlot.’ This can also be translated as a question: ‘Will they call him the son of a harlot?’ The implication seems to be that Mary’s pregnancy with Jesus could be seen in a negative way.
“The Jewish term for a child born of any sexual relationship outside of marriage is mamzer, often mistakenly translated as ‘bastard,’ but it is a legal term, not a term of profanity in Hebrew. A related term the rabbis use is a ‘hushling’ or ‘silenced one.’ This is someone who knows his mother but not his father. There is also the term ‘foundling,’ used for one who knows neither father nor mother. However, any child born to an engaged or married woman is presumed to be her husband’s, unless she is so promiscuous that such a presumption becomes unsupportable. Accordingly, much depends on the man, and how he decides to handle the pregnancy. In Matthew’s account of Joseph discovering his fiancee’s pregnancy, we are explicitly told that Joseph did not make it public — he went ahead with the marriage, taking the child as his own, ‘unwilling to put her to shame’ (Matthew 1:19-25). Legally speaking, Jesus then becomes his legitimate child.”
From THE LOST MARY: Rediscovering the Mother of Jesus by James D. Tabor. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by James D. Tabor.
