Mark 6:3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us? And they were offended at him.
This comment from Mark is intriguing. Here Jesus is referred to as the carpenter, which would have been his trade since Joseph was a carpenter. Occupations were traditionally handed down from father to son.
That being so, it would have made sense to refer to Jesus as the son of Joseph. The custom was to identify a man by his father. If you refer to the begats, they almost invariably are lineages defined by the males in the families.
To refer to Jesus as the son of Mary was an insult. One would refer to someone as the son of his mother when his father was unknown. In the case of Jesus, it was apparently public knowledge that Joseph had not sired him.
Without the benefit of angels to explain things, the assumption was that Jesus was the product of a forbidden union between Mary and an unknown man.
At the time of her pregnancy Mary was betrothed to Joseph. Betrothal had the same responsibilities as actual marriage. Sex with anyone other than the betrothed was adultery, and carried the same penalty as adultery within a consummated marriage. That penalty was death.
Joseph had been informed by an angel of the miraculous nature of Mary’s pregnancy. He accepted the situation. The people in the town, however, were not so informed. They could only see that Mary had conceived during a time when she was considered married, and her betrothed had not slept with her. The only reasonable conclusion was that Mary had committed adultery with someone, and that Jesus was therefore an illegitimate child – a bastard, in other words.
The term “bastard” doesn’t have the same meaning now, as in biblical times. A bastard was the product of a forbidden union. If a married woman became pregnant by a man other than her husband, there was no way to remedy the situation. She couldn’t marry the father, because she was already married. This child would be a bastard.
Deuteronomy 23:2 A bastard shall not enter into the congregation of the LORD; even to his tenth generation shall he not enter into the congregation of the LORD.
The implications of this are not immediately obvious. However, this circumstance would have created an incredibly painful situation for Jesus, one for which there was no remedy.
The scripture from Deuteronomy forbids a bastard – a product of a forbidden relationship – to ever enter into the congregation of the Lord. The “tenth generation” means, “forever.” Neither he nor any of his offspring could ever be participants in Jewish religious life. There was no remedy for this, no way to make it right. He could not convert, nor marry into the faith, nor do anything to correct this problem – a problem he did not even create.
A bastard could never marry in the Jewish faith. Marriage was a religious event, and a bastard could not participate. Any children he had would be likewise be bastards, forbidden to participate in Jewish religious practices.
Jesus was faced with this painful dilemma. The community, which did not have the benefit of angelic information, had no choice but to conclude that Jesus was in fact a bastard, a child conceived by Mary through a forbidden union. That being the case, it was not possible for Jesus to participate in Jewish practices.
One of the stories about Jesus describes how he debated with the Rabbis at the Temple, when he was 12 years old. I am left wondering whether Jesus was attempting to persuade the rabbis that he should be permitted to read Torah when he came of age the next year. The rabbis would have had no choice but to deny that request, in light of the scripture forbidding it. Only proof that Jesus was not a bastard would have sufficed, and that proof was not forthcoming.
To the sensitive, deeply spiritual person that Jesus was, being barred from the Temple must have been a crushing blow. Despite his spirituality, Jesus was denied access to the usual place where people went to express their spirituality.
Could it be that this tragedy, Jesus’s inability to participate in regular worship, was what led Jesus to develop his unique spirituality?
I can see some threads of that in his teachings. Jesus often spoke against blindly obeying the Law without regard for the intent of the Law. He spoke of mercy towards those who did not fit into the Law’s narrow definition of the righteous. He had some hostility towards those who made a god of the Law at the expense of honoring God. It would not surprise me to find that Jesus was indeed molded by the painful circumstances of his birth, forced to rise above them.