The Espousals of Mary and Joseph: A True Marriage

The espousals of Mary and Joseph designate the real and legitimate marriage that united the Virgin of Nazareth to the carpenter of the house of David. To the question “Were Mary and Joseph married?” the answer of Scripture and of the Church is an unreserved yes: according to Jewish marriage custom, the espousals (qiddushin) already constituted a fully valid conjugal bond, and this is why the Gospels call Mary the wife of Joseph even before they lived together (Mt 1:18-25 and Lk 1:27). The marriage of Mary and Joseph was therefore true as to the bond and virginal as to the body – a marriage unique in the history of salvation, which the liturgical tradition celebrates in the feast of the Espousals, on January 23.

Jewish marriage in two stages: qiddushin and nissuin

To understand the espousals one must abandon the modern category of “engagement.” In Second Temple Judaism, marriage was carried out in two distinct stages, normally separated by about a year. The first stage was the qiddushin (קידושין, literally “consecration”), also called erusin: before witnesses, the man acquired the woman as his wife through consent and the handing over of the mohar, the nuptial payment that the husband paid for his wife. From that moment on, the woman was juridically a wife in the full sense. The proof is in the Torah itself: Deut 22:23-24 treats the betrothed young woman who unites herself with another man as an adulteress, with the same penalties as a married woman, and the dissolution of the bond already required a certificate of divorce (get), not the simple breaking off of a commitment.

The second stage was the nissuin (נישואין, from a root that evokes “to lift up, to lead”): the nuptial feast in which the husband brought his wife from her father’s house to his own, beginning their cohabitation. Between one moment and the other, the woman remained with her family of origin, but she was no longer a “fiancée” in our sense: she was a wife waiting to be brought into her husband’s home. It is exactly in this interval that the Gospels situate the Annunciation and the virginal conception of Jesus.

What the Gospels say: Mt 1:18-25 and Lk 1:27

Matthew opens his account with juridical precision: μνηστευθείσης τῆς μητρὸς αὐτοῦ Μαρίας τῷ Ἰωσήφ, “his mother Mary having been betrothed to Joseph” (Mt 1:18). Luke uses the same verb: the angel is sent to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph (παρθένον ἐμνηστευμένην, Lk 1:27). The Greek participle (from mnesteuomai) technically renders the qiddushin: Mary was already the wife of Joseph, even before the two came to live together.

The angel himself confirms it. In Mt 1:20 he says to Joseph: “do not fear to take Mary, τὴν γυναῖκά σου,” literally “your woman,” “your wife.” And the Catechism reads the episode in precisely this way: “God called Joseph to ‘take Mary, his wife, into his home,’ she who was pregnant with ‘the One who was conceived in her by the power of the Holy Spirit’ (Mt 1:20), so that Jesus, ‘called Christ,’ might be born of Joseph’s wife, in the messianic lineage of David (Mt 1:16)” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n. 437). What the angel asks of Joseph in one of the dreams that guided his entire mission is not that he marry, but that he complete the marriage that already exists: that he celebrate the nissuin and lead his wife into his home.

Joseph’s obedience is described with the exact vocabulary of the second stage of marriage: “Called to protect the Redeemer, ‘Joseph did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife’ (Mt 1:24)” (John Paul II, Redemptoris custos, n. 1). The Greek verb of Mt 1:24, παρέλαβεν τὴν γυναῖκα αὐτοῦ, “he received his wife,” is the technical language of the nuptial procession. The Catechism sums up the situation of Lk 1:27 in the same key: God chose as the Mother of His Son a “virgin betrothed to a man of the house of David, named Joseph” (CCC 488), where “betrothed” renders precisely the wife of the qiddushin not yet brought into the home.

A true and virginal marriage: Augustine and Thomas

If the bond was real, the theological question remains: is a marriage that was never consummated a true marriage? Saint Augustine answered yes with an argument that became classic. In his writings on marriage, he shows that the three goods that define marriage were all present in the union of Mary and Joseph: offspring (Jesus, received and not begotten), fidelity (no violation of the conjugal bed), and the sacred and indissoluble bond. What constitutes marriage, the Doctor of Hippo teaches, is the consent of the spouses, not the use of the body – and the consent of Mary and Joseph was full.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa theologiae (III, q. 29), systematizes the answer: the marriage of Mary and Joseph was true because it attained the perfection of its essential form, the inseparable union of souls through conjugal consent. As for its ordering to offspring, Thomas observes that this too was fulfilled in an eminent way: Jesus was not born outside that marriage, but was received, protected, and raised within it. Virginity took nothing away from the truth of the marriage, because carnal consummation belongs to the integrity of the sign, not to its essence. This is the theological foundation of the perpetual virginity of Mary lived within an authentic spousal bond.

The modern Magisterium took up this thesis without hesitation. Leo XIII, in the encyclical Quamquam pluries (1889), teaches that between the Most Holy Virgin and Joseph a true conjugal bond was formed, and that precisely for this reason Joseph came closer than any other creature to the most exalted dignity of the Mother of God. John Paul II drew the decisive consequence: “As can be deduced from the Gospel texts, the marriage to Mary is the juridical basis of Joseph’s fatherhood. It was to ensure fatherly protection for Jesus that God chose Joseph to be Mary’s spouse” (Redemptoris custos, n. 7). This is why the fatherhood of Saint Joseph is not a pious fiction: “his fatherhood, however, is not only ‘apparent,’ or merely ‘substitutive’; rather, it is fully endowed with the authenticity of human fatherhood, with the authenticity of the paternal mission in the family” (Redemptoris custos, n. 21). The son of the wife is, for the law of Israel, the son of the husband: Jesus is the son of David because Mary was truly married to Joseph.

The feast of the Espousals: January 23

The Church did not leave this mystery without a liturgy. Devotion to the espousals gained impetus in the fifteenth century with Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris and a great promoter of the cult of Saint Joseph, who exalted the virginal marriage in his writings and in his preaching at the Council of Constance. In the following centuries the feast of the espousals of Mary and Joseph spread through dioceses and religious families, becoming fixed on January 23. It was never permanently established in the universal Roman calendar, but it survives to this day in the proper calendars of orders and congregations, especially those of Josephite spirituality, as a memorial of the day on which the Holy Family was juridically born.

Conclusion: the marriage that sustains the mystery

The espousals of Mary and Joseph are much more than a curiosity of biblical archaeology: they are a structural piece of the Incarnation. Through the conjugal bond, Jesus enters the messianic lineage of David, receives a father according to the law, and grows up in a true home. Pope Francis condensed it all into a single sentence: “The greatness of Saint Joseph consists in the fact that he was the spouse of Mary and the father of Jesus” (Patris corde, n. 1). Spouse first, father in consequence: that is the order of the mysteries. Whoever wishes to explore more deeply the place of this marriage within the whole of the theology of the holy patriarch will find the complete picture in our study of Josephology, the Catholic theology of Saint Joseph.

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