BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

The Question of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity

Considering the brothers and sisters of Jesus with Helen Bond

Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini (late 1480s). Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

In the Summer 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, New Testament scholar Helen Bond asks a provocative question: “Was Mary a Second Wife?” Replete with fresh ideas, this article provides an entry point into the possible “perpetual virginity” of Mary—the doctrine asserting that Jesus’s mother never had sexual intercourse, even after his birth.

Today, any inquiry into a woman’s virginity can feel intrusive, as if her worth is being measured by sex. The earliest defenders of Mary’s perpetual virginity were not cataloging Mary’s sexual history for its own sake. Many saw her as uniquely consecrated to God’s purpose, as set apart by the singularity of the virgin birth, or believed that the miraculous nature of Christ’s birth demanded an equally singular mother. The doctrine seems to have emerged from theological reverence, whatever its effects on later Christian discussions of women’s sexuality.

A young woman’s virginity carried social and legal importance for marriage in ancient Israel, but the Hebrew Bible does not present sexual abstinence as itself a marker of moral or spiritual superiority. Ritual purity and impurity were states tied to the body’s natural processes, like childbirth, menstruation, and seminal emission. These were seen as ordinary, temporary, and manageable conditions rather than moral failings, requiring ritual purification before cultic activities could be resumed. In other words, ritual impurity was a normal consequence of being embodied, and was not a moral stain.

The shift toward viewing sexual abstinence as a marker of holiness reflects a later development, shaped by ancient Greek philosophical currents that increasingly associated the body and its desires with spiritual compromise, and by an emerging Christian theology prizing virginity as total consecration to God. By the time the Protevangelium of James was written in the second century CE, this shift was well underway, and Mary’s perpetual virginity had come to the fore not as a ritual or personal fact but as a moral and spiritual achievement.

As Bond recounts, the Protevangelium of James was a wildly popular text in which a 12-year-old Mary is given in marriage to an elderly widower named Joseph. The text explains away the “brothers and sisters” of Jesus mentioned in Paul’s letters and the Gospels by making them Joseph’s children from an earlier marriage. Though this reading became standard in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, modern scholarship has mostly abandoned it. Bond asserts that even many Catholic interpreters now understand the brothers and sisters of Jesus siblings as younger children of Mary and Joseph. Popular media—The Chosen, Netflix’s Mary—reinforces this assumption, portraying Mary and Joseph as a young couple entering a first marriage together.

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Bond argues we may have dismissed the older reading too quickly, basing her case on two pieces of evidence. The first involves simple demography: Matthew 13:55–56 lists four brothers and at least two sisters of Jesus, implying a family with seven or more children. Given ancient infant mortality rates—a third of children died in their first year, up to half before age five—this would require Mary to have had at least 14 pregnancies.

Drawing on demographic research using Egyptian papyri, historian Sabine Huebner has shown that the average young man in Jesus’s time had fewer than one living brother. This makes Jesus’s family size statistically extraordinary. A family this large becomes far more plausible if some of the children belonged to one or more additional marriages.

Second, Bond turns to an odd detail in Mark 6:3, where the people of Nazareth call Jesus “the carpenter, the son of Mary,” where the “son of Joseph” would be expected. Scholars have often read this as a veiled insult, implying illegitimacy, or assumed it simply reflects Joseph’s death. Bond cites historian Tal Ilan’s research to note that identifying a man by his mother’s name was not inherently shameful in the ancient world, and was sometimes used to distinguish among sons of different wives, as with the two wives of Lamech in Genesis 4, or Adonijah, called “son of Haggith,” in 1 Kings 5. Bond proposes that the Nazareth villagers used “son of Mary” to specify which of Joseph’s wives had borne this particular son, which is, she argues, the kind of intimate detail neighbors in a small village such as Nazareth would have known.

The verses Bond relies on—Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55–56—present the brothers and sisters of Jesus alongside his mother in a context that strongly implies a biological or household relationship rather than the fictive use of “brothers and sisters,” for example as is typical in Paul’s letters. The villagers are listing people they know personally from Jesus’s biological family, and Mary is named as his mother, grounding the passage in the language of household rather than community.

These two strands of evidence suggest a scenario where young Mary entered an existing household, perhaps helping to raise the eventual brothers and sisters of Jesus who were not her own biological kin, in a common circumstance of the ancient world. The Gospels plainly present Mary as a virgin at the time of Jesus’s conception, and centuries of later theology were built around the question of whether she remained a virgin perpetually. Mark 6:3 and Matthew 13:55–56 do not share that interest and instead focus on identifying the members of Jesus’s family.

Read the article “Was Mary a Second Wife?” by Helen Bond in the Summer 2026 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Lauren K. McCormick is an assistant editor at Biblical Archaeology Review and a specialist in ancient Near Eastern religions, visual culture, and the Bible. She holds degrees in religion from Syracuse University, Duke University, New York University, and Rutgers University, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship on religion and the public conversation at Princeton University.

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