I’m currently reading Solider Sailor by Claire Kilroy. Early in the book, her narrator says this:

The Virgin Mary, of all people, came to mind. I ask blessed Mary, ever virgin. Having never given her a moment’s consideration in my life, it then struck me that she was real. Not real as in there beside me—don’t worry, I wasn’t having a visitation—but real as in there had once been a girl, a living girl, a child in fact, called Mary, Maryam, Mariam; a child who had given birth in a stable at the age of thirteen or fourteen or possibly twelve. Where was her mother, was my question. Where was the poor kid’s mother? How could you let your child go through that without being by her side?

This was a thought that festered. From a modern perspective, this idea seems unimaginably cruel, not to mention negligent. Unlike Joseph’s father, the Bible doesn’t name Mary’s parents, known traditionally as Ann and Joachim.¹

By the time of the birth, Mary was, literally, the property of Joseph, hence the need to tote her along to Bethlehem for the census. A man claiming ownership of a child and separating her from her family while she gives birth in a stable to the first of at least seven children seems, again, abhorrent to modern eyes.

One might be tempted to conclude that we can’t judge the behaviours and mores of people two millennia ago by modern standards, and that we live in very different times. Regrettably, not everyone sees it that way.

1. Lest you worry that this Ann gets all the flak in the quotation, the narrator goes go on to criticise Joachim in similar terms a couple of pages later.

The picture at the top is, fairly obviously, a detail from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, probably better known these days for the Putti at the bottom of the frame.