How Old Was Mary When She Had Jesus?

No one knows the exact age at which Mary gave birth to Jesus, but she may have been a teenage mother. There are only two scriptural accounts of Christ’s birth in the New Testament—in the Gospel According to Matthew and in the Gospel According to Luke—and neither provides much insight into how old she was. Both biblical accounts affirm that Mary became pregnant while engaged to Joseph (Luke 1:26–38 and Matthew 1:18–25), though the length of their engagement is unspecified. Several early Christian traditions suggest that she was in her teens or slightly younger. For example, the Protevangelium of James, an influential and noncanonical work written in the mid-2nd century ce, portrays her as being 12 years old at the time of her betrothal to Joseph. Other apocryphal texts and early traditions place her slightly older, about 14, when she became engaged.

Cultural expectations in Judaism at the time of Christ’s birth would tend to support the possibility of an adolescent Mary. Girls could be married shortly after reaching puberty, with ages as young as 12 being permissible and marriages in the teens regarded as normal. Historical summaries of Jewish law emphasize that marriage was generally expected once a girl experienced menarche (first menstruation) and had reached physical maturity. (The Talmud would later establish 12 as the age of religious majority for girls and 13 for boys; see also bar and bat mitzvah.) Given these norms, a betrothal between 12 and 14 would have been socially unremarkable, though Mary certainly could have been 15, 16, or even older at the time of Christ’s birth.