Joseph, that righteous man.
My primary interest in this play about how he deals with the revelation that his fiancee is pregnant was the simple human drama of it. When I was thinking about how to approach the story, I decided to cheat a little bit to increase the tension. I’d always assumed that he learned about her pregnancy by her telling him, but decided to have him learn from the neighborhood talk instead in my play, to ramp up the shame level that this conscientious and proper man would have to deal with. Then I noticed that the story itself suggested that that’s how things happened: Mary “was found to be with child”!
Incredible. Why didn’t she tell him upfront about the visit from the angel? Well, it’s a question I didn’t have to deal with in this play, because I decided to write it entirely from Joseph’s point of view. At some point, I’ll do a play entirely from Mary’s point of view, probably based on the reading for Advent 4, Year B, in about a year, and then we’ll see what I come up with. In the meantime, however, there are a couple of puzzles still to wrestle with in this story as it is.
First, there’s the question of the course of action Joseph decided on before he’s visited by the angel. The original story frames this as the act of a righteous man: not to have Mary punished or publicly humiliated, but to have her “put away” quietly. And I’m sure that in its historical context, in the patriarchal world of the first century, this was a truly enlightened act. But what about now, for the modern reader of this story? And so I have my Joseph wrestle with a somewhat wider range of possibilities.
Second, there’s that mishandling of an Old Testament prophecy by the angel. A similar thing will happen in the next play. What’s going on in the Gospels with these “prophecies” of Jesus’ birth?