In December 2010, alongside the Dr Who Christmas Special and dysfunctional domestic fare of Eastenders, the BBC included Tony Jordan’s dramatization of The Nativity. Depicting Mary as a pregnant teenager threatened by stoning, the drama simultaneously acknowledged concerns regarding young motherhood in the UK and the perceived threat of religious cultures condoning the public execution of women for sexual misdemeanour. This projection of the preoccupations of a twenty-first-century audience onto a two-thousand-year-old narrative did not go unnoticed. Journalistic coverage debated the apparent ‘modernisms’ in the dialogue, accused the BBC of negative portrayals of Judaism and saw Joseph’s doubt as undermining Mary’s virgin pregnancy. Yet responses to the programme largely ignored the fact that this depiction of the doubting relationship between Mary and Joseph was not a new interpretation, but a very old one.

Debates concerning the virgin pregnancy are nowhere more vociferously explored than in late-medieval religious drama. In the speech cited above, the N-Town Joseph articulates the essential paradox at the heart of a drama that is simultaneously domestic and spiritual. While he wants to think that his meek and mild wife remains chaste, he believes her pregnancy to be impossible without ‘mannys company’. But this is not only an appeal to the laws of nature. It is also a question of religious understanding. The virgin conception marks the beginning of a new kind of law – one that Joseph is spectacularly ill-equipped to encounter. The argument between the holy couple in plays depicting Joseph’s doubt is not therefore simply a debate about spousal betrayal, sexual misdemeanour or a misogynistic exemplar of the evils of taking a younger wife. It is a debate about time.

The Middle Ages supported several competing and intersecting models of time. Within Church theology, time could be read as a linear narrative of the Fall in Genesis, the life of Christ and progression towards Doomsday, or it could be cyclical, with the Fall anticipating mankind’s eventual reunion with God. Biblical events could also be experienced in the medieval present, with worshippers directly participating in certain scriptural moments during ceremonies such as the Mass, or through annual liturgical events such as the Passion or Easter Sunday.