saxitoxin wrote:ITT tzor defends his cult's support of 13 year old girls marrying 45 year old men on moral relativism - "it was common at that time."
No, it was quite common for 12 year old men to marry 13 year old girls, not 45 year old men. This leads to the question of who Joseph was. Note that any writing (and most writings which depict Joseph's age come from the mid second century) that depict him as "old" also depict Mary as being someone who had professed a vow of perpetual virginity in the temple. These writings place his age not at 45 but 90!
Catholic Encyclopedia wrote:It will not be without interest to recall here, unreliable though they are, the lengthy stories concerning St. Joseph's marriage contained in the apocryphal writings. When forty years of age, Joseph married a woman called Melcha or Escha by some, Salome by others; they lived forty-nine years together and had six children, two daughters and four sons, the youngest of whom was James (the Less, "the Lord's brother"). A year after his wife's death, as the priests announced through Judea that they wished to find in the tribe of Juda a respectable man to espouse Mary, then twelve to fourteen years of age. Joseph, who was at the time ninety years old, went up to Jerusalem among the candidates; a miracle manifested the choice God had made of Joseph, and two years later the Annunciation took place. These dreams, as St. Jerome styles them, from which many a Christian artist has drawn his inspiration (see, for instance, Raphael's "Espousals of the Virgin"), are void of authority; they nevertheless acquired in the course of ages some popularity; in them some ecclesiastical writers sought the answer to the well-known difficulty arising from the mention in the Gospel of "the Lord's brothers"; from them also popular credulity has, contrary to all probability, as well as to the tradition witnessed by old works of art, retained the belief that St. Joseph was an old man at the time of marriage with the Mother of God.
ConfederateSS.out!(The Blue and Silver Rebellion). 
