Why was Jesus single, given that it was highly unusual for a 33-year-old Jewish Rabbi to be unmarried in the 1st century Roman Empire? What is the most likely reason behind it?

 

The most likely reason is that he wasn’t single. It was just that his wife was never very relevant to the narrative.

Alternatively, as has been speculated, that his wife was Mary of Magdala. She is basically the only woman in the entire narrative who isn’t the wife, sister, or mother of anyone, but just mentioned as if the reader was expected to know her from being famous, or understand who she was from context. (Her identification with the “sinner” who washed Jesus’ feet is almost certainly wrong – it is not supported by the text in any way whatsoever, it’s just that some people are very keen to have as few female characters as possible around.)

It’s also eminently possible that he was a widower. It was more common than today to die young, after all. Again, this would not have been important to the narrative, so it was left out.

A more controversial take is that hey, you have 13 men walking around the Judean countryside with no women around, what do you think they got up to? You can actually dismiss that out of hand: 13 men with no accompanying women would have led to all sorts of rumours, no one would have taken them seriously ever and they might have got themselves stoned for their trouble, so it’s virtually certain that there were women accompanying them.

Just reading the text, the idea that the wedding in Cana was Jesus’ own would strike you as eminently plausible. Any other explanation is a bit far-fetched, actually. Again, the writers would not have felt the need to be explicit about something that a contemporary reader would understand anyway, just like they don’t point out that Tiberius Caesar and Claudius were Emperors and that they reigned in Rome (Luke 3:1–2, Acts 11:28). (No, “Ceasar” didn’t mean “Emperor” – it’s just a family name, they would have been known as “Imperator”.)