What people seem to overlook is that there was ABSOLUTELY NOT NEED for Jesus Christ to be born at all. He could have simply materialized as a full-grown Man.
God CHOSE the Blessed Virgin Mary and she said YES. Did He know she would consent, certainly, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t her choice.
I cannot begin to imagine the awesome responsibility that the Blessed Mother and Saint Joseph were tasked with and because of that it is incomprehensible to me that they would allow ANYTHING to interfere with what God tasked them to do.
Again we see the lamentably common mistake of conflating fore-knowledge with fore-ordination.
Your assumption is that having other children would interfere with the raising of Jesus. Have you really thought about that position?
There are good reasons that having many children was considered a blessing in antiquity. Children were put to work at a very young age. Boys labored and brought in money to the family, girls helped with cooking, cleaning, and domestic chores (which was hard tedious labor in those days.) Large famalies were a huge economic adavantage.
Had Jesus been an only child, his parents would have to had spent inordiante amounts of time working. Having additional children would have freed up Mary's and Joseph's time so they could have spent MORE time concentrating on Jesus.
Far from distracting from Jesus, additional children would have helped his parents spend more time with Jesus.
“What people seem to overlook is that there was ABSOLUTELY NOT NEED for Jesus Christ to be born at all. He could have simply materialized as a full-grown Man.”
I don’t believe that is true. The reason is that Jesus, in order to claim He had lived a perfect life as a perfect man, had to be genuinely human. Not taken a shortcut, and skipped over a bunch of time where he’d have to be exposed to the same kinds of circumstances EVERYONE else has to deal with as infants, small children, juveniles, and young adults. Satan would have been crying “FOUL!” if God claimed Jesus went through everything other humans did and still remained perfect, Satan would have rightly said it wasn’t an equal test.
So Jesus was born like a normal human, grew up, exposed to the same kinds of situations, challenges, temptations, etc - and lived a perfect life through all of the trials ordinary people go through and fail - but He, Jesus, didn’t fail a single one of them.
That’s why it was critical for Jesus to come into the world as He did. He lived a genuine human life like everyone else, no favoritism, no rigging the deck, no skipping over certain parts of a human’s life experience. And He made it through all of that perfectly. That’s why Satan can’t cry it wasn’t a fair test. It was totally fair. Christ passed a 100% fair test.