Red-Letter Day
Husband of the Blessed Virgin Mary
March 19
also known as Joseph of Nazareth, St. Joseph, Joseph the Just
The husband of Mary and the legal father of Jesus, a working man of Nazareth who is never once quoted in Scripture. What the Gospels give him instead is a pattern: he is told something in a dream, he gets up, and he does it. He named the child, which was the father's act and made the fatherhood legal, and then he disappears from the record so completely that the Church has had to infer his death from silence.
Almost everything known about Joseph fits on a page, and none of it is anything he said.
He was of the house of David and lived at Nazareth, and he was betrothed to Mary when she was found to be with child. Matthew records what he decided to do about it, and the sentence has carried his reputation ever since: he was "a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example," and so he "was minded to put her away privily." That is a man choosing the most merciful option he can see inside a law that gave him harsher ones. Then he was told in a dream not to be afraid to take her, and he took her.
The act that mattered most came next and is easy to read past. When the child was born, Joseph named him. Under the law naming was the father's prerogative and its exercise was the acknowledgement of the son, so in that one verb the whole legal fatherhood is transacted: the descendant of David gives the child his line. Everything the genealogies are doing runs through it.
They were poor, or near enough. At the presentation in the Temple the offering was two birds, which Leviticus appoints for those who cannot afford a lamb. He worked as a tekton, a word covering the building trades rather than fine joinery, in a village of a few hundred people about six kilometres from Sepphoris, which the Romans had levelled and which was being rebuilt through the years of Jesus's boyhood. What that meant for his working life is a reasonable guess and nothing more.
Twice more he was warned in sleep and twice more he moved: into Egypt while Herod was killing, and out again when Herod was dead, turning aside from Judea because Archelaus was reigning there and settling in Galilee. Matthew tells it flatly, without a word from him.
He appears in person one last time. Jesus was twelve, and the family had gone up to Jerusalem for the Passover, and on the road home they discovered he was not with them. They went back and found him in the Temple after three days, and Mary said, "thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing." That is Joseph's last scene in the whole of Scripture, and he does not speak in it either; he is present in his wife's word for him.
After that, nothing. During the ministry he is mentioned but never appears. The neighbours say "Is not this the carpenter's son?" and that is the sort of remark that needs no living father behind it. Mary turns up without him. At the cross Jesus gives his mother into the keeping of the beloved disciple, which is hard to explain if a husband were alive to keep her. So the Church has always concluded that Joseph died somewhere between that Passover and the Jordan, and every source that states it as fact is inferring it from the same silence. No Gospel records his death. No one knows where he is buried.
Consider how little Joseph is given to work with. No word of his is recorded, no explanation is offered him, and every instruction arrives while he is asleep and is gone by morning. He is told to take a wife whose pregnancy he cannot account for, to get up in the night and cross a border, to come back, to go somewhere else instead. He does each of these things and says nothing, and the record of his obedience is simply that the next sentence describes him doing it. There is no scene in which he understands. Most of the deciding you will do this year will be like that rather than like a vision: partial information, no confirmation, and the thing needing to be done before you feel ready to do it. It is worth noticing that the tradition did not make him a hero for this. It made him a patron of workers and of the dying, which are the two conditions in which people most often keep going without being told why. What would change if you stopped waiting for the explanation you have been told you are owed, and simply did the next plain thing?
Joseph appears in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke, is mentioned during the ministry, and is nowhere else. Reading him well means keeping the two witnesses apart, because they do not tell the same story and the differences are not small.
Matthew and Luke run different itineraries. Matthew has the family in Bethlehem, then in Egypt, then settling in Nazareth, with the Magi and Herod and three dreams, and no census at all. Luke has them start from Nazareth, travel to Bethlehem for a registration, go up to the Temple, and return home, with no Magi, no Herod and no Egypt. The census journey belongs to Luke, not Matthew, and Luke's dating of it to the governorship of Quirinius carries a chronological problem that has never been resolved to general satisfaction. Nor are the two genealogies reconcilable on the surface: Matthew makes Joseph's father Jacob, Luke makes him Heli, and the ancient harmonisation by levirate marriage goes back to Julius Africanus.
He is called a carpenter, but not in the way usually supposed. The neighbours at Nazareth ask "Is not this the carpenter's son?" in Matthew; it is Mark who calls Jesus himself "the carpenter, the son of Mary," without naming Joseph at all. The Greek is tekton, a builder or craftsman in wood and stone rather than a cabinetmaker, and the earliest witness outside the Gospels is Justin Martyr around the 160s, who says Jesus made "ploughs and yokes."
The brethren of Jesus are a three-way dispute, and the two main answers belong to opposite halves of the Church. The Protoevangelium of James, from around 150, makes Joseph an elderly widower with children of his own, which is the reading that took hold in the East. Jerome argued instead that the brethren were cousins, and that view became dominant in the West. Helvidius, against whom Jerome wrote, held that they were Mary's later children, which is where most modern critical scholarship sits. The canonical text does not settle it.
Almost everything colourful about him is second-century or later. The old widower, the dove alighting on his staff, the six children by a first wife, the death at a hundred and eleven with Jesus at the bedside: none of this is in Scripture. It comes from the Protoevangelium and from the History of Joseph the Carpenter, an Egyptian work probably of the sixth or seventh century. These texts have no evidentiary weight for his life and enormous weight for his cult, since the deathbed scene is the foundation of his patronage of a good death. The Catholic Encyclopedia's own verdict on the apocryphal ages and marriages is that they are "void of authority."
Joseph's cult is the slowest starter in the calendar and ended in the highest place. For the first millennium the West barely marked him. He begins to appear in Western martyrologies in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the nineteenth of March is attached to him by the tenth, though why that date was chosen is not recoverable from anything this page could check.
Then the late Middle Ages took him up. Jean Gerson composed an office of the Espousals in 1400 and pressed his cause at the Council of Constance in 1414. Sixtus IV put the nineteenth of March into the Roman calendar in the 1470s; Gregory XV made it a holy day of obligation in 1621. Teresa of Avila, who took him as patron of her reform, wrote that where other saints seem given grace to help in some particular need, "to this glorious Saint, I know by experience, to help us in all."
The nineteenth century finished the ascent. In 1870 Pius IX declared him Patron of the Universal Church, and in 1889 Leo XIII devoted an encyclical to him. In 1955 Pius XII instituted the feast of Joseph the Worker on the first of May, set deliberately against the workers' day of the international labour movement. John XXIII put his name into the Roman Canon in 1962, and in 2013 Francis added it to the other eucharistic prayers.
Anglicans keep him more soberly, which suits him. The Church of England observes Joseph of Nazareth as a Festival on the nineteenth of March, and the American book lists Saint Joseph among the major feasts. He has no relics, because there is no body and no tradition of one, which for a saint of this magnitude is itself remarkable and perhaps fitting: the man whose only recorded actions are getting up and going has left nothing behind to venerate.
Further reading. The two ancient texts behind almost all of Joseph's legend are the Protoevangelium of James (c. 150) and the History of Joseph the Carpenter, both translated by Alexander Walker in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume 8. For the modern papal documents, Leo XIII's Quamquam pluries (1889) and Francis's Patris corde (2020) bracket the cult's final century.
Online resources. The Protoevangelium and the History of Joseph the Carpenter are at New Advent, which also hosts the 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia article that sorts the apocryphal material and dismisses most of it. Justin Martyr on the ploughs and yokes is in the Dialogue with Trypho, chapter 88.
O God, who from the family of your servant David raised up Joseph to be the guardian of your incarnate Son and the husband of his virgin mother: Give us grace to imitate his uprightness of life and his obedience to your commands; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
2 Samuel 7:4, 8–16Psalm 89:1–4(5–18)19–29vRomans 4:13–18Luke 2:41–52