Joseph of Nazareth

Joseph of Nazareth appears in the New Testament only in the birth and childhood narratives of Jesus, and there almost entirely in the Gospel of Matthew. He is described as a tekton, a craftsman, traditionally rendered carpenter, of the line of David, betrothed to Mary, and it is through him that both Matthew and Luke trace Jesus' Davidic descent, though their genealogies differ.

Matthew tells the story from Joseph's side: learning of Mary's pregnancy and resolving to divorce her quietly, he is reassured in a dream by an angel, takes her as his wife, names the child, and is warned in further dreams to flee with mother and child into Egypt from Herod and later to settle in Nazareth. Luke, telling the story from Mary's side, places Joseph at the census journey to Bethlehem and at the presentation of the child in the Temple.

After the episode of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, Joseph vanishes from the record. He is never mentioned during Jesus' public ministry, and the tradition has generally inferred that he had died by then. The Gospels report no word spoken by him; he is a figure known entirely through his obedient actions.

Joseph stands at the centre of an old question: the Gospels refer to brothers and sisters of Jesus, and how these are understood depends on how Joseph is understood. Churches that hold the perpetual virginity of Mary, the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, explain the brothers as cousins or, in an Eastern tradition drawn from the apocryphal Protevangelium of James, as Joseph's children by an earlier marriage, making him an older widower when betrothed to Mary. Many Protestants take the more straightforward reading that they were later children of Joseph and Mary. The texts alone do not settle it, and the answer follows from prior doctrine.

Devotion to Joseph developed comparatively late but became substantial, especially in the Western church. He is honoured as the patron of workers, his feast as Saint Joseph the Worker set on the first of May, of fathers and families, of a happy or holy death (from the tradition that he died in the presence of Jesus and Mary), and, since the nineteenth century, as patron of the universal Church.

Islam takes a different view entirely: the Qur'an affirms the virgin birth but assigns Joseph no role, for Isa (Jesus) is born of Maryam alone by the direct creative word of God, and Joseph does not appear.