An Absent Father?
Scripture provides minimal material for a popular cult of St. Joseph. The gospels mention him by name (the name "Joseph" means "God adds" or "God gathers") only 15 times: He appears briefly in connection with the early life of Jesus, then simply disappears. The Evangelists record not a single word spoken by St. Joseph. And without a traditional burial place, he didn't even leave bodily relics.
None of the above would have necessarily pushed St. Joseph into the background. Imaginative histories were concocted for nameless New Testament cameo players later called Saints Longinus, Veronica/Bernike, and Martial.
But the early Church was anxious to defend the Virgin Birth and the perpetual virginity of our Lady. It seemed to many Christians that minimizing St. Joseph magnified Mary. The Church fathers remained studiously incurious about his life. Although they mention him occasionally in passing, there's not a single listing for St. Joseph in the saints' index to Migne's Patrologiae Latina, a 221-volume collection of Church writings up to 1216.
St. Joseph's obscurity in the East ensured that Mohammed never heard of him from Christian informants. The unmarried Virgin Mary, on the other hand, enjoys favorable attention in the Koran, where Surah 19 is titled "Mary."
Finally, the most influential of the apocryphal gospels, the Greek Protevangelium of James, assigned St. Joseph a less-than-flattering part. Here he's a timid, elderly widower with grown children. Even after the heavenly sign of a dove emerges from his staff, he tries to beg off marrying young Mary "lest I should become a laughingstock to the children of Israel," but the high priest insists. When Mary is found to be with child, St. Joseph frets that she's been deceived by Satan, as Eve was before her. Later in Bethlehem, St. Joseph is off looking for a midwife when Mary gives birth to Jesus with miraculous ease.
Although condemned by popes in the West, the Protevangelium provided the East with its preferred solution for the pesky "Brethren of the Lord" problem: Those identified as siblings of Jesus must have been children from St. Joseph's first marriage.
Redone in Latin as the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew between the eighth and ninth centuries, the Joseph legends of the Protevangelium spread throughout Western Christendom. They appear in The Golden Legend (1298), the Middle Ages' favorite book about saints, where St. Joseph is discussed only on feasts of our Lord or our Lady because he lacked a feast of his own.
An elderly St. Joseph, subordinate to Mary, was a stock figure in medieval literature. For instance, in the 15th-century English mystery play Joseph, he's a querulous codger who fears he's been cuckolded.
The low point of St. Joseph's position in medieval devotion has to be the story of Blessed Herman Joseph of Steinfeld (d. 1240), a Norbertine priest. The culmination of the cozy apparitions he'd enjoyed from childhood was a mystical marriage with his "sweetheart," the Blessed Virgin. The holy man added "Joseph" to his birth name, Herman, symbolically taking St. Joseph's place in Mary's affections.
Despite his debut in an illustrative mosaic at St. Mary Major in Rome (circa 440), St. Joseph was marginalized in medieval art. He didn't rate a separate image, even in prayer books. Northern Gothic artists did give him an active part in caring for the Christ child — but only in menial tasks such as finding water, cooking, or swathing the Infant in his woolly hose.
Fourteenth-century Tuscan painters developed a peculiar motif known as the charivari of St. Joseph, in which Mary's disappointed young suitors — those whose staves failed to blossom or generate a dove in the High Priest's fitness test — watch angrily and make threatening gestures during the wedding of Mary and Joseph. These images reflect contemporary social problems that left many vigorous young men unable to marry while older men snapped up tender maidens with rich dowries.
Even at the end of the Middle Ages, St. Joseph was still being pushed to the background in the Holy Kindred — group portraits of our Lady's whole family that were popular in northern Europe. Like the other male relatives, he merely watches the reading women and playing children from behind a barrier. Only after 1500 does St. Joseph move into the circle of activity and get to touch Jesus.
