Meet Jesus’s Other Father: The Overlooked Legacy of Joseph of Nazareth

Joseph of Nazareth, the adoptive father of Jesus, is neglected in theology and biblical studies and even in devotion. In Protestantism, he is seldom more than a Christmas decoration. In Catholicism, despite centuries of veneration of the Holy Family, he had no liturgical feast day of his own until 1481 (celebrated on March 19) and no papal encyclical singled him out until 1889.

There is astounding disparity between the parents of Jesus on this score. Research on the mother of Christ is so vast it has become its own field, but there is no department of Joseph studies anywhere, nor are there any Josephologists.

We come by our negligence honestly. It is more or less proportional to Joseph’s representation in the Gospels. In the drama of salvation, Joseph has few stage directions and no lines. The Gospel of John mentions him only twice; in neither instance is he actually present, but is simply referred to indirectly and in passing (1:45 and 6:42). Mark makes no mention of him at all and, once we’re past the Gospels, neither does the rest of the New Testament.

Yet a role can be small and still critical. In fact, Joseph might be the most significant insignificant man in the New Testament. There are dozens of marginal figures in the backdrop of the New Testament who receive only a few lines of attention. To my mind, however, Joseph’s marginality requires explanation, since it seems remarkable for a figure so closely connected to Jesus.

This essay will trace Joseph’s marginality in the New Testament with the aim of bringing into relief his major contribution to the gospel of Christ.

Silent Joseph

In August 2024, I sat in the audience for the recording session of A Light to All, an EP by Fr. Steve Williamson, manager of church programming at the Center for Pastor Theologians. The setting for the fourth entry in the album, “Joseph’s Song,” is Christmas night. Jesus is born. Shepherds and angels have come and gone. Child and mother are asleep. Only Joseph remains awake. The song begins as he reflects on the night’s events and offers a prayer of awed praise. Williamson’s piece is a work of affective fiction and an imaginative meditation on Joseph’s paternal heart, the only heart in history to have loved Jesus as a Savior and as a son.

The shock of “Joseph’s Song” is it breaks a two-thousand-year silence. The Bible say little about Joseph, but Joseph himself says nothing at all. He left no word on record. When Jesus’s parents find him in the temple after he was lost for three days, it is Mary who voices their frustration: “Son, why have you treated us so? Behold, your father and I have been searching for you in great distress” (Luke 2:48). The stories of Jesus’s Nativity and Boyhood favor Mary’s perspective, not Joseph’s.

Not only does Joseph never say anything, no one says anything to Joseph. No one at any point turns and addresses him. No human, that is. In fact, what little we have of Joseph’s biography is almost entirely a series of encounters with angels: four in total, all in dreams. Like his Old Testament namesake, Joseph is a “dreamer” (Gen 37:19; בַּעַל חֲלוׄמוׄת, literally “one who possesses dreams”), and when we encounter him in the text, he is usually sleeping. Little wonder, then, that the favored way to depict Joseph in Christian art and iconography through the centuries is to have him slouching or reclining drowsily, as this is the most Bible-accurate way to depict him.

There is no dialogue in these visits. After he is commissioned to be the father of Jesus, it is not written whether Joseph delivered a faithful fiat, like Mary (Luke 1:26–38), or if he raised any doubts, like Zechariah (Luke 1:5–25). To us readers, the movements of Joseph’s heart are hidden. We perceive his faithfulness in his actions only.

Some have detected in Joseph’s marginality an example of “holy hiddenness” as marks the sort of person who shuns the public eye and withdraws to seek a heavenly reward from God, “who is in secret” (Matt 6:6). If so, then Joseph was nearly too successful. He almost vanished from the record. What remains is a marginal figure operating on the periphery of the gospel narrative, unheard, unaddressed, seldom seen, and when seen, seldom awake. I deny, however, that a pious spirit is to credit for Joseph’s marginality, as will be shown.

Absent Joseph

Joseph’s activity is confined to the Nativity and boyhood narratives in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. After these, he disappears from the story. Mary, meanwhile, continues to make frequent appearances. She is present at several major events of the gospel, but Joseph is never presented alongside her.

Joseph’s apparent death

The inevitable inference is that at some point during the eighteen years between Jesus entering the temple at twelve and receiving baptism at thirty (a period scholars refer to as “the hidden years”), Joseph must have died.

This point is reinforced by every instance we would expect to see Joseph but don’t. The adult Jesus is described in various Gospels interacting with his mother (John 2:3–5), his brothers (John 7:3–10), and his mother and brothers together (Mark 3:31–35), along with passing references to his sisters (Mark 3:35; 6:3). But in all references or descriptions of his family, his father’s presence is never suggested, and Jesus never interacts with him. While Jesus is preaching, it is his “mother and brothers” who come and ask for him. In response, Jesus gestures at the crowd: “Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35). Jesus presumably did not round out the family unit in his analogy with a “father” because there was no father present to be analogized.

Concluding that Joseph was dead clarifies some difficult passages. At one point in the Gospel of Mark, a crowd calls Jesus “the son of Mary” (6:3). This phrase is unique to Mark. In the parallel passages in the other Gospels, the crowd calls Jesus “Joseph’s son” or “the carpenter’s son” (Matt 13:55; Luke 4:22; John 6:42). There have been many theories as to why Mark chose only to refer to Jesus’s mother: Is Mark hinting at the virginal conception? Is the crowd insinuating that Jesus was conceived illegitimately? But the simplest explanation remains the best: Joseph is dead, and therefore absent, and the crowd points to the relatives of Jesus who are living there in Nazareth as standing evidence of Christ’s ordinary beginnings. In short, “They do not point to Joseph because he is not there, and Jesus is called ‘son of Mary’ because she is there.”

If you remain unconvinced that Joseph was dead by the time Jesus began his adult ministry, it is certain that he was dead by the time Jesus was crucified. From the cross and near death, Jesus committed the care of his mother, Mary, to his disciple, John (John 19:25–29). He would only have done so if there were no other living male relative to care for her.

In conclusion, Joseph is noticeably absent from the company of Jesus’s family and does not feature at all in his son’s adult ministry.

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Before the “beginning”

This absence is key for tracing Joseph’s marginality, which requires us to clarify that in the Gospels and Acts, “the beginning” of Christ’s gospel was not his conception in Mary’s womb, but his baptism by John. As much is implied in the first chapter of Acts. There, the apostles were seeking a replacement for the traitor Judas. A necessary qualification was the candidate had to have followed Christ since the “beginning” (Acts 1:21; cf. Mark 1:1). But this did not mean the candidate had to have known Jesus as a boy, but only since the “baptism of John” (v. 22). Though the Gospels of Luke and Matthew may open with the Infancy and Boyhood Narratives (and John with a theological treatise on the eternal pre-existence of the divine Logos), these openings function like Christological prologues. Wherever the Gospel writers speak of the beginning of the gospel proper, they inevitably mean the ministry of John.

There are thus two ways to speak of Christ’s “beginning.” Christ’s incarnation, his earthly sojourn where the divine Word “tabernacled” among us (John 1:14), begins in Mary’s womb with the annunciation. Christ’s gospel, his public ministry of proclaiming the “good news” (εὐαγγέλιον) of the kingdom of God, begins in John’s baptismal ministry. For centuries, when Christ has been depicted enthroned as king and surrounded by praying saints (an iconographic tradition called Deisis), the Virgin Mary is always placed on his immediate right and John the Baptist on his immediate left. These two figures are given such prominence because they represent the two “beginnings” of Jesus in the Gospels: One bore Christ through the waters of the womb, the other bore him through the waters of the Jordan.

So if Joseph died before Jesus began his public ministry, then Joseph is technically pre-gospel. He is in the Gospels (i.e., the canonical books), but not in the gospel (i.e., the historic period of Jesus’s public ministry).

This creates a stunning contrast between Jesus’s two parents. Consider: One parent witnessed his earthly sojourn in its entirety from annunciation to ascension (apparently, the only human being to have done so), and she even lived on into the earliest years of the church. She was likely in the upper room and received the outpouring of the Spirit on Pentecost (cf. Acts 1:13–16 and 2:1), making her one of the church’s original founding members. In contrast, the other parent didn’t live to see his son leave home to pursue baptism. He never heard the gospel clatter through Galilee. Joseph died an Old Covenant Jew obeying the charge he had received from angels.

Joseph was not faithful to Jesus as a disciple, but as a father.

This gives his faith a distinct quality, for it means Joseph was not faithful to Jesus as a disciple, but as a father.

Joseph’s untimely death was no doubt a major factor in his marginalization. The stories in the Gospels may have looked much different had Joseph lived to play a part in Jesus’s ministry, to take questions from neighbors, to join his son in the synagogue, or to be his advocate to the crowds and court assemblies. As it is, his death ensured his visibility was limited to pre-gospel narratives.

Father Joseph

Despite his marginal status, Joseph played a key role in salvation history, which was to be the father of Jesus. This did not only mean that he was tasked to care for the child and to contribute to his growth in “wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52), though it included that. More significantly, Joseph’s fatherhood fulfilled a prophecy that the messiah would be born in the line of David (see Mic 5:2). 

Mary, daughter of … David?

Let’s settle the point that Jesus received his Davidic heritage from Joseph, not Mary.

An early tradition, first appearing in Justin Martyr (Dial. 45) in the second century, claims Mary was in the lineage of David. This is likely based on a misreading of the phrase “of the house of David” in Luke 1:27 as referring to Mary rather than to Joseph. It might also be a result of comparing “the seed of the woman” (Gen 3:15) and “the seed of David” (2 Sam 7:12–14; cf. Rom 1:3) in such a way that “seed” is taken to describe Jesus’s maternal descent—nevermind that women do not have “seed.” At any rate, the New Testament never states that Mary was of the tribe of Judah or of the house of David.

In fact, we know virtually nothing of Mary’s genealogy. The only clue is given in Luke 1:5, where Elizabeth is said to be both “of the daughters of Aaron” (v. 5) and a “kinswoman” of Mary (v. 36). The Greek term for “kinswoman” (συγγενής) is vague, denoting a vast range of possible relational ties. However, it is at least a theoretical possibility that Mary’s lineage is levitical, perhaps Aaronic.

But any consideration of Mary’s lineage is immaterial. In the Jewish milieu of the time, a child’s genealogy was traced through his or her father, whether or not that father was the biological parent. This can be difficult for a modern audience to appreciate. More than previous eras, modernity is strongly colored by a strain of naturalism, inflamed by valuations contrived from the modern science of genetics, which construes the biological father as the “real” father. In antiquity, the real father was the legal father, whether or not he physically procreated the child or had any genetic relationship with him.

Legal sonship in the ancient world

While the natural–biological link did carry weight in the ancient world, sonship was not a biological given: It awaited the father’s legal recognition.

Some Greek and Roman fathers withheld this acknowledgement and the child was accordingly abandoned in a trash-heap or other remote place—a practice called “infant exposure.” A much-cited case is found in a letter written in 1 BC by a man, Hilarion, perhaps a Roman soldier, to his wife, Alis. Alis is expecting. In anticipation, her husband delivers these instructions: “if it is a boy, let it be; if it is a girl, cast it out.” Exposure could be done without legal reprisal. It was another story if a family abandoned a child whose legitimacy had already been recognized, which was condemned. Point being, children were not accepted as family members until they were legally recognized as such.

Those children who were not recognized as sons or daughters are included in the group called the “fatherless” (Hebrew יָתוֹם; Greek ὀρφανός). While Joseph deliberated quietly annulling his marriage to Mary, Jesus was at this moment at risk of becoming one of the fatherless himself. Joseph’s annunciation is a critical moment. The angel was not merely explaining the situation to Joseph and advocating for the innocence of Mary, but commissioning Joseph, with emphasis on the fact that he was “of the house and lineage of David” (Luke 2:4; cf. Matt 1:1–17, 20), to acknowledge the child in Mary’s womb as his own son.

One way a father recognized a child was by naming. Both Mary and Joseph were instructed to “call his name Jesus” (Mary, Luke 1:31; Joseph, Matt 1:21), indicating that naming was a joint responsibility and both parents were to be agreed before the name was made public. (As much is also implied in the story of the naming of John by Zechariah and Elizabeth, as will be seen.) But this task placed a special burden on Joseph. By naming Jesus, Joseph effectively adopted the son of Mary as his own. For boys, the public naming would occur on the eighth day after the child’s birth in the same ceremony as his circumcision (e.g., John, Luke 1:59; Jesus, Luke 2:21). For Jews, these two rites—grafting the son into the covenant of Abraham and giving him a name—were connected.

That naming was a public act of endowing legal sonship is most clearly shown in John’s Nativity Narrative. To discern this, we open with the question: Why does Zechariah regain his voice when he does? The answer is naming required him to perform his paternal duty.

If you recall the story, shortly after John’s circumcision, his family would have named him Zechariah, but his mother countered, “No; he shall be called John” (Luke 1:60). Other family members objected that this name was unsuitable, for the boy had no relatives by that name. Despite the mother’s insistence, Zechariah did not regain his voice and the name of his child remained in dispute. Only when Zechariah put down on a writing tablet “His name is John” (v. 63) was the matter settled and “immediately his mouth was opened and his tongue loosed” (v. 64). For Zechariah to regain his speech, it was imperative, not that his son be named John, but that he name his son John.

In the story, it is the father’s act of naming that is definite. This not only highlights how naming was a joint venture shared by both parents, but also that it was necessary for Zechariah’s repentance to be complete. Until Zechariah named his son, he had not fully acknowledged him, but once he had done so, the angel’s message that “your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you shall call his name John” (v. 13) was fulfilled and Zechariah had fully submitted to it, repenting of his earlier doubts. So the ban on his speech was lifted.

This prompts a speculation: Even if nothing Joseph said was ever written down, is there anything we can be reasonably certain he did say? I submit one phrase he is likely to have uttered at some point is “His name is Jesus.”

Son of Joseph or Son of David?

Jesus’s Davidic lineage was one of the earliest affirmations of Christianity. Its appearance in numerous streams of New Testament tradition testifies to its great antiquity. When Paul wrote in the late 50s to a church he had not founded nor ever visited, he includes in an early creedal formula in Romans 1:3–4 that Jesus “was born of the seed of David according to the flesh.” Unlike many points of the gospel, this one Paul felt no need to defend or expound upon. Instead, Paul assumed the Christians in Rome were aware of this formulation and affirmed it by faith as he did. So a mere twenty-eight years after Christ’s crucifixion, Jesus’s descent from David was enshrined in the earliest creedal formulas preserved in the New Testament and enjoyed universal consensus among the first churches.

Despite belief in Jesus’s Davidic descent being one of the earliest truly catholic (i.e., “universal”) articles of Christianity, it did nothing to lift Joseph out of his marginal status. In none of the ancient creedal formulae is Joseph named or even alluded to. Instead, this article of faith was affirmed in connection with Jesus’s resurrection. As the confessional formulae in Romans 1:3–4 and 2 Timothy 2:8 bear out, especially when taken together with the sermons of Peter and Paul in Acts 2:24–36 and 13:17–37, the significance seems to be that, in Jesus, and especially at his resurrection, God fulfilled the promise he made to David in 2 Samuel 7:12–14: “I will raise up your seed after you … and I shall establish his kingly rule … and I shall make firm his throne forever. I will be his father and he shall be my son.” So it seems first-century Christians weren’t thinking so much of Joseph and the Nativity Narratives when they confessed Jesus was the descendent of David, but rather, as the historian John P. Meier explains, “the earliest connection that Christian faith made between Jesus and Davidic descent was in the context of his resurrection and in the light of the OT promise to David.”

Jesus’s Davidic lineage was key for the early church in helping them understand and interpret his miraculous resurrection as a messianic event. This marginalized Joseph because it makes David’s fatherhood the one of significance. Even when Jesus’s sonship to Joseph is alluded to in the New Testament, occasionally this isn’t even by name (Matt 13:55), and Jesus is expressly called the “son of Joseph” only thrice (Luke 4:22; John 6:42; the third instance is in Luke’s genealogy, where it has the air of a technicality which the author feels the need to qualify: “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son (as was supposed) of Joseph.” Luke 3:23; emphasis mine.) Meanwhile, Jesus is called the “Son of David” fifteen times across the Gospels.

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If we were to ask a first-century Christian who the (earthly) father of Jesus was, she would most likely respond, “That’s easy. David!”—as when the blind beggar at the gate of Jericho cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Luke 18:38, 39; emphasis mine). Joseph’s fatherhood is a historical incident: Its purpose is to point us to David’s fatherhood. So despite the particulars of Jesus’s biography, Jesus’s father, according to the apostolic preaching, is David. Consequently, Joseph is pushed into the margins to give David the spotlight.

Even so, we must not lose sight of the fact that Joseph is to credit for connecting Jesus to this Davidic lineage. Just as the annunciation to Mary commissioned her to be Jesus’s mother, the annunciation to Joseph commissioned him to be Jesus’s father, and the lineage of Joseph, not of Mary, determines the lineage of Jesus.

Orthodox Christians must affirm Jesus had a human father: If he did not, then he cannot be the heir of David.

This demands we be more precise about how we speak of Joseph’s fatherhood. Many well-meaning pastors, scholars, and teachers, attempting to uphold orthodox Christology, will occasionally deny Jesus had any “human father.” What they really mean to say is Jesus had no biological or natural father; put another way, he had no father according to his human/created nature. But to say “Jesus had no human father” is, on its face, a false statement. From the perspective of the ancient world, Joseph was as much the father of Jesus as Mary was his mother, despite the fact that Jesus had no biological relationship with Joseph (or David). Orthodox Christians must affirm Jesus had a human father: If he did not, then he cannot be the heir of David.

As it happens, the gospel begins and ends with the theme of adoption: Just as Jesus was God’s Son by nature, David’s son by adoption, so we are Adam’s children by nature, God’s children by adoption (see Rom 8:15).

“[Joseph], did you know / That your baby boy / … Is the Great I AM?”

In Fr. Williamson’s “Joseph’s Song,” the adoptive father of Jesus is depicted in poverty, with nothing to offer his Savior except his paternal love. This accords with the conclusion of this essay that Joseph’s contribution to the gospel of Christ was singular: to adopt the child in Mary’s womb as his own son. At some point during the song, Joseph lifts sleeping Jesus into his arms, “so frail, so light,” and bows his head to kiss his face: “This is my offering: / The sacrifice of love I bring / To lay before my king.” A small thing, this paternal kiss fulfilled ancient prophecy and enlisted poor old Joseph into the service of the life of his king decades before he ever declared his kingdom or was unveiled to be the Life of the world.

What Joseph knew about his son’s identity was likely minimal. The angel told him Jesus “will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21), so Joseph would have known he was some sort of messiah. The angel also said he was conceived “of the Holy Spirit” (Matt 1:20), so Joseph would have known this child had some relation to the divine. These points, however, would most likely have furnished the same sort of messianic expectations as those harbored by the apostles, which were famously wide of the mark.

Joseph would have known Jesus was special, but he would likely have imagined him to be simply another installment in a series of messianic figures who have appeared throughout Israel’s history and were often miraculously conceived. The apostles themselves were initially uncomprehending of Jesus’s identity as the Son of the living God. In fact, only one group seems to have accurately discerned Christ’s identity in the Gospels before his resurrection: the demon-possessed!

A significant exception comes from the mouth of Peter shortly before Jesus is betrayed. Jesus asks him, “But who do you say that I am?” and Peter replies, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” This is an uncommon moment of discernment for an apostle. Jesus calls Peter blessed, but adds, “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (Matt 16:15–17). Jesus is saying Peter did not deduce his identity through “flesh and blood”; that is, by being physically close to Jesus and watching him teach and perform miracles. Rather, the Son is revealed by the Father.

Accordingly, it is only after the resurrection, when Christ is exalted by the Father, when the identity of Jesus is fully revealed to all. Jesus’s true identity could not have been imagined by Joseph. As Abraham obeyed the voice of God to journey to a land he knew not where (see Gen 12:4), so Joseph obeyed the voice of angels to adopt a child he knew not who.

Our faith is often small. How is this possible, when we know who Christ really is and have even personally experienced his merciful presence through the Holy Spirit? We possess riches that Joseph did not, not least of all an established New Testament and a fully exalted Christ.

And there’s the rub: Joseph did more with his poverty than we often manage with our abundance. Despite having so much less than we in terms of divine revelation, Joseph had a faith of quiet magnificence, useful to God. Joseph shows us that a humble spirit always trumps knowledge. This sort of spirit is required of us if we wish to be “spiritual” Josephs who will “adopt” the Holy Stranger (cf. Rev 3:20) as our own and shelter him in the home of our hearts where, by faith, he can begin to grow within us to full maturity.

Summary

We have traced a hazy profile of this “just man” (Matt 1:19) as a poor but pious Old Covenant Jewish carpenter. He had the faith of Abraham and a faith like Abraham’s. In what is written of him, he spends more time with angels than with people, asleep.

We have also identified two major factors contributing to Joseph of Nazareth’s marginalization in the New Testament, one historical and the other Christological. The first is his early death before the commencement of the historic gospel. This naturally limited his role in the life of Christ and curtailed the possibility of becoming a more prominent player in his public ministry. The second is the emphasis in early Christianity on Jesus’s royal–prophetic Davidic sonship over his immediate Josephic sonship. The former is more relevant to the proclamation of faith, and the latter is only significant on account of the former.

Once we have identified that Joseph’s major (and singular) contribution to the gospel of Christ was to adopt the child of Mary as his own son and call him Jesus, we have in effect said everything of import there is to say. We have, at any rate, exhausted the Gospel writers’ interest in Joseph. This done, his nodding figure immediately decreases, that the Son of David may increase (John 3:30).

Resources mentioned in this article

• Brown. Raymond E., et al., eds. Mary in the New Testament: A Collaborative Assessment by Protestant and Roman Catholic Scholars. Fortress Press, 1978.
• Coyle, Kathleen. Mary in the Christian Tradition: From a Contemporary Perspective. Revised edition. Twenty-Third Publications, 1996.

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