(4 of 7)
The Apocryphal accounts had a mixed legacy. Several became sources--centuries later--for both Western art and the miracle plays that were medieval Europe's precursor to modern theater. The plays had fun with Joseph. In one he announces that he is so "olde [that] both myn leggys [be]gyn to fold," while in another the High Priest's waters of conviction simply get Joseph and Mary soused. But the dramas offered a common man's appreciation for Joseph's early fear that he has been cuckolded, and other human touches. In one play, when Joseph renounces his jealousy, Mary allows him a brief, companionable kiss.
Doctrinally, however, the Apocrypha were a dead end in the Western church. Their creativity was a liability. The 4th century church father Jerome called them "deliria." Although Eastern Orthodoxy continues to accept Joseph's prior marriage and children, in the West, Jerome doubly secured Mary's virginity by proposing that Joseph too was a virgin and that Jesus' siblings were cousins, a view still held by most Roman Catholics. (Protestants eventually decided that Joseph and Mary did have additional children.) Church fathers debated earnestly over whether Mary and Joseph's union could actually be called a marriage (yes) and whether Joseph could actually be called Jesus' father (a mixed verdict.)
But this was not exactly the exciting makings of mass devotion, and for a long time, says the Rev. Joseph Lienhard, an expert in the early church at New York City's Fordham University, "Joseph was not a popular saint." That's an understatement. His name did not pop up on any Western saints lists until 1000. The Koran, which dates from the 600s, dedicates a chapter to Mary but omits Joseph. According to Sandra Miesel, a Catholic journalist with a specialty in medieval history, a list of 30,000 Florentine men of the officeholding class before 1530 contained precisely one "Giuseppe."
Early Christian art, notes Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, a religious-art specialist affiliated with Washington's Georgetown University, sometimes omitted Joseph from the Nativity. When present, "he's either disinterested or separate, a doddering old man with a bald head or gray beard, a stock character," she says. The Rev. Michael Morris, an expert in art and Catholic theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., says Joseph was occasionally painted sleeping through the event. This may have been a nod to his prophetic dreams, but Morris notes that even among Catholic clergy today, "if someone says he's going to take a St. Joseph's meditation, it jokingly means he's taking a nap."
The Adoring Protector
The earthly fortunes of saints, however, can fluctuate as wildly as tech stocks--depending on the needs of believers. And beginning in the late 1300s, Joseph enjoyed one of the greatest religious rehabilitations in the history of Christianity. The 14th century saw famine, the Hundred Years' War and the Black Death. The church itself was ill, increasingly corrupt and at one point contested by three papal claimants. Families were warped or ripped to shreds, with élites suffering a particular crisis of affection: to avoid having many children who would then divide their estates, noblemen waited until they were quite old before taking young wives and producing much younger sons. "Now," asks Chorpenning of St. Joseph's University, "what does that sound like?"