(6 of 7)
His look changed. In 1570 Johannes Molanus, the Counter-Reformation's religious-art czar, banned the old, bald Joseph and stipulated a younger model. Artists like Murillo responded, resulting in, as Miesel puts it, "a vigorous, really studly Joseph." His saintly portfolio became extraordinarily diverse. (He now enjoys 24 "patronages.") Jerome's old notion had turned him into the patron of virgins, even as his paternal status made him the patron of families. The apocryphal scene of his death surrounded by Mary and Jesus was translated into his patronage of good deaths. ("When I was a little Catholic girl," recalls Anne Rice, "we used to pray to Joseph for a happy death.") Eventually he was assumed to protect the Universal Church from heaven as he had the Family on earth. In 1955 Pope Pius XII traded on Joseph's identification as a working man, decreeing a second feast day for him on May 1 to compete with communist May Day galas. In 1962 Pope John XXIII inserted Joseph's name in the canon of the Mass, reportedly the first such addition in over 1,300 years.
The Modern-Day Evangel
Yet today, the most creative popular inquirer into Joseph's merits may well be an evangelical Protestant. Jerry Jenkins looks cautious, almost nervous discussing Holding Heaven's boldness. "If we get criticized for Left Behind," he says, "it's, 'Are you adding to Scripture?' And we say, 'We're not adding. We're saying what prophesy would really look like.' You're really on more dangerous territory, though, when you quote an entire chapter and a half of a novella from a guy who's not quoted in Scripture, ever."
Holding Heaven, Jenkins' project with illustrator Ron DiCianni, has only two scenes: one in Egypt as Joseph talks his restless infant to sleep by describing the miracles of his life thus far and another 30 years later at the Nazareth carpenter's deathbed as the old man querulously but determinedly extracts from the adult Jesus the grim story of Christ's future and his good news for humanity.
The book is not high art, but it stirs a pang of recognition in any man who has rocked a sleepless infant or grasped a bedridden father's hand--as well as a tingly intuition of the special nature of those particular players. When the young Joseph muses that "when You settled into my arms it felt as if I were holding heaven," the Christian reader is meant to realize that he actually was.
Protestants have never felt the kind of unease with Joseph that, in a kind of allergic response to Catholicism's elaborate exultation of Mary, inhibited their relationship with the Virgin. On the other hand, he doesn't particularly interest them either. There are exceptions. The neo-orthodox theologian Karl Barth championed Joseph's role of taking care of Jesus. The black church in the U.S., says Robert Franklin, an expert on that topic at Atlanta's Emory University, has long felt a connection between Joseph as patriarch of an unexpectedly blended family and African-American slave history, in which men "found their own wives full with child and at the birth discovered the child was a mulatto." But for the most part, explains David Steinmetz, a religious historian at Duke Divinity School in Durham, N.C., "Joseph plays a very small role in Protestantism, aside from cameo appearances in Advent and on Christmas."