Joseph the Carpenter

When did Joseph die?

Joseph the Carpenter is dated d. before AD 30 (unrecorded; aged 111 by later tradition) in the archive, which places Joseph in the Apostolic Age (AD 4–70).

Which early sources mention Joseph?

Joseph the Carpenter is named in 3 primary-source passages catalogued here, drawn from Matthew and Anonymous. Every passage is quoted from a named public-domain translation, earliest first.

Where was Joseph from?

The archive associates Joseph the Carpenter with Bethlehem, Nazareth (via Egypt). The sources record more than one location, so the places are listed in the order the record moves through them.

Who were Joseph’s contemporaries?

The archive links Joseph the Carpenter to 5 other figures, including Mary, the Mother of Jesus, Herod the Great, Herod Archelaus and Jesus of Nazareth. Each connection is drawn from a source that places them together, not from inference.

Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily. But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife.

Is not this the carpenter’s son? is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas?

2. There was a man whose name was Joseph, sprung from a family of Bethlehem … He was, besides, skilful in his trade, which was that of a carpenter … 4. And Mary found James the Less in his father’s house, broken-hearted and sad on account of the loss of his mother, and she brought him up. **Hence Mary was called the mother of James.** … 8. Therefore he rose and took Mary my mother, and I lay in her bosom. **Salome also was their fellow-traveller.** … 14. He lived forty years unmarried; thereafter his wife remained under his care forty-nine years, and then died. And a year after her death, my mother … was entrusted to him by the priests … 16. **Woe to the day on which I was born into the world! Woe to the womb which bare me!** … Woe to my body; and woe to my miserable soul, which has already turned aside from God its Maker! … 21. And turning my eyes towards the region of the south, I saw **Death already approaching, and all Gehenna with him**, closely attended by his army and his satellites; and their clothes, their faces, and their mouths poured forth flames. … 26. And whosoever shall write the history of your life … **I will burn the book of his sins** … 32. They are Enoch, Elias, Schila, and Tabitha. [Walker’s translation, from the Arabic. The long lament of chapter 16 is the book’s original contribution and its most-copied passage — Joseph curses each part of his body in turn, in the manner of a Coptic funerary lament, and Christ has to drive Death back from the bedside. Two details bear on other figures: the text explains the epithet “Mary of James” from Luke 24:10 by making her the woman who raised Joseph’s orphaned son, and it places Salome on the flight into Egypt. “Schila” at the end should be read **Sibylla** (W. E. Crum).]

Held in this library. English: Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers 8 (1886), from Tischendorf’s Latin of the Arabic — public domain and complete. The Bohairic recension differs; see the text record.

Joseph the aged widower, guardian rather than husband

The picture of Joseph as a man of ninety chosen by lot to guard the ever-virgin Mary derives from fourth-century and later apocrypha — the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, the Nativity of Mary, the History of Joseph the Carpenter — written in support of an ascetic Mariology. Nothing in the canonical Gospels requires it.