Word: joseph
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...dynamic clerics thought it sounded enough like Joseph, Mary and Jesus to propose the carpenter as the paternal model for what would eventually be called the nuclear family--and for much, much more. Unlike the writers of the Apocrypha, they did not add to the biblical story, but they concentrated fiercely on the implications of the Egyptian exile and Jesus' unknown life in Nazareth prior to his ministry. Jean Gerson, the chancellor of the University of Paris in the late 1300s, thought a 90-year-old Joseph ridiculous in light of the rigors of travel in Egypt and recalibrated...