Chapter 1

THE MANY FATHERS OF JESUS CHRIST

In the N-Town plays, a suspicious Joseph returns home to find his wife, Mary, pregnant, and he knows full well that he cannot be the father of her child. When he asks her, “Whose childe is this?” (12.47), she answers with a long list of possible candidates: Joseph himself, the Holy Trinity, and the archangel Gabriel. Variations on this episode, which have been titled by modern editors “Joseph’s Doubt,” “Joseph’s Jealously,” or “Joseph’s Troubles about Mary,” expand on three lines from the Gospel of Matthew (1:18–20)—though in the Bible, Joseph never gives voice to his suspicions.1,2 Early English drama throws off any such discretion and has Joseph speak “open words, contrary to scriptures,” as the early modern reformer Christopher Goodman complained.3 Indeed, N-Town’s Joseph accuses Mary in no uncertain terms of sinning with “sum other man” (12.28) or “sum boy” (12.75). “Joseph’s Doubt” draws on a long tradition within Christianity of doubts and accusations about the identity of Jesus’s father. The N-Town manuscript in particular compiles these long-simmering insinuations into an extended running joke, accumulating more and more paternal candidates for the farcically promiscuous virgin birth.

Joseph, God’s Cuckold

According to the parsimonious principle of Ockham’s razor, the simplest explanation is often the best. In the case of the virgin birth, that principle would seem to point directly to Joseph. When Mary is found to be pregnant, she and Joseph are betrothed and cohabitating: therefore, Joseph’s paternity would seem to be the most obvious explanation. N-Town stages this knee-jerk first response: when the news of Mary’s pregnancy begins to spread, the neighborhood immediately suspects Joseph.4
Apparently responding to the same suspicion, the Gospel of Matthew narrates the virgin birth as a sustained denial of Joseph’s paternity. The argumentative thesis of verses 1:18 to 1:25 is that Joseph is most decidedly not Jesus’s father.5 The passage opens and shuts with clear-cut insistence on Joseph’s noninvolvement: he had not consummated his marriage when Mary conceived; therefore, he could not be the father of her child. Later apocryphal emendations clarify that Joseph was not even present when Mary conceived but rather far, far away on a prolonged business trip.6 The vehemence of this denial suggests the urgency of the suspicion to which it responds. Joseph poses a significant threat to the doctrine of the virgin birth. He provokes suspicion. Indeed, several early heretical sects (the Ebionites and, later, the School of Antioch, most importantly Nestorius and Diodorus of Tarsus) believed that Jesus was not the Son of God but rather the son of Joseph—biological rather than adoptive.7
And yet Joseph also keeps up appearances. As Thomas Aquinas himself pointed out, Joseph’s legitimizing presence in the narrative of the virgin birth prevents every pregnant and unmarried Christian girl from claiming the Virgin as the exemplar and excuse for her dishonor.8 In other words, Joseph offers Christianity some, if meager, protection from the virgin birth’s enormous potential for scandal.
As Christianity flourished, so did Mary’s purity. A standard of chastity acceptable in one century became insulting by the next. Following this pattern, the Gospel of Matthew’s denial of Joseph’s paternity, which had at first functioned as a defense of Mary’s virginity, soon became cause for further denial. The problem: verse 1:25 of Matthew defends the virgin birth by specifying that Mary and Joseph did not consummate their marriage until after the birth of Jesus. This foundational claim defended but also limited the doctrine of Mary’s virginity. Adding to the problem, all four Gospels refer repeatedly and casually to Jesus’s siblings, the abundant fruit of the consummated marriage of Mary and Joseph.9 Thus, Tertullian praises Mary for honoring Jesus with all of the “sacred titles”: “mother and virgin and monogamous wife” (matrem et virginem et univiram).10
Quickly enough, however, Christianity’s chaste ambitions outgrew these limitations. As early as the second century, the Church began to demand more and better virginity from and for the Virgin: perpetua (eternal) rather than limited until the birth of Jesus. The Parthenos was well on her way to becoming the Aeiparthenos, the Ever-Virgin. The second-century Gospel of James attempted to support this cause by adding an apocryphal backstory to the Nativity.11 This Gospel introduces Joseph to Mary as an old widower with children from a previous marriage, indisposed toward consummating his second, very late-in-life marriage.12 In fact, Joseph flat-out refuses to accept Mary’s hand, protesting, “I have sons and am an old man; she is but a child. I do not want to become the laughingstock of Israel.”13 Only by threatening that the Lord might split open the earth and swallow him whole does the officiating priest change Joseph’s mind. Thanks to these apocryphal emendations, Joseph went from being a disturbingly virile young man to being a reassuringly grouchy and elderly—and, by implication, impotent—widower.14
The pattern repeats. This fortification of Mary’s virginity, like its predecessors, soon began to undermine itself. Although the apocryphal Gospel of James attempted to protect Mary’s chastity by making Joseph old and impotent, Jerome found its best efforts deeply inadequate. Jerome saw that a doctrine as monumental as Mary’s perpetual virginity could not be founded on the shifting sands of apocrypha; this fortress had to be deeply rooted in the self-evident truth of the canonical Gospels. The naked text, however, posed the very problem that the apocrypha had sought to correct in the first place. Therefore, Jerome came up with an ingenious interpretive solution: he retranslated (or rather, as he would have it, corrected the previous mistranslation of) the truth. Jerome argued that the Greek word for until in verse 1:25 of Matthew (Joseph “knew [Mary] not until she brought forth her first-born son”) did not necessarily mean that “after the time indicated something had changed”—and that the word brothers (as in Jesus’s brothers) did not necessarily mean biological siblings.15 Thus, Jesus’s brothers became his cousins and Mary’s limited virginity became potentially limitless.
Problem almost solved. Jerome was also troubled by the apocryphal Gospels’ depiction of Joseph as a once-fertile patriarch rendered celibate by physical decrepitude. He wanted much better security for Mary’s virginity than Joseph’s impotence. Old age, while taking away the means, does nothing about the will. Jerome understood that bridling Joseph’s sexuality by rendering him decrepit and impotent has the unintended effect of magnifying the underlying insinuation of that bridling’s necessity. Therefore, he internalized Joseph’s chastity. Rejecting the legend of Joseph’s first marriage, Jerome insisted that Joseph, like Mary, obeyed a pristine vow of lifelong virginity. He argued that “holy men” do not “fornicate”; therefore, a man as holy as Joseph must never have fornicated—an aggressive choice of words, considering that Joseph stood accused only of lawful marital intercourse.16 Jerome concluded that Joseph must have kept his virginity perfectly intact, just like Mary: self-motivated and self-policing. He rewrote the marriage of Mary and Joseph as an ever-unconsummated syneisaktism, a spiritual or white marriage, between two like-minded virgins.17
Jerome would be pleased with the version of Saint Joseph venerated in contemporary Catholicism, as well as Christianity more broadly. Today, Joseph tends to be represented as a young, fair, blandly handsome man, situated in the center of the frame and set off by a golden halo. He cuddles with the baby Jesus, chaste lilies in hand; when Jesus grows older, father and son bond over carpentry. Modern iconography depicts the Holy Family as a nuclear family: Joseph takes care of Mary and Jesus, who revere his paternal authority. As the patriarch of the Holy Family, Joseph is respectable and respected. In 1870, Pope Pius IX officially declared Joseph the patron saint of the Universal Church—the father figure of Catholicism itself; in 1955, Pope Pius XII promulgated the feast of Joseph the (Anti-Communist) Worker—the Holy Family’s (and Catholicism’s) breadwinner.18 Joseph no longer disturbs but rather upholds the chaste decorum of the Holy Family. It is all so very solemn and polite.
This triumph of decorum was not easily achieved. It took centuries to accomplish, largely because of the problem posed by the raucous late medieval period. During the late Middle Ages, Jerome’s corrections circulated in tandem with the very problems that they sought to resolve. Both versions of Joseph got around: the apocryphal Gospels’ old grouch and Jerome’s chaste saint. Artists representing sacred scenes like the visit of the magi or the flight into Egypt could pick and choose from this composite tradition which qualities their Joseph would express. Early English biblical drama, for example, mixes and matches, representing Joseph as a wizened old man (following the apocryphal Gospels) and as a virgin (following Jerome).
In fact, contrary to Jerome’s wishes, most late medieval artists, across many media, chose to make their Josephs elderly. Altarpieces, triptychs, alabasters, tapestries, stained-glass windows, misericords, and murals represent Joseph as a decrepit, and often fat, old man. Instead of a halo, he wears a pileum cornutum, a hat that marks him as Jewish.19 Instead of the classical drapery appropriate to sainthood, he wears rags that mark him as Mary’s social inferior—her servant, even.20 His decrepitude provides comic relief in the midst of sacred scenes. Located in the margins of the frame, Joseph dozes off during the Nativity, huffs and puffs on the flight into Egypt, and eats his porridge sullenly in the corner—his back turned to Mary and Jesus, excluded (and apparently miffed) by their sacred embrace.21 Despite Jerome’s best efforts, the late medieval version of Joseph was no saint, at least not in the modern sense of the term.22 He was, instead, a kind of sacred fool—emphasis on fool.23
What was it about old Joseph that struck medieval artists as being so funny? Joseph’s role in the divine comedy of the virgin birth is inherently amusing—even (if not especially) in the context of the canonical Gospels themselves. The jokes write themselves. Joseph discovers that his bride is pregnant, and knows that he is not the father; he tries to extricate himself from this knot yet cannot escape—because God has m...