Christian Pure

How Old Was Joseph When Jesus Was Born? Perhaps 20, Perhaps 80

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  • The Bible never says how old Joseph was when Jesus was born; Matthew and Luke tell us what he did, and give his age nowhere.
  • The picture of an old Joseph comes from the second-century Protoevangelium of James, where he tells the priest, “I have children, and I am an old man, and she is a young girl.”
  • The Orthodox Church keeps that older Joseph in its lives of the saints: a widower with children, about eighty when he was chosen as Mary’s guardian, who died at about a hundred.
  • Jerome gave Joseph no age and held that he stayed a virgin, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church names no age either; as devotion to Joseph spread in Spain after the Catholic Reformation, at least one statue showed him as a young father.
  • If Joseph married at the age a Jewish saying of about AD 200 gives, “At eighteen the bridal canopy”, he may have been in his late teens or early twenties, a few years older than a teenage Mary.
  • The last time we see Joseph is when Jesus is twelve (Luke 2:41-51), and tradition holds that he died before Jesus began to preach at about thirty.

The Bible never tells us how old Joseph was when Jesus was born. Matthew and Luke name him, trace his family to King David and tell us what he did, but neither gives his age. The numbers come later: Orthodox tradition remembers a widower of about eighty, and a Jewish saying on marriage age would make him perhaps twenty. What Matthew gives us instead is a man who gets up in the night. After the angel speaks to him in…

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قائمة المراجع (انقر للعرض)
  • الكتاب المقدس، نسخة الملك جيمس (نطاق عام)، عبر بوابة الكتاب المقدس: Matthew 1:16-25, 2:13-23 and 13:54-56; Mark 6:3; Luke 1:26-27, 2:1-20, 2:41-52 and 3:23; John 6:42 and 19:25-27.
  • The Protoevangelium of James, chapters 8-9, 12 and 17, translated by Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8 (1886), نيو أدفنت.
  • The History of Joseph the Carpenter, chapters 2, 14-15 and 29, translated by Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 8 (1886), نيو أدفنت.
  • Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary (Against Helvidius), about 383, section 21 and the editor’s introduction, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 6 (1893), نيو أدفنت.
  • Mishnah, Pirkei Avot 5:21, سيفاريا; on the Mishnah’s compilation around AD 200, سيفاريا.
  • “Holy Righteous Joseph the Betrothed”, Lives of the Saints, The Orthodox Church in America.
  • “Праведный Иосиф Обручник” (Righteous Joseph the Betrothed), Orthodox calendar, Azbyka.ru.
  • “Icon of the Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ”, Orthodox Church of the Mother of God.
  • Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 500, vatican.va.
  • Charles Souvay, “St. Joseph”, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 8 (1910), نيو أدفنت.
  • George Reid, “Apocrypha”, The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 (1907), نيو أدفنت.
  • José Risueño, St Joseph with the Christ Child, about 1720, catalogue entry, Victoria and Albert Museum.

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