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

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 a dream, “Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife” (Matthew 1:24). When Herod hunts the child, the angel comes again, and “he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt” (Matthew 2:14). The Gospel does not say whether the man who rose that night was twenty or eighty. It says that he rose.

Where do the ages people give for Joseph come from?

Each age has a source, and none of them is the Bible. Set side by side, oldest first, they also show what each makes of the “brethren” of Jesus, because the two questions have travelled together since the oldest of these books.

What do Matthew and Luke tell us about Joseph?

Luke introduces him as the man Mary was promised to: “a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David” (Luke 1:27). Matthew calls him “a just man” (Matthew 1:19), one who meant to spare Mary shame before the angel told him the child was of the Holy Ghost. He took her to Bethlehem “being great with child” (Luke 2:5), carried mother and son into Egypt and brought them home to Nazareth. Years later the neighbours knew him by his work: “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Matthew 13:55).

Luke is careful with ages when he has them. He tells us Jesus was “twelve years old” at the Passover (Luke 2:42), and that he “began to be about thirty years of age” when his ministry began (Luke 3:23). He never gives Joseph’s. If you want a number for Joseph, you have to leave the Gospels to find it.

Why is Joseph so often shown as an old man?

The picture begins with a book called the Protoevangelium of James. It is not in any Bible, but Origen knew it, and scholars place it in the second century. It tells how Mary lived in the Temple until she was twelve, and how the high priest, told by an angel, called the widowers of Israel to bring their rods. A dove flew out of Joseph’s rod and settled on his head, and the priest told him, “You have been chosen by lot to take into your keeping the virgin of the Lord.” Joseph tried to refuse: “I have children, and I am an old man, and she is a young girl. I am afraid lest I become a laughing-stock to the sons of Israel.”

The book gives no number. It gives an old man with grown sons, and later, on the road to Bethlehem, Joseph says, “I shall enrol my sons.” Later writers sought in stories like this the answer to Matthew 13:55, where Jesus’ “brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas” are named. Read this way, they are Joseph’s children by a first wife, older than Jesus, and Mary remains a virgin.

A later legend, the History of Joseph the Carpenter, put figures on it. Joseph “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, the blessed Mary, was entrusted to him.” That makes him about ninety when Mary came into his house, and the same book has him die at a hundred and eleven. George Reid, writing on the apocrypha in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, said the story “seems to date from about the fourth century”, and Charles Souvay, in the same encyclopedia’s article on Saint Joseph three years later, judged those ages “most unlikely”.

What does the Orthodox Church hold about Joseph’s age?

The Orthodox Church keeps the older Joseph in its lives of the saints, and it keeps him with honour. He is commemorated on the Sunday after the Nativity as Righteous Joseph the Betrothed. The Orthodox Church in America tells his life this way: he had four sons and three daughters by an earlier marriage, and after he became a widower “Saint Joseph led a life of strict temperance. He was chosen to be the husband and guardian of the Most Holy Theotokos, who had taken a vow of virginity.” The life read in the Russian Orthodox calendar gives a number: Joseph was eighty years old when the high priests chose him as the guardian of the Virgin’s purity. Both say he died at about a hundred.

For the Orthodox, his age belongs with his calling. An old man who has buried a wife and raised a family takes a young girl into his care as a guardian, and the children called Jesus’ brothers are his own. You can see this Joseph in the icon of the Nativity, sitting apart at the bottom of the picture while Mary lies at the centre. One Orthodox parish explains that he sits there because “he was not involved in the miracle of the Incarnation of the Son of God, but he was the protector of Mary and Jesus.” A figure speaks to him, bringing doubts, and Mary turns her face toward him. The icon does not hide that a just man found this hard to believe.

What did Jerome and the Western Church hold?

In Rome, around 383, Jerome wrote against a man named Helvidius, who argued that the brothers of Jesus were Mary’s later children. Jerome gave Joseph no age at all. He would not accept an earlier marriage either, because “it is nowhere written that he had another wife.” He went further: “I claim still more, that Joseph himself on account of Mary was a virgin, so that from a virgin wedlock a virgin son was born.” For Jerome the brethren were cousins.

Much of the Western Church followed Jerome. In the Catholic reading, James and Joseph, called the brothers of Jesus, “are the sons of another Mary, a disciple of Christ,” and so “close relations of Jesus, according to an Old Testament expression” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 500). Nothing in that reading needs Joseph to be old, and the Catechism gives him no age. Souvay went further and called the old Joseph a belief held “contrary to all probability”. As devotion to Joseph spread in Spain after the Catholic Reformation, artists there often set him alone with the Christ Child. In one terracotta of about 1720, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, he kneels with the infant in his arms, “shown as a relatively young father”.

A third reading takes the brothers as children Mary and Joseph had after Jesus. Helvidius argued it in the fourth century, and many Protestants hold it today. They point to Matthew’s words that Joseph “knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son” (Matthew 1:25), and to the neighbours in Nazareth who asked, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, and Joses, and of Juda, and Simon? and are not his sisters here with us?” (Mark 6:3). On that reading Joseph need not have been old at all, and the brothers and sisters of Jesus were his own children with Mary. So each church’s picture of Joseph follows from how it reads those brothers.

How old would Joseph have been if he married at the usual age?

Jewish teaching gives a guide. A saying in the Mishnah, the collection of Jewish teaching compiled around AD 200, lays out the seasons of a man’s life: “At thirteen subject to the commandments; At fifteen the study of Talmud; At eighteen the bridal canopy; At twenty for pursuit [of livelihood]” (Avot 5:21). If Joseph married as that saying expects, he was in his late teens or early twenties when Mary came to him, and not much older when Jesus was born.

That is only a guess from custom. The saying describes an ideal, and it was written down nearly two centuries after Joseph. A man might marry later, or marry again after losing a wife. And the Gospels never tell us whether Joseph had been married before. What the saying does show is that a bridegroom of eighteen or twenty would have surprised no one in Nazareth. The Joseph of the Western statues is as possible as the Joseph of the Eastern icons.

Was Joseph older than Mary?

Probably, though by how much depends on which picture you follow. Mary was probably in her teens; the Protoevangelium says she was twelve when Joseph took her into his care and sixteen when she conceived, and the likely range for Mary’s age when Jesus was born runs from about thirteen to sixteen. If Joseph married at the age the Mishnah names, he was a few years older than she was. In the Orthodox account, where he was eighty when chosen, he was more than sixty years older.

When did Joseph die, and how old was Jesus?

The last time we see Joseph is in Jerusalem, when Jesus is twelve. The boy stays behind in the Temple, and after three days of searching Mary speaks for them both: “Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and I have sought thee sorrowing” (Luke 2:48). Then the family goes home, and Luke adds that Jesus “went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them” (Luke 2:51).

After that, Joseph is gone from the story. In the years of Jesus’ preaching his mother and brothers appear, but Joseph never does, though people still call Jesus “the carpenter’s son”. At the cross Jesus gives his mother into the care of the disciple he loved: “Behold thy mother! And from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home” (John 19:27). Christians have long read this as a sign that Joseph had died, since otherwise Mary would have had a husband’s home to go to.

Tradition puts his death before Jesus began to preach. The History of Joseph the Carpenter has him die at a hundred and eleven, which would make Jesus about eighteen or nineteen; the Orthodox lives say about a hundred, which would make him about twenty. Those numbers rest on the legends’ own ages. The Gospels let us say only that Joseph was alive when Jesus was twelve and, it seems, gone by the crucifixion. Jesus began to preach at about thirty and died a few years later.

So the years are lost, and the nights remain. Three times an angel spoke to Joseph in his sleep, and three times he got up and did what he was told. We do not know whether his hands were young or old when they lifted the child. We know that the Son of God was carried in them, and that he grew up in Joseph’s house and was subject to him. “And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel” (Matthew 2:21).

Related reading

• How many Josephs are in the Bible, and the one who never speaks
• How old was Mary when Jesus was born and crucified?
• Did Jesus have siblings?
• When was Jesus born?
• How old was Jesus when the wise men came?