All spoke well of (Jesus) and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" Luke 4:22.

Joseph was the father of probably the most famous man who ever lived, but we know very little about him for certain beyond the sparse references to him in the Gospels. Both Luke and Matthew name him as the ‘father’ of Jesus, while also asserting that the child was born of a virgin.
Even if he wasn’t what we call his ‘biological’ father, it was important to them that he was a distant descendant of the great King David - a necessary qualification for the Messiah. The rather creative genealogy with which Matthew opens his Gospel traces the descent of Jesus from Abraham, by way of David, to the humble carpenter of Nazareth, Joseph, who was ‘espoused’ to a young girl called Mary. It is obvious that Joseph was poor, because he was allowed to offer the poor man’s sacrifice of two pigeons or turtle doves at the presentation of his infant son.

The observation of the crowd, above, is also evidence that no one expected eloquence or wisdom from this man’s son. Jesus was born into a poor family, with a doubtless hard-working artisan as his father. There would surely have been few luxuries in that little home at Nazareth. Matthew begins his birth narrative with the bald statement that Mary was engaged to Joseph, but before they lived together she became pregnant ‘with child from the Holy Spirit’. Joseph was not apparently privy to the divine intervention in her life, and drew the obvious conclusion: it was another man’s child. However, he was not the sort of man who wished to disgrace her publicly, so he resolved to ‘dismiss her quietly’ — end their engagement without fuss, we might say.

However, at that point Joseph had the first of four dreams in which he felt the guidance of God. In this one, he was told by ‘an angel of the Lord’ not to hesitate to take Mary as his wife, because the child conceived in her was ‘from the Holy Spirit’. More than that, the baby was to be named ‘Jesus’ (Yeshua — ‘Joshua’, ‘saviour’) because he will ‘save his people from their sins’.  On waking, Joseph did as he had been instructed and took Mary as his wife. So far as Joseph himself is concerned we can be sure of a few things. In human and legal terms he was the father of Jesus, he was a carpenter and (a conclusion one has to draw from the other references to him in the Gospels) he had died before Jesus began his public ministry. The little we know of him strongly points to a devout, fair and sensitive man, one who shared Mary’s anxiety when the young Jesus went missing in Jerusalem (Luke 2:48) and who presumably taught his son the trade of a carpenter.

Joseph has become an icon of the working man - there are many churches nowadays dedicated to ‘Joseph the Worker’. He can stand in the calendar of saints for the ’ordinary’ man, a straightforward craftsman who never expected or chose to be in the spotlight of history. He did what he could, and he was obedient to everything that he believed God required of him. To do the ‘ordinary’ thing well, to be kind, caring and open to guidance: these are great gifts, and Joseph seems to have had them in abundance.
Canon David Winter is a former Dicoesan Adviser on Evangelism, former BBC head of religious affairs, a broadcaster and author of many books.