I was recently asked by a blog reader about an intriguing but little known apocryphal Gospel called The History of Joseph the Carpenter, an account of Jesus’s (alleged) father “according to the flesh” Joseph told by Jesus himself.  It’s not a widely known account in part because it is preserved only in Arabic and Coptic (no manuscripts in Greek or Latin).  But it is fascinating and worth knowing about.

My colleague Zlatko Plese and I included a fresh translation of it (done by Zlatko) in our book The Other Gospels: Accounts of Jesus from Outside the New Testament (Oxford University Press, 2014).  Here is an explanation of it we give in an Introduction; in the next post I’ll excerpt a part of the translation.  (If you’re interested in such things, check out our book; we include over forty non-canonical Gospels – either entirely preserved or in fragments – from the early centuries of Christianity)

Here is a description of the book:

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Like other infancy gospels, the History of Joseph the Carpenter attempts to fill the narrative gaps in the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke  by shedding more light on the life of and death of “the father of Christ according to flesh.”  Framed as a revelation given by Jesus to his disciples on the Mount of Olives (1, 30-32), this first-person ‘homily’ outlines the central moments in Joseph’s biography: his background (ch. 2), his relationship with Mary (3-4), his role in Jesus’ birth and growing to manhood (chs. 5-14), and his death at the age of hundred and eleven (chs. 15-29).

As indicated by its opening section (“This is the departure from the body of our father Joseph”), the text focuses on the circumstances accompanying Joseph’s death and on Jesus’ miraculous preservation of Joseph’s body, followed by the proclamation of his feast-day.  Besides its clear purpose for Christian liturgy, the text tries to clarify the ambiguous status that Jesus’ adoptive father has in the canonical Gospels.

Here Joseph is straightforwardly portrayed as an old widower with children from his previous marriage; this clarifies the New Testament references to Jesus’ brothers (chs. 2-4).  Joseph’s initial doubts about Mary’s virginity (ch. 5) are immediately countered by his readiness to register Jesus as the legitimate son (ch. 7), and is further explained by human incapacity to understand divine mysteries (ch. 17).  Finally, Jesus’ curious reluctance to promise immortality to Joseph during his lifetime, which created a stir among the apostles (chs. 30-31), is amended by a passionate filial care for the father’s post-mortem fate: at Jesus’ instigation, the soul of Joseph is delivered to heaven (ch. 23) and his body preserved both from corruption (chs. 25-27) and from end-times tribulations (ch. 31).

The History of Joseph the Carpenter is a complex mixture of ancient literary genres.  The “revelatory dialogue” (in which Jesus delivers a revelation, as in other Gospel texts) serves as a narrative frame for two distinct literary units: (i) the biography of Joseph, a kind of Christian midrash on the canonical infancy narratives, which seems heavily indebted to the Proto-Gospel of James, and (ii) the account of Joseph’s death, to which the text itself refers as a “testament”, and which exhibits a number of striking similarities with the Jewish-Hellenistic genre of ‘testament’ literature (e.g. the Testament of Abraham).

The section is also quite similar in form and content to various sixth- and seventh-century Coptic accounts of the passing of the Virgin Mary (the dormition traditions), including the Sermon on the Virgin’s Dormition delivered by Theodosius of Alexandria in 565. In its present form, the History of Joseph the Carpenter is thus a compilation of various traditions concerning Mary and the ‘holy family,’ most likely composed in Byzantine Egypt in the late sixth or early seventh century.  Some earlier scholars proposed Greek as the original language of this composition, but their linguistic arguments, have been rejected by other specialists in favor of a Coptic original.

The text of the History of Joseph the Carpenter is preserved in three different versions: one in Arabic and two in the regional dialects of Coptic—Sahidic and Bohairic, respectively.  The Arabic version, attested by a number of both complete and fragmentary manuscript witnesses dating from the fourteenth century onward, was first published by G. Wallin in 1722 along with his own Latin translation.   In 1808, E. Quatremère reported his discovery of the complete Bohairic version in an eleventh-century manuscript from the Vatican Library, at that time stored in the Royal Library in Paris.  Eventually, Paul de Lagarde produced an authoritative critical edition of the Vatican Bohairic manuscript.  The translation here is of de Lagarde’s edition….

 

Bibliography

Aranda Perez, G. “Joseph the Carpenter,” in: A. S. Atiya, gen. ed., The Coptic Encyclopedia.   New York-Toronto: MacMillan, 1991; vol. 5, pp. 1371-1374.

Lagarde, P. de., ed. Aegyptiaca, Göttingen: Hoyer, 1883, pp. 1-37.

Robinson, F. Coptic Apocryphal Gospels. Texts and Studies 4,2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896; pp. xxvii-xxix, 130-159, and 220-235.