Showing posts with label Nativity Scene. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nativity Scene. Show all posts

Sunday, 30 December 2012

The Hidden Man of Christmas : Putting St. Joseph back in the picture.

By James Martin
Illustration by Charlie Powell. Click image to expand.
As far as biblical figures go, St. Joseph—the man who married the mother of Jesus—often gets short shrift: his life isn’t prominently featured in the Gospels, and he’s rarely depicted on Christmas cards. Yet Joseph did fulfill an astonishingly important task: raising the son of God. James Martin explores what we do and don’t know St. Joseph’s identity in a 2008 article reprinted below. 

Christmas cards tend to fall into three categories: the family card (cheerful children in red and green sweaters), the secular card (snowmen, snowflakes, snowy villages), and the religious card. The religious card usually bears a portrait of the Virgin Mary gazing beatifically at the crib of her newborn son, Jesus. Behind her, the picture is just as some of the Gospels describe: shepherds, animals, maybe even the three wise men, though they actually were late on the scene.

But where's St. Joseph? Where is the man to whom, according to the Gospel of Matthew, an angel announced the birth of Jesus? Where is the guy who married Mary even though she was already "with child," the man who helped to raise Jesus, the carpenter who taught Jesus his craft?