Joseph, husband of Mary

Joseph appears in the infancy narratives of Matthew and Luke as the betrothed and then husband of Mary and the legal father of Jesus, of the house of David. Matthew tells of his dreams and the flight to Egypt; Luke of the journey to Bethlehem and the visit to the Temple when Jesus was twelve. Mark 6:3 calls Jesus a tektōn, builder; Matthew 13:55 gives the word to Joseph.

He is absent from the accounts of Jesus’s public ministry, and most readers infer that he had died by then. The two genealogies that run through him differ, a problem Julius Africanus tried to solve in a letter preserved by Eusebius. Later writings such as the Infancy Gospel of James present him as an elderly widower with children from an earlier marriage.