Joseph, the name of four persons in Scripture. (1) JOSEPH, the elder of the two sons of Jacob by Rachel, and his father's favourite among all his sons. His envious brothers sold him into Egypt, where, after he had endured imprisonment in consequence of the calumnious charges of the wife of his master Potiphar, his conduct and skill in the interpretation of dreams brought him the especial favour of Pharaoh and the first place in the kingdom. His prudent foresight enabled him to stave off famine by measures which enormously enhanced the power of the throne, and soon he had the gratification to find his brothers at his feet, driven down into Egypt for lack of bread. The story is told in full detail in Genesis, how at last he made himself known to his trembling brothers, and sent to Canaan for his aged father and the whole family, placing them after their arrival in the land of Goshen. Joseph died at length full of years and honours, and when the Israelites left Egypt they carried with them his bones to be buried in Shechem in the inheritance of his son Ephraim.
(2) JOSEPH, the husband of the Virgin Mary, and reputed father of Jesus, a carpenter at Nazareth. The earliest genealogy of Jesus makes Joseph a descendant of David, and would seem to favour the natural birth of Jesus from parents both of royal line; but the notion of the miraculous conception is found in both Matthew and Luke, and was early accepted as a part of Christian belief. Later days developed the idea of the perpetual virginity of Mary, and made Joseph into her protector and merely nominal husband, giving him eighty years and a grown-up family of sons by a former wife at the time of his formal espousal of Mary. These stories first occur in the apocryphal gospels, earliest of which is apparently the Prot-evangelium of James, a 2d-century production quoted by Origen, and mentioned by Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr. The apocryphal Historia Josephi fabri lignarii, which now exists in Arabic, is thought by Tischendorf to have been originally written in Coptic. Joseph appears last in the gospel history when Jesus is twelve years old (Luke, ii. 43); he is never mentioned during his ministry, and may be assumed to have been already dead. The controversy about the 'brethren of the Lord' has engaged the attention of many writers from the time of St Jerome to the present day. The main facts related of them in Scripture itself are their unbelief during the lifetime of the Lord, their distinctness from the Twelve (Acts, i. 13; 1 Cor. ix. 5), and their connection with Joseph and Mary. The two opinions that prevailed until the time of St Jerome about the close of the 4th century were (1) that they were sons of Joseph by a former wife, as held by most orthodox Christians, and by such Fathers as Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, Epiphanius, Ambrose, and the later Greek writers; (2) that they were sons of both Joseph and Mary, as maintained by Tertullian, Helvidius, Bonosus, and the heretical Arabian sect of the Antidicomarianites, and Alford and Farrar among modern scholars. St Jerome about the year 383 wrote a treatise in answer to Helvidius, maintaining that they were cousins after the flesh, being sons of Mary, the wife of Alphaeus (identical with Clopas) and sister of the Virgin. In this opinion Jerome was followed by Pelagius, Augustine, Theodoret, and later Latin writers. But as Bishop Lightfoot points out in the Dissertation, 'The Brethren of the Lord,' appended to his Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians (1865), Jerome claims no traditional support for his theory, and does not himself hold it staunchly and consistently. The strongest objection against the Helvidian theory is that Jesus on the cross commended his mother to the keeping of St John (John, xix. 26, 27); against the Hieronymian, that it gives a special sense to 'brethren' unsupported by biblical usage, and that it supposes two if not three of the unbelieving 'Lord's brethren' to be in the number of the Twelve. Lightfoot favours the Epiphanian as traversing less serious scriptural difficulties, and more in accordance with Christian tradition.
(3) JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA, a rich Israelite of high character, who seems to have been a member of the Great Council or Sanhedrim. He opposed the determination of his colleagues to bring about the death of Jesus, but did not openly profess himself a disciple from motives of fear. But the courage of his convictions came to him at the moment of the crucifixion, and on the evening of that day he went boldly to Pilate and begged the body of Jesus, burying it reverently in his own rock-hewn tomb. An ancient tradition makes him carry the Grail (q.v.) to Britain about the year 63 and settle at Glastonbury (q.v.).
(4) JOSEPH, called Barsabas and surnamed Justus, one of the two persons chosen as worthy to fill the vacant place of Judas among the Twelve (Acts, i. 23). Papias relates a tradition that he had been miraculously preserved by the Lord from the fatal effects of a cup of poison he had drunk.