James Hilston, Post-Gazette Click illustration for larger version.

Jesus has Broadway musicals and epic Charlton Heston movies written about him, and Mary gets lots of churches and universities named after her. But what about Joseph, adoptive father of Jesus, the forgotten man in the earthly trinity? Joseph's appearance in the New Testament was practically a cameo walk-on: His death was never recorded, his age was never certain, and John's gospel barely mentions him. Our knowledge of the carpenter father is so limited that we are not certain whether he even attended the birth of Jesus or, as some artists have imagined it, whether he napped through the whole event.

This month, David Van Biema of Time magazine offers four portraits of Joseph, all of which, at various points in Christianity's history, served as the dominant character study. First is the "chaste caretaker" role: Joseph is an old man, possibly in his 90s, an image derived partly from the apocrypha known as the Protevangelium of James. Joseph, in this book, is chosen to care for a much younger Mary, who was evicted from a temple at age 12. Joseph has also been portrayed as an "alienated cuckold" who napped through Jesus' birth; an "adoring protector," perhaps in his 30s when Jesus was born, who serves as the paternal model in today's nuclear family; and the "modern-day evangel," Joseph's most recent metamorphosis as a "lunch-pail hero" and role model for fathers everywhere.

-- earlychristianwritings.com

Modern novelists are filling the void created by the gospel writers. Anne Rice's "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," is a best-seller, and Joseph also plays a starring role in "Holding Heaven," a short book by Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the apocalyptic Left Behind Series. Mrs. Rice's novel is about the holy family's flight from Bethlehem after Jesus is threatened by King Herod. "Holding Heaven" is Mr. Jenkins's dramatization of what it must have been like for Joseph to hold an infant Jesus in his hands for the first time, says Time.

Anne Rice, in an interview with The Washington Times, says she's given up vampire novels for good. "I want totally to put any talent I have at [God's] service," Mrs. Rice said. "I simply told God that I wouldn't write anything anymore that wasn't his life, that wasn't for him." The Times says she departed from Catholicism in her late teen years, swept up in the writings of the Beat Generation and "captivated by existentialism." In the late 1990s, she says, she returned to the church. Meanwhile, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that Mrs. Rice hopes to write at least two more novels about Jesus and his early years.

... And they're not all good for Mrs. Rice. A Hartford Courant reviewer asks "why does this stately, reverent, exhaustively researched depiction of Jesus in early childhood unfold like a comic superhero origin story? The kind in which Clark Kent discovers that his parents are not from around here, and he's not like everybody else? The kind in which the Kent family conceals the child's real parentage from him for his protection and theirs?" A Washington Post reviewer has this to say: "Rice has sucked the life out of the greatest story ever told."

In August 1989, his 11th year as pope, John Paul II published "Redemptoris Custos," an essay about Joseph and the modern Catholic church's understanding of fatherhood. "Aware of the significant cultural changes in societies around the world and against the backdrop of the assault on family life, the pope holds up St. Joseph as an example for our age," writes Bishop Donald Wuerl, head of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. In "Redemptoris," Pope John Paul II wrote that Joseph was a "guardian of the mystery of God," and the head of the original domestic church, in which "every Christian family must be reflected." The pope also chimed in on Gospel writers' slight treatment of Joseph, and the fact that his voice is never shared with readers: "The silence of Joseph has its own special eloquence, for thanks to that silence we can understand the truth of the Gospel's judgment that he was a just man."

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In the Roman Catholic church, there are nearly 75 saints named Joseph -- to distinguish between the original and the rest, the church refers to Jesus' adoptive father as "Joseph the Betrothed."

Seems that Pope John XXIII, who reigned from 1958 until his death in 1963, agreed that Joseph has been getting short shrift all these years. Pope John XXIII was known as "the Pope of St. Joseph," and viewed Joseph as "the most hidden of all the saints," a problem he aimed to rectify. In 1961, he wrote an apostolic letter on devotion to St. Joseph: "kind and gentle, St. Joseph [is] a figure so dear to the minds and hearts of those who are most responsive to the appeal of Christian asceticism and to forms of religious devotion which are quiet and unobtrusive -- and all the sweeter and more pleasing for being so." This week, the current Pope Benedict XVI offered a Sunday homily on Joseph, contrasting his silence in the New Testament against the mad bustle of the Christmas season: "Let's allow ourselves to be infected by the silence of St. Joseph," he said. "It is so lacking in this world which is often too noisy, which is not favorable to recollection and listening to the voice of God."

-- www.catholicculture.org