Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, is a man we don’t know much about. Many Bible scholars assume that Joseph died during Jesus’ teenage or young adult years (since the last mention of him is during the pilgrimage to Jerusalem when Jesus was twelve. – Lk. 2:41-51)
Though the bible doesn’t tell us a lot about Joseph, what it does provide is the picture of an unusually good man. When Joseph found out his young fiancée Mary was already pregnant, “he decided to break the engagement quietly” because “he was a good man and did not want to disgrace her publicly.”
In a culture that considered engagement the first-stage of marriage, Joseph may well have been within his legal rights to have Mary stoned to death. (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22) At the very least, he would’ve been considered justified in “making an example” of her. To have your fiancée pregnant with another man’s baby would have been terribly humiliating. (Remember, angels told Mary and Joseph of their son’s Divine origins…but no one else. The rest of the community was bound to view Jesus as the illegitimate child of a promiscuous young woman, and Joseph as a poor cuckolded husband.) It was an embarrassment that would—quite literally—last a lifetime!
By far the easiest thing would’ve been for Joseph to cut his losses and walk away. We live in a day when far too many fathers take the easy way…the coward’s way out. We need more Josephs—real men who are willing to swallow their pride and suffer indignity rather than pass it on to innocents.
(If you have time, listen to this song. It's a powerful message about the type of man Joseph was...and the sacrifices he made) It Wasn't His Child
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