Father & Child

But Jenkins may be tapping into two relatively recent trends in the Protestant church, particularly in its Evangelical wing. The first involves his tight focus on the relationship between Joseph and Jesus. The attendance in most U.S. churches skews female, provoking a search for strong masculine Biblical role models and ways to create church-based male bonding, especially between younger men and mentors. Joseph is the original Promise Keeper. Also, Jenkins sees a shift in even conservative Evangelical preaching from stringent exegesis, or analysis of text, to more free-ranging storytelling. "There are guys who can spend an hour just talking about one verse, and that happens to be my favorite form of preaching," he says. "But there is a marketplace of ideas. People now have access to iPods and TV and movies." Christian fiction is booming, and "if you go to a good, big, Evangelical church now, you'll hear a guy weaving a story."

That plays to Joseph's strengths. The more that belief strictly cleaves to "what the Bible says," the less will be heard of him. But the moment the believer imagines himself or herself into the biblical story, Joseph explodes back onto the scene. Scripture plain may not spend a sentence describing the Egyptian sojourn, but anyone reconstructing a narrative of the Bible will recognize it as an episode and Joseph as its hero. The same holds true for those extensive yet ill-chronicled Nazareth years.

You can see the storytelling principle at work in Rice's Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, which is her version of the Holy Family's return from Egypt's Alexandria to Nazareth and a Holy Land rocked with violence following Herod's death. Rice is Catholic, but when she focuses on Joseph, she is writing not hagiography but a modern description of his leadership of a sizable clan and his reluctance to tell the boy Jesus too much of his backstory until he is more mature. "I think he was a resolute man, an unshakable man, but he had no need to make a lot of noise about it," says Rice. "He takes over and does what has to be done, and I think he could definitely be a patron of foster parents." The series' next book, she says, will tell Joseph's death in a set of flashbacks.

The most fruitful road to Joseph seems to be, as the Rev. Edington noted, one combining "good, serious Bible study and some recreative imagination." Edington's own book is not really storytelling. It can be divided into four sermons, one for each of Joseph's angelic dreams. But it is peppered with mildly speculative sections titled "How it must have been," and it speaks humbly but with feeling to the bond in faith--and other things--between a father and son not related by blood. Edington's book ends with a meditation on the power of love to ennoble the lover, especially if the beloved is God--a model of Joseph as believer that would surely pass muster in almost any Christian church. "Joseph took God's son into his home in Nazareth, thus providing Jesus with a normal, loving family environment in which to grow," Edington writes. "Joseph took God's son into his heart, thus discovering a purpose for his own life within the greater purposes of God." Then he addresses his readers: "My prayer is that you will do the same."