SJ2 – Joseph and His King – St. Joseph and His World with Mike Aquilina – Discerning Hearts Podcast

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ThecerningHearts.com presents St. Joseph and his world with Mike Aqualina.

Mike Aqualina is a popular author working in the area of church history, specializing

in petristics, the study of the early church fathers.

He is the executive vice president and trustee of the same Paul Center for Biblical Theology,

a Roman Catholic research center based in Stephenville, Ohio.

He is a contributing editor of Angela's magazine and a general editor of the Reclaiming

Catholic History series from Ave Maria Press.

He is the author or editor of more than 50 books, including St. Joseph and his world, the

book on which this series is based.

He has hosted 11 television series on the Eternal Word Television Network and is a frequent

guest commentator on Catholic radio.

St. Joseph and his world with Mike Aqualina, I'm your host, Chris McGregor.

Welcome back, Mike.

Hey, thanks for having me back, Chris.

OK, when we last left the people of God, especially those who now have returned to the land

that have been promised to them, the Galilee, we now find ourselves in familiar territory

don't we?

We do.

We do.

You know, it's the territory that we know from the Gospels because this is the land where

Joseph was born and grew up and this is the land where Jesus spent so much of his will

spent all of his young years and returned to often during his ministry.

The first chapter of the book, St. Joseph in this world, that final paragraph is going

to kick us off here.

It's said that later in that century, one of the families in Nazareth, a family of

artisans, gave birth to a boy and his name was Joseph.

His name, like the name of his birthplace, reflected the hope of his people, Joseph

and Hebrew means God will increase.

And that's what's happening, not only for a man named Joseph, but we see that happening

with the people of God in this moment.

We do.

We do.

This is an important moment, although it mustn't have appeared that way to them.

I mean, if this is just another birth and just another town and it's a quiet sleepy

place, population 100 in the middle of nowhere, far away from what everyone would consider

the real action of the time, the cultural centers like Jerusalem.

This is just a sleepy little place where life was quietly lived from day to day.

In the land, the whole part of Israel, there is, can we say, factions or different groups

that we need to be aware of, helping the people not only grow in their face, but also

function in society.

There's a scholar, Bargol Picksner, who refers to it as normative pluralism, that there

were many different ways of talking about how to live in faithfulness to the law.

And at that time, in the Holy Land, there was really a lot of religious ferment going

on, you know, in that first century BC, the two great teachers of Judaism, Hillel and

Shamai, both were alive during that time.

There were different groups who had different approaches to the law.

There were the Sadducees, who were a priestly class, aristocratic.

They tended to be part of the ruling class.

They focused on the ritual worship of the temple.

They were intensely concerned with that.

The Pharisees were a lay movement concentrated on exact observance of the law, to know what

the law required, and to be very just meticulous about its observance, so that you did not

risk fending God in any way.

You know, there were traditions at the time that said, if all of Israel could live faithfully

by the law for just one day, the Messiah would come.

So yes, they wanted to promote the exact observance of the law, the Pharisees.

And then there were the Essens, who were a separatist movement.

They didn't believe that the priesthood in Jerusalem was legitimate in that time, especially

the high priesthood, because the Maccabee rulers who had revolted against the Syrian

Greeks had kind of tinkered with it.

They had established priests and high priests, and then yanked them out of office, and done

a lot of things that played fast and loose with the rules.

So they kind of separated themselves.

They kept to what they considered the old ways, the old calendar, the old observances,

but they also had the respect of a lot of people because of their ascetical practices.

They had quite a following.

It's from this set that we probably got the Dead Sea Scrolls.

They're the likely ones who produced the Dead Sea Scrolls.

There was an Essene community in the Dead Sea near the region where these were found.

Some scholars believe that the Essens had an outsized influence in Nazareth in the first

century BC, farming that was done in Nazareth at that time.

Archaeologists tell us was done according to Essene regulations, according to Essene

standards.

So the Essens may have had quite an influence on the extended family of Mary and Joseph,

and maybe on their immediate family as well.

I don't want to trivialize the nature of the Sadducees and the Pharisees, but it sure

sounds like that in some ways the Sadducees, again, wealthy and largely materialistic.

If I'm not mistaken, they didn't believe in angels, or even the afterlife.

Right.

And they recognized only the five books of Moses, the Torah, as scripture.

Now careful, I don't want to say they were liberals, but they were the opposite in some

ways of the Pharisees then, because they were very much into the regulations, as you said,

and the customs and the traditions, and very meticulous.

So I don't want to say liberal and conservative or anything like that, but they were maybe

just very opposite each other, weren't they?

Well, they were often in conflict, and that was true during the reign of the Maccabees.

It was true later on during the reign of Herod and Herod's descendants, that they were

often jockeying for position and for influence in the capital city, and with the people as

well, because a ruler has to be concerned with the people.

The people can always rise up as the Maccabees did, overthrow their ruler.

So the Maccabees themselves were intensely aware of this, so was Herod, and they worried

about it.

So the rulers tended to play politics with the various religious groups, and they would rise

and fall according to the whims of the rulers.

So yeah, they had their ups and downs during the lifetime of Joseph, and then afterward

as well.

One of the surprising things that we find in the Gospels is just the strange unanimity

of various factions in bringing down Jesus Christ and their opposition to Him.

It's like they couldn't agree on much, but they could agree that Jesus had to die, and

they were willing to work together to bring about His death.

Yeah, it is fascinating, because it seems as though as we understand politics, there

is so much politic going on.

For many people, even today, in speaking from our experience, at least in the United States,

there was always this idea that the church and state are separated, and you could argue

that maybe that's not the best thing that could be happening at certain points, but what

happens is when the religion and the controlling of the governmental structures kind of collide,

it can be very hazardous, because that politicking can have disastrous effects as it did often

in this particular region.

Well, there was no clear separation in that time between government and religion.

It was seen as just part of this culture.

These were not separate phenomena.

Religion touched upon everything.

The law touched upon everything.

The law prescribed the way a ruler ruled.

There was no way to separate the two.

They were going to be united.

The worst rulers were the ones who tried to manipulate religion for their own end, ends

of power, greed, pride, and so on.

Well, as we get closer to the actual time of Joseph, this land, this area that had been

built up, but then began to really begin to have the disastrous effects of so many different

rulers, their corruption really started a big place.

Yes, the Maccabees were great warriors, but they were not great rulers.

This often happens that warriors know how to make war.

They know how to fight, and they're good at it.

Then they take office, and what do they do?

They keep making war, but now they make war with one another.

The Maccabees were always plotting and scheming against one another, one member of the family

trying to rest control from another member of the family.

This happened over the course of a century.

They did manage to do some things well.

They made a strategic alliance with Rome, which was just beginning to be a world power

at that time, this rising power from the West.

That ended up becoming a great economic boon to the Holy Land, because the Romans gained

so much from it, because they could use the Holy Land as kind of a road to get to the

East.

So it was important for trade, it was for important for troop movement, it was important

for so many reasons.

So the Romans got a lot out of this alliance.

The Romans did grow increasingly frustrated with the Maccabees, though, because the Maccabees,

plots and schemes tended to destabilize the region and leave the Roman alliances vulnerable

to incursions from the East, from Persia.

So yeah, there was some degree of stability.

The Romans certainly thought it could be better, and eventually they kind of came in with

a strong arm and established rule in the Holy Land the way they wanted it done.

Yeah, it's kind of interesting to understand it in some ways, why they would bring forces

in, because originally, as you said, it's just a trade route for them compared to everything

else they have going on, the Romans.

And yet, if you cut off that trade route, you cut off commerce, and they need that to

be able to keep going, it would be like if I'm for the odd reason, I'm thinking of the

Panama Canal.

I mean, the United States, we did that so that the East could easily connect through shipping

and everything trade so they could not only deal with the West Coast, but other parts

of the world more quickly.

And if there's destabilization in that particular passage, then it halts everything up

and brings you to attention as a nation.

Exactly.

And that's kind of what was happening there, right?

Yes, the stakes were very high.

And so the Romans eventually decided they were going to take matters into their own hands,

and they installed a ruler in Jerusalem that they thought they could rely on.

And he was an extraordinary young man.

He wasn't a Jew.

That was something of a problem, but he was willing to act like one.

He was an Edamite, his mother may have been Jewish.

In any event, he made a great show of conversion as an adult to Judaism, and he observed the

law with a great public show.

He tried to establish himself as the ruler that the Jews would want in Jerusalem.

And he gave himself to certain projects that he knew would be dear to their hearts.

He stopped banditry on the roads, on the highways, so that you could travel safely.

Commerce could happen more easily for the locals.

So he did these wonderful things.

He did rule with a strong arm, this man, this Herod the Great, and he manifested his rule

in some conspicuous ways.

I would say the two things he did to show his might were build buildings.

Herod was a master architect.

He had just great aesthetic sense, and he built grand projects in order to show off really,

in order to strike his people with awe so that they would be terrified of him.

The other thing he did was murder.

He was famous for his massacres, for his public executions, so that he could instill terror

in his people, and they would be afraid to plot against him.

Herod was a genius of diplomacy, and he was one of these great world figures in his time.

He had diplomatic relations with Cleopatra, with Mark Antony, with Caesar Augustus, all

of the great figures of his moment in history.

So Herod really did earn his title, Herod the Great, and he was called by that title during

his own time.

People recognized his greatness, even though they also feared him and loathed him as a

despot, because he was so murderous.

Yeah, I mean, this is a guy who had a crowd around him that really covered up as you

are bringing forward a suicidal type of depression, maybe bipolar or manic, or maybe even

worse.

Yes, he, you know, he obviously suffered from some mental illnesses.

They may have had organic causes.

They may have, you know, been the result of demonic activity as we find the life of King

Saul, certainly Satan has a great interest in the lives of rulers, because they can

affect the lives of so many others.

We'll return to St. Joseph and his world with Mike Aqualina in just a moment.

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We now return to St. Joseph and his world with Mike Aqualina.

Herod's life took some strange turns.

He would go into these bouts of depression, as you said, he would become suicidal.

And sometimes during these fits that he had, he would do things that he would later regret.

He was famous for murder.

He murdered several of his sons.

He murdered his favorite wife.

He murdered so many family members and so many people who were close to him.

And this doesn't lead to good mental health either.

So yes, Herod was a tormented man.

And yet he was a genius and his genius is manifest in so many of his building projects,

not only in the Holy Land, but also throughout the Mediterranean.

He's also known for kind of the audacity of his massacres that he was willing to murder

people who were so beloved in his homeland and he was willing to murder people in great

numbers at times.

There was a time when he got it into his head that he wanted to be the Messiah that was

expected.

He wanted to establish himself as the Messiah, lay claim to the title.

So he started minting coins with Messianic symbols, like the star on them.

Again, as I said, he rebuilt the temple on a grander scale than Solomon had built it

originally.

So he wanted to lay claim to this title, to this office.

And he consulted with the priests of the Jerusalem temple according to one account.

And the priests had the conversation over, you know, whether Herod might be the Messiah

and they decided that he probably wasn't because he was a foreigner.

And the law had said the chosen people should not be ruled by foreigner.

Well Herod didn't like that.

He found out who were the advocates of that position, the priest who had brought it forward

in the discussion.

And then he had them massacred.

This is Herod.

This is the ruler who's trying to lay claim the title and the office of Messiah.

And you know, some people believed him.

We find this group called the Herodians that they appear in the pages of the New Testament.

And even hundreds of years later, Saint Jerome and Saint Epiphanius testify to the endurance

of the Herodians as a sect of Jews who expected the Messiah to come from the lineage of Herod.

Very strange idea, but Herod tried to assert it and there were people willing to believe

it because he was so powerful and because he had done such amazing things, he had raised

up the apparent dignity of his people.

He had, you know, reconquered the lands and established a unified rule over the people

there.

And he brought about a renewed observance of the law and renewed worship in the temple.

So he had certain trappings of the Messianic office.

And he was ruling, it seems at the time when the Messiah was supposed to arrive.

So yes, he was, he was like a demonic counterfeit of the life of Jesus.

He had some of the outward trappings of the Messiah.

And yet he had so many other counter signs, you might say, that showed the possibility

of demonic influence.

Well, there you go.

I mean, as far as discerning, and going back and even discerning history, because this

is, as you said, very clearly, and this is based on, but frankly, a lie in being in

cohorts where the father of lies, because that genealogy, that importance of keeping those

painstaking records, he couldn't get around the fact that he was not born in the house

of David.

Yes.

And if you did live in, in one of the villages of David, if you were a descendant of David

himself, if you did live in the house of David, I'm sure that during the reign of Herod,

you would live with a certain worry about whether you might get, you know, gain his attention,

that he might get it in his head, that he needed to wipe out the descendants of David in

order to remove all competition.

Since Herod was a paranoid ruler, since he was always worried about plots against his

reign.

And he was even willing to murder his own sons, because he believed they were plotting

against him, you can bet that the members of the house of David lived with a certain degree

of fear that they might suddenly be noticed by him.

Well, as we've going to, unfortunately, here in the Gospel stories, he's not above killing

children.

Yes.

Yes.

It was probably a small massacre, so it didn't even merit a mention by the historians of

the time, but he did massacre the Holy Innocence when he decided to go after a plausible

messianic claimant, this Jesus who was born in the city of David in Bethlehem.

So he, you know, went looking for the children of that region.

Again, these are cultural backwater.

These are places off the beaten path.

So there weren't many children who fulfilled the description.

So what we call the massacre was probably small by the standards of Herod's massacres.

When he went after the Jerusalem priests, he murdered more than a hundred.

The Maccabees had sometimes massacred thousands in their bids to keep their throne.

But the Holy Innocence probably numbered fewer than ten.

Oh, boy.

But if it's in your family, just even one.

Yes.

I don't mean to minimize it.

No, no, no, I know you're not.

It's just that it's just the fear and the damage it could cause to, and I speak of family,

not just the smaller family, but the entire village, as you said, because of the nature

of the clan.

Yes.

David's clan.

They would not forget it.

Right.

Exactly.

And that memory just stays with it.

And I think it was really beautiful and quite poignant that in the back end of the chapter

that we're discussing chapter two of St. Joseph in his world, you would say so eloquently

in the villages inhabited by David's clan, pregnant mothers were surely reminded quite

likely that this child could be the one.

And certainly there was the expectation because the time, time of fulfillment was at hand.

Yeah, that the small children were raised with the virtues and skills modeled by their

ancestors, the kings.

They had to be brave for battle like David.

They should be wise and discerning like Solomon.

They should be zealous for true worship like Hezekiah.

It would not be surprising if descendants of the psalms received musical training as

well.

And this is the beautiful seed bed that Joseph is born into.

Yes.

I like to imagine that because David was so musical, it's one of the ways that he exercised

his influence and remained in the consciousness of his people for centuries.

And he remains in the consciousness of all those who follow biblical religion even today,

because of the psalms, because of the songs he sang, and we know that they cast a spell,

King Saul himself became addicted to David's music.

So I like to imagine that the Holy Family was a musical family, that this was a tradition

that remained in the house of David.

It's beautiful to sit and ponder.

I don't know how many of us spend time wondering about this, I guess we could say the

identity of Joseph, because we're not sure of his birthday.

We're not sure where he's placed exactly in this period.

I mean, as far as the absolute moment by moment, you know, how many years old, how many,

but these would have been his formative years.

Yes.

Yes, we do know that he was probably raised in family that gave him his trade.

So they would have been a family of carpenters.

You tended to grow up in the family business, so to speak.

So Joseph would have spent his childhood first just hanging around the workshop, you

know, cleaning up.

Perhaps they'd give him a broom and have him sweep sawdust from the floor doing that sort

of work.

And then eventually he would graduate into making small items, carving small items, making

tools, and that sort of thing that could be sold.

And then he would graduate into the more elaborate projects, the construction project that

would likely have been the family's bread and butter, where they earned serious money.

So he would have grown up working.

He would have had some minimal education as well.

You know, there's plenty of evidence of that that the children in a village like Nazareth

would have been educated in the synagogue, educated to know the Torah and to read the Torah

to ponder it.

And this would have happened for at least a couple of years in their childhood, so that they

could attain a certain minimal literacy and the ability to figure mathematically, because

they had to keep their books, carpenters had to build their clients, and they had to collect

those bills.

They had to keep accounts that way.

When you grew up in the business like that, you know, you were an important contributor

to the family's economy, to the family's welfare.

This is just part of your upbringing.

It was a natural thing in that day and age.

Well, there's something very special about Joseph, fact that even in the last line you

would say that somehow the past of Herod and Joseph were destined to converge.

Yes.

And that's where we're going to have to pick up when we come back to the rest of the story.

And our next episode of any final thoughts, Mike?

Now, I'm looking forward to that discussion, because as you mentioned, Herod would have

been the ruler for much of Joseph's life.

Perhaps the majority of Joseph's life, as I tend to think, Joseph would have spent

his lifetime thinking of Herod as the king.

This was something that would have been on his radar all the time.

It would have been part of his consciousness.

So yes, their paths were destined to cross.

I keep going back to these footnotes, but it seems as though we've always talked about

how Mary was so prepared, so beautifully, the macular consumption and her raising and

being prepared for that moment with the angel where she would give her a scent.

And yet have we ever really thought, at least I haven't, but thanks to you, I have now,

how Joseph was prepared and how God will really, at the moment, for Joseph.

Yes.

I mean, such an important figure, not just a righteous man, but the righteous man.

Yes.

Mike, thank you so very much.

Thank you, Chris.

I'm enjoying the conversation.

It's always great to talk about St. Joseph.

You've been listening to St. Joseph and his world with Mike Aqualina.

To learn more about this subject, you can purchase the book St. Joseph and his world on which

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