I wish I could remember where, but I recently read a story about the Holy Family which intrigued me:
Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary are walking and Mary sees some lovely fruit hanging just out of reach. She asks Joseph to get one, and he says “Let he who got you pregnant get it for you!” Jesus in her womb hears this, and commands the tree to bend down so his Mother can reach and take the fruit.
This seems to address nicely a recognizable element of the humanity of Joseph with any number of miracle acts of goodness of the Savior. It also seems to fold into it a retake on an actual bible story, in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, where Jesus cursed/cursed at an olive tree for being barren, which even to his own disciples down to this day was something which needed a little extra defending or at least explaining. Apologetics avant la lettre, if you will.
Has anyone heard of the fruit tree story, and know something about its source?
I can’t remember where in the New Testament the simple reactions of Joseph to his wife’s pregnancy are recorded. Can someone cite me those, and any important or interesting selections from the two-millennia canon of Christian commentary on that?
Great, and thank you. There’s a Peter, Paul, and Mary version, apparently (is that how you know it, or from church?), who presumably got it, according to Wiki, from a 19th century compendium of English songs called Child Ballades (not the Christ child, but the name of the compiler of the ballades), and before that a carol from a 15th-century Corpus Christi festival.
The story itself, minus the tune, according to Wiki,…is derived from the apocryphal Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, which combines many earlier apocryphal Nativity traditions; however, in Pseudo-Matthew, the event takes place during the flight into Egypt, and the fruit tree is a palm tree (presumably a date palm) rather than a cherry tree. In the apocryphal Gospel, Jesus has already been born and so Joseph’s truculence is unrelated to any dismay over Mary’s pregnancy, but has to do with an inability to reach the fruits of the palm and a concern over the family’s lack of water.
Actually, the first version of the song I heard was by Emmylou Harris. The Peter, Paul, and Mary was just the first one Google turned up, so that’s what I linked.
I never heard of this before sounds interesting. It would make a great deal of sense to be honest considering Joseph would think she had gotten pregnant by another man before an angel clarified what had taken place.