We can begin by recalling the Jewish custom of marriage at the time of Jesus.
First came the period of betrothal, during which the bride continued to live with her parents. It was during this period that the archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary in the Annunciation.
Around a year after the betrothal, when it came time for the wedding, the husband would go to the home of the bride and take her to his own home in a procession with great rejoicing (cf. J. Flader, Question Time 6, q. 797).
How far away was the house of St Joseph? From the house of Sts Joachim and Anne on the site of the present Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth to the present-day Church of St Joseph, where tradition tells us the Holy Family lived, would be a walk of no more than five minutes, up a small hill. The large monastery of the Franciscans extends between the two churches.
As to the origin of the tradition regarding the house, some of Jesus’ relatives were still living in Nazareth in the second century, according to the Judaeo-Christian Hegesippus. In the fourth century Eusebius of Caesarea reported in his Ecclesiastical History: “Of the Lord’s family, there remain the nephews of Judah, the brother according to the flesh, who were denounced as belonging to the lineage of David.”
It can be supposed that these relatives of Our Lord and Joseph played an important role in preserving the Christian memory of the house of the Holy Family in Nazareth.
The apocryphal “Story of Joseph the Carpenter” narrates the death and interment of Joseph, describing how Jesus and Our Lady helped and comforted him at the moment that he passed out of this life. A beautiful stained-glass window in the church depicts the scene.
The present-day Church of St Joseph, also known as the Church of Joseph’s Workshop, was built in the Romanesque Revival style in 1914 where a church built by the Franciscans in the 17th century had stood. Beneath it are the remains of a church built by the crusaders and of several much earlier ones.
One of the earlier ones was the church mentioned by the pilgrim Arculfe around 670AD in his De locis sanctis (II, 26).
He wrote that in Nazareth “two large churches were built: one in the middle of the city, founded over two arches, the place where the house in which our saviour grew up was built and the other on the site of the house where the angel Gabriel came to Blessed Mary and, finding her alone, spoke to her.”
In the 17th century a Franciscan priest, Fr Francesco Quaresmius, in his Historica, theologica er moralis terrae sanctae elucidatio, Historical, theological and moral explanation of the Holy Land, written between 1616 and 1626, affirmed the existence from ancient times of special devotion to St Joseph in Nazareth. He wrote of a place “that the locals call Joseph’s house and workshop where, for a time, there was a beautiful church dedicated to St Joseph.”
As in the Basilica of the Annunciation, a stairway in the church goes down to a crypt where there are caves and ancient ruins. Caverns can be seen through a grille in the floor. Seven more steps lead to a two-metre square basin or pit with a black and white mosaic floor. This is believed to have been a baptistry or ritual bath, used perhaps as early as the first century.
Beside the basin a flight of rough stairs leads down to a narrow passage which, after turning 180 degrees, opens into an underground chamber two metres high. Off this are openings to grain silos and water cisterns cut into the soft limestone rock by early dwellers. Such underground repositories were typical of ancient Nazareth.
All in all, there is powerful evidence that the Church of St Joseph in Nazareth stands over the house where the Holy Family lived and where Jesus spent the 30 years of his hidden life.
