Joseph and the Three Gifts : A Review

Joseph and the Three Gifts takes both the bible stories, comments and additions down the years, and a new story about Joseph told by an Angel, and weaves them into a seamless thread It has a gentle conversational tone, as if one was being told this story by the fireside, or at bedtime, on a winter’s day. And Joseph’s story is linked to the gifts of the Magi – and the question told in this inventive tale: whatever happened to those gifts? And how did Jesus grow up working with Joseph as a carpenter?

I’m not giving away spoilers, but the way in which their use is worked out in the story of Jesus was beautifully and imaginatively worked together, each gift for a different time and so appropriate occasion - and we also find out why Joseph disappears from the gospel stories.

There’s a lot of debunking today of elements of the Christmas stories, such as the number of Wise Men, or the donkey, and that’s right and proper, but this tale shows how we can keep them, even if they sit lightly to history. I really appreciated that. I want that donkey, those three Magi, and here they are, along with other links to paintings (“The Shadow of the Cross”) and stories about Jesus. As a result, part of the story has a dreamlike quality (as the best stories do), but again and again, we are also brought back to the gospel story itself, the terra firma which grounds the tales, where myth becomes fact.

It’s a story that lingers long after you’ve read it, and a story which you can read again and again – always the sign of a good book, as C.S. Lewis noted. And the nice thing about the way the story has been woven, it sits well with Christmas, and Candlemas, and Easter. Christmas has so much focus on birth that it forgets Easter, and yet from the start, the gifts point ahead to Easter.