I am Yosef ben Yakov, the carpenter from Nazareth, husband of Mary and legal father of Jeshua Meshiah, or "Jesus Christ." I am deeply honored to be invited to share my story with you today.

I am from Nazareth, a tiny farming village in Galilee. We never had more than 500 people in our town during my lifetime. We Galileans were rough, course, common people. The city folks down south made fun of our clothes and the way we talked.

And Nazareth was even less significant. Our town was not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament. There was even a joke down in Judah, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" And everyone would laugh (John 1:46).

The only reason our family lived there was because of our zeal for the Lord and his word. A hundred years earlier, during the rule of Aristobulus, a number of zealous Jews migrated north to take our faith to the pagan Galileans. Our family was among them. We were so successful that no one questioned the Jewishness of Galilee for centuries to come. As you might expect, I grew up in a very religious home.

I made my living as a carpenter, what the Greeks called a tekton (Matthew 13:55). I worked with wood to make just about anything you might need. I built walls, mended roofs, repaired gates, made ox-yokes and ploughs and kitchen tools and beds, furniture and even ships and houses. As was our custom, I taught my craft to our son, Yeshua (Mark 6:3).

Mine was an honorable trade, but not very profitable. A carpenter depends on the payment of his townspeople, and ours was a very poor village. We were so poor, in fact, that after Yeshua was born and we brought the required sacrifice for him to the Temple, we were allowed to substitute a dove since we couldn't afford a lamb (Luke 2:24; cf. Leviticus 12:6-8). But I get ahead of myself.

One other fact you need to know about my family: we were poor, but hard as it is to believe, we were royalty. Our family was descended from the great King David himself. In fact, I am the only man in your New Testament besides our son Yeshua to be called the "son of David" (Matthew 1:20).

David's home, as you may know, was the village of Bethlehem, down south near Jerusalem. And so Bethlehem was my home town as well, a fact that would soon become very important to my story.