Attentive readers of Scripture will have noticed that the Ioseph typikos, of whom our blessed Lady's chaste Spouse is the Antitypos, is described (Genesis 39) in the Vulgate (and the Neo-Vulgate) and the Septuagint as having been sold as a slave to Potiphar, 'Eunuch' of Pharaoh. Indeed, Brown Driver Briggs gives "Eunuch" as the central meaning of the Hebrew SRIS.
Eunuchs were very often Great Men in ancient kingdoms because a sovereign could be moderately confident that they would not spend their time and ingenuity squirreling away state resources for their own offspring. Since, therefore, great officers of state were often eunuchs, it will often yield apparently good sense to translate SRIS as "Officer" or "Courtier" or (Tyndale) "Lorde".
And, of course, that rendering will prevent naive people from blurting out "But how can a eunuch have a wife?" Nor will puzzled children ask what a Yew Nuck is and, when told, get out their pen-knives and start experimenting on the household pets.
And, indeed, all the proliferating English Protestant Bibles which derive from the King James Bible do translate this word as something like Officer. But, surprisingly, so do the Catholic Knox and Jerusalem Bibles (and, even more oddly, they do so with never even an explicatory footnote). Only the Geneva Bible and the Douay-Rheims-Challoner Bible courageously give "eunuch". (John Wycliffe, sometime Master of Balliol College in this University, rendered it "gelding"! Nice one, Master!)
Now: observe, in the Genesis narrative, the emphasis given by the writer to Joseph's sexual attractions. He was (LXX) Kalos toi eidei kai horaios tei opsei ... sphodra (exceedingly)! And this heavy hint introduces the narrative of Potiphar's wife's attempt upon Joseph's virtue.
Translating the term accurately as "Eunuch" gives, um, piquancy to Potiphar's wife's rather urgent desire for sexual intimacy (some have suggested that her name was Zuleika!) And the writer emphasises that there was nobody else in the oikiai when she made her attempt. He also sees a narrative need to explain that Joseph was not dillying or dallying, with no reason, within the oikia ... No; he had had to go inside to poiein ta erga autou. Dutiful; as well as chaste!
Joseph is not another Paris; although perhaps Potiphar's wife is another Helen (vide my previous post in which I drag in Homer).
I venture to suggest that the Spouse of God's Mother has through Providence the name Joseph precisely because of his chaste abstinence within his marriage to Mary. This would make the emphasis on his name, in both Matthew and Luke, a "historical" witness to the Perpetual Virginity of our Lady.
B Pius IX felt that the afflicted Church needed a Patron/Protector, and gave S Joseph a Sunday in Eastertide (according to Gueranger, the commemoration had to be on a Sunday to ensure that Joseph did get a Day of Obligation). A Pontiff or two later, when it had become unpopular to encumber the same Sunday permanently with some other celebration, S Pius X shifted him onto an adjacent Wednesday. Pius XII, another restless liturgical innovator, suppressed that festival, replacing it with S Joseph Opifex on May 1. The post-conciliar revisers (according to Fr Louis Bouyer, "three maniacs"), noticing that nobody much seemed to want S Joseph the Workman, chopped him down to an Optional Memorial.
I disagree with you: this story is not funny. It has had the effect of sending Pip and Jim on their travels.
The bodies of Ss Philip and James are buried in the Basilica of the XII Apostles, dedicated on May 1 in some year near 570. Pius XII exiled them to May 11; the post-conciliar 'reformers' reduced their sentence of relegation to three days and left them on May 3.
Reckless libertarian that I am, I plan to be getting out Red Vestments on May 1.
The celebration of S Joseph on March 19, found in many Western calendars in the first millennium, was received at Rome in 1479 but did not enter the universal Roman calendar until 1621 ... yet another witness to Rome's innate conservatism ... before the twentieth century ...
The Masses and Offices provided for S Joseph are very decently typological; shedding a great deal of light upon the role of S Joseph in a rounded, intelligent Heilsgeschichte.