Joasaph (also rendered Ioasaph or Josaphat) is the prince at the center of the medieval hagiographic romance of Barlaam and Joasaph. By tradition he was the son and heir of King Abenner of India, who, having been told by astrologers that his son would one day become a Christian, confined the boy within a palace and tried to shield him from any knowledge of suffering or of Christ. Despite this isolation, Joasaph was visited by the hermit-monk Barlaam, who taught him the Christian faith, baptized him, and led him to renounce his royal inheritance for a life of asceticism. He is commemorated together with Barlaam, principally on November 19, and also on August 26 in Greek usage.
The narrative relates that at Joasaph's birth fifty-five astrologers offered predictions, and that the wisest among them foretold that the child would not succeed his father but would enter a better and greater kingdom, and would become a Christian. To forestall this, Abenner is said to have built an enormous palace and kept his son within it, allowing only a few chosen instructors near him, who were charged to keep from the prince all mention of death, old age, sickness, and poverty, and above all any mention of Christ. According to the tradition, the hieromonk Barlaam reached the prince by disguising himself as a merchant and, through an extended parable about a precious gem, gradually unfolded the Christian teaching. Barlaam baptized Joasaph in a garden pool, celebrated the Bloodless Sacrifice, and gave him Communion of the Holy Mysteries.
By the account preserved in the Slavic synaxarion, Joasaph eventually brought his own father to Christ; after his baptism Abenner is said to have lived a further four years in deep repentance before his death. Other versions of the legend instead relate that Abenner converted, surrendered his throne to his son, and withdrew to the desert as a hermit. The tradition recounts that Joasaph in turn entrusted the kingdom to his friend Barachias and departed into the desert to live in asceticism for the sake of Christ. According to one telling he renounced the throne at the age of twenty-five and lived a further thirty-five years in the wilderness, where he was reunited with his teacher Barlaam.
The story of Barlaam and Joasaph circulated widely across the medieval Christian world, in Georgian, Greek, Latin, and many vernacular versions, and the two figures were entered into both Eastern and Western calendars. Modern scholarship has shown that the romance is a Christianized adaptation of the life of the Buddha: it descends from a Sanskrit Mahayana Buddhist text of roughly the second to fourth century, transmitted through Manichaean and Arabic intermediaries before being reworked in a Christian frame. The very name Joasaph is traced to the Sanskrit bodhisattva. For this reason the historical existence of Joasaph as a person is not affirmed by historians, and he is best understood as a traditional hagiographic figure venerated within the Orthodox calendar.
