Joseph of Arimathea: From Biblical Obscurity to New Age Fame

Abstract

Joseph of Arimathea receives no more than brief mention in the canonical Gospels, primarily as the person who took down and buried the body of Christ.¹ By the mid-thirteenth century, however, various subsequent works had elaborated on his remarkable post-Crucifixion career, one that started with lengthy imprisonment by Herod and ended with missionary success as the apostle to Britain. Over time, knowledge of this Joseph spread from England to Europe and, ultimately, the rest of the world, but a key step in this process surely came around 1250 when, at Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset, an interpolation was added to a copy of William of Malmesbury’s De antiquitate Glastoniensis ecclesiae, an interpolation claiming that Joseph had founded the monastery.2 At that point, and for almost a century and a half thereafter, Joseph remained a saint recognized mainly in the West Country, but during the conciliar period he found himself both nationalized and internationalized as the English delegations to the Councils of Pisa, Constance, Siena, and Basle sought precedence for themselves by demonstrating that Joseph had brought the light of Christianity to Britain well in advance of its apostolic arrival in other nations. A generation ago, Valerie Lagorio dealt brilliantly with most of these developments, but because she saw Joseph’s legend as inherently medieval, she failed to explore some of its most extravagant claims, ones that took shape remarkably recently, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even today, in fact, Joseph seems to retain remarkable myth-making potential.