Joseph of Arimathea: Difference between revisions

We may surmise that Joseph’s influential position and devotion to the cause probably made him a leader in the early church. Members of the church were forced to flee the “great persecution against the church which was at Jerusalem” recorded in Acts, which followed the martyrdom of St. Stephen, about <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. 35. “They were all scattered abroad throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria, except the apostles,” Acts continues. “Therefore they that were scattered abroad went everywhere preaching the word.”  

Their journey was possible in the historical framework of the time. Marseilles was a prosperous port under Roman protection. In fact, John W. Taylor, author of The Coming of the Saints, says that Marseilles and the provinces around it “became the favourite emigration ground of Rome, and generation after generation of Romans traded here, lived here, made their fortunes here, and died here.” Doubtless ships regularly made the journey from the flourishing port of Caesarea to Marseilles.

<blockquote>After the first persecution, when St. James was slain by the sword, those who had followed him were thrust into a boat, without oars or sails, on the coast of Palestine somewhere near to Mount Carmel, and so got rid of. In the boat were: St. Mary, wife of Cleopas, St. Salome (often called St. Mary Salome also), St. Mary Magdalene, St. Martha, and with the two latter was their maid Marcella. They were accompanied by the following men: Lazarus, Joseph of Arimathea, Trophimius, Maximin, Cleon, Eutropius, Sidonius (Restitutus, “the man born blind’), Martial, and Saturnius.</blockquote>  

The apocryphal Acts of Magdalen, or Life of St. Mary Magdalene, compiled in the eighth or ninth century by Rabanus Maurus, archbishop of Mainz, gives confirmation to the story:

<blockquote>Leaving the shores of Asia ... they came near to the city of Marseilles, in the Viennoise Province of Gaul, where the river Rhone is received by the sea. There, having called upon God, the King of all the world, they parted; each company going to the province where the Holy Spirit had directed them; presently preaching everywhere, “the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following.”</blockquote>  

We know that for hundreds of years prior to the first century <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. there was a well-established tin trade between Cornwall and Phoenicia. Herodotus, the fifth-century <small>B</small>.<small>C</small>. Greek historian, calls the British Isles the Cassiterides, or Tin Islands. The fourth-century <small>B</small>.<small>C</small>. navigator Pytheas visited the British Islands and mentions the tin trade. In his History of England, Sir Edward Creasey writes: “The British tin mines mainly supplied the glorious adornment of Solomon’s Temple.”

That the Roman Empire mined lead in England during Joseph’s time is shown by a bar of lead found near the Mendip mines in Somerset. It was dated <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. 49 and stamped with “Britannicus,” the name of the son of Emperor Claudius.  

Capt avers that the tradition is fairly ancient and widespread, noting that the children of Priddy, a hill village near the mines of the Mendips, sing a carol that begins: “‘Joseph was a tin merchant, a tin merchant, a tin merchant’, and goes on to describe him arriving from the sea in a boat.”  

<blockquote>They that inhabit the British promontory of Belerium, by reason of their converse with merchants, are more civilized and courteous to strangers than the rest are. These are the people that make the tin, which with a great deal of care and labour they dig out of the ground; and that being rocky, the metal is mixed with some veins of earth, out of which they melt the metal, and then refine it; then they beat it into four-square pieces like to a dye, and carry it to a British isle near at hand, called Ictis.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The merchants transport the tin they buy of the inhabitants to France; and for thirty days journey, they transport it on horses’ backs through France, to the mouth of the river Rhone.</blockquote>

Joseph could have even been more than a merchant—a Roman official in the trade. Gildas the Wise, a British monk who lived <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. c. 500–570, refers to him as “nobilis decurio.” According to Capt, the title “‘decurio’ denoted an important Roman office, usually connected with the general management of a mining district. The implication is that Joseph was a provincial…Roman Senator and in charge of Rome’s mining interests in Britain.”  

Today Glastonbury is an emerald plain with majestic ruins of a twelfth-century abbey dissolved by Henry VIII in 1539. But it was once an island. Perhaps the fabled island of Avalon where Arthur is said to have died. Through the sixth century, it was surrounded by water, but gradually, according to Capt, the swampy lake surrounding the island was filled in with layers of peat, clay, and gravel “as the estuary retreated to the sea.” By the early 1500s, there were still six lakes in the area.  

Archaeological excavations at Glastonbury show that a village flourished there from 50 <small>B</small>.<small>C</small>. to about <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. 80, a village whose inhabitants, according to Capt, “possessed the most advanced civilization of their time in Britain.” The people “were highly cultured, and skillful in various kinds of work.” They were expert carpenters, used canoes for coastal trading, built wheeled carts and worked lead, tin, and copper.

The Glastonbury village was probably related to the tin trade. Capt says that metal mined in the Mendip Hills above Glastonbury was placed on small boats to be floated down the river Brue. Therefore “the lake villages of Glastonbury would have been a natural stop-over for trading.”  

Historical evidence of an early Christianity in Britain does exist. Capt summarizes his evidence in Traditions of Glastonbury. His literary references are as follows:  

Tertullian, who lived about 160 to 230, wrote that “the extremities of Spain, the various parts of Gaul, the regions of Britain which have never been penetrated by Roman arms have received the religion of Christ.” Glastonbury fits Tertullian’s specification. It was in a region held by the British which had escaped the Roman conquest of Julius Caesar.

<blockquote>Christianity was privately confessed elsewhere, but the (first) nation that proclaimed it as their religion and (called it Christian) after the name of Christ was Britain.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The Apostles passed beyond the ocean to the isles called the Britannic Isles.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Afterwards the Apostles built several tabernacles, and through all the parts of the earth wherever it was possible to go; even in the Isles of the ocean they built several habitations for God.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The British Isles which are beyond the sea, and which lie in the ocean, have received virtue of the Word. Churches are there found and altars erected.... Though thou shouldst go to the ocean, to the British Isles, there thou shouldst hear all men everywhere discoursing matters out of the scriptures, with another voice indeed, but not another faith, with a different tongue, but the same judgment.</blockquote>

<blockquote>These islands, stiff with cold and frost, and in distant region of the world, remote from the visible sun received the beams of light, that is the holy precepts of Christ, at the latter part, as we know, of the reign of Tiberius Caesar.</blockquote>

Tiberius died in <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. 37. Capt concludes from his evidence that “Joseph became the Apostle of Britain, who with twelve other disciples of Christ, including his son, Josephes, and Mary the mother of Jesus, established Christianity in the Isles of Britain over five hundred years before St. Augustine [who was sent by Pope Gregory to bring Christianity to Britain] set foot on English soil.”  

Hugh Paulinus Cressy, an English Catholic Benedictine, says in his seventeenth-century Church History of England that Britain received “beams of the Sun of Righteousness before many other countries nearer approaching the place where He first rose.”

<blockquote>Now the most eminent of the primitive disciples ... was St. Joseph of Arimathea, and eleven of his companions with him, among whom is reckoned his son of his own name. These toward the latter end of Nero’s reign [it ended about <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. 68], and before St. Peter and St. Paul were consummated by a glorious martyrdom [about <small>A</small>.<small>D</small>. 64 and 67], are by the testimony of ancient records said to have entered this island, as a place for the retiredness of it, the benignity to the British Princes, and the freedom from Roman tyranny, more, opportune, and better prepared for entertaining the Gospel of Peace, than almost any country, under the Romans.</blockquote>