Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Member of the Sanhedrin & Follower of Jesus
August 1
also known as Joseph from Arimathea, Joseph the Righteous One
Joseph of Arimathea was a wealthy member of the Sanhedrin and a secret disciple of Jesus. When Jesus was dead and the disciples had fled, Joseph went openly to Pilate, asked for the body, and laid it in his own new tomb cut from the rock. All four Gospels record the burial, and the tomb he gave is the one the women found empty on the third day. Later ages made him the apostle of Britain and the keeper of the Holy Grail; the Gospels make him braver and plainer than that.
Joseph was a rich man from Arimathea, a town somewhere in the hill country of Judea, and he sat on the Sanhedrin, the great council in Jerusalem that governed the law of the Jews. He had come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the one Israel had been waiting for. He kept it quiet. The men he sat among had set themselves against Jesus, and to follow the Galilean openly would have cost Joseph his seat, his standing, and perhaps more.
Then the council he belonged to condemned Jesus to death, and Pilate the Roman governor had him crucified. The disciples who had walked with Jesus for three years scattered and hid. Peter, the boldest of them, swore three times that he had never known the man. There was no more dangerous hour in the world to be a friend of Jesus of Nazareth.
That was the hour Joseph chose to stop hiding.
He went to Pilate, the governor who had just signed the death warrant, and asked to be given the body of the executed man so that he could bury it himself. Mark says he took courage and went in. There was little courage to spare in Jerusalem that day, and Joseph spent his whole store of it walking through the governor's door. To ask for the body was to announce, to Pilate and to the council and to the whole watching city, whose side he was on. He had finished being a secret disciple.
He owned a new tomb, cut into the rock, that no one had yet been laid in. He gave it to Jesus. With Nicodemus, another man of the council who had once come to Jesus by night and now came into the daylight, he took the body down from the cross, wound it in clean linen with myrrh and aloes, and laid it inside. They rolled a great stone across the mouth of the tomb, and the women who had followed from Galilee watched to see where he was laid.
There the story might have ended, a good man's last kindness to a teacher the world had killed. But the tomb Joseph gave was not done with him. Early on the first day of the week the women came back with their spices and found the great stone rolled away and the rock chamber empty. The grave Joseph had cut for the dead could not keep the Lord of life. Of everything given to Jesus in the Gospels, Joseph's gift is the one that was handed back: he had lent a tomb, and on the third day it was returned to him empty, the first room on earth from which the resurrection was told.
Joseph of Arimathea is one of the few people of the Passion whom all four Gospels name, and they name him doing one thing: burying Jesus. Mark, the earliest account, calls him a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God; Matthew names him a rich man from Arimathea; Luke, a good and righteous man who had not consented to what the council did; John, a disciple of Jesus, but secretly for fear of the Jews, joined at the tomb by Nicodemus. The quotations here follow the English Standard Version. That four strands of the tradition agree on Joseph and on the burial is itself the historical weight of the matter: the claim of the empty tomb needed a known tomb and a named owner, and Joseph supplies both, which is why his burial of Jesus is counted among the best-attested details of the Passion. Where Arimathea itself stood is less sure. It is often identified with Ramathaim in the Judean hills, but the Gospels do not place it and no site is certain.
Everything else told of Joseph is later, and most of it is legend, traceable as it grew. The apocryphal Acts of PilateThe Acts of Pilate (Gospel of Nicodemus) — J. K. Elliott, in The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford), also called the Gospel of Nicodemus and circulating by the fifth century, gives him a sequel the Gospels do not: imprisonment by the council for burying Jesus, and a rescue by the risen Christ. The British legend is later still and English in origin. William of Malmesbury wrote a history of Glastonbury Abbey, the De Antiquitate Glastoniensis Ecclesiae, about 1129, but the passages that make Joseph the founder of the first church in Britain are interpolations added by the abbey's own monks in the thirteenth century; the original text is largely lost. Around 1200 the poet Robert de Boron, in his verse romance Joseph d'Arimathie, first joined Joseph to the cup of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail, in which Joseph was said to have caught the blood of the crucified Christ and which his kindred then carried to Britain. John of Glastonbury's Cronica drew the threads together in the fourteenth century. The modern scholars who have traced this growth, Carley on the abbey and Valerie Lagorio on the legend itself, find no evidence earlier than the high Middle Ages for Joseph in Britain; the Glastonbury Joseph is a treasure of medieval England rather than of apostolic history.
The Anglican kalendar keeps Joseph of Arimathea on 1 August. Rome commemorates him on 17 March, and the Eastern churches on 31 July and again on the Sunday of the Myrrh-Bearing Women after Pascha, where he is honored alongside Nicodemus and the women who came to the tomb.
Because he gave his own grave to bury another's son, the church made him the patron of those who tend the dead: undertakers and funeral directors, gravediggers and pallbearers. The Glastonbury legend gave him a second patronage, among the tin-miners of Cornwall and over the town of Glastonbury itself.
In Christian art Joseph belongs to the Deposition and the Lamentation, the scenes of Christ taken down from the cross. He is the bearded man who receives the body, often holding the winding-sheet, sometimes shown with the pincers and the ladder used to draw the nails. Where the medieval legend governs, he carries instead two small cruets said to hold the blood and water of Christ, or the Grail cup itself, or a flowering staff. That staff is the Holy Thorn of Glastonbury, the hawthorn that the legend says sprang up when Joseph thrust his walking-stick into the ground, and that blooms, against the nature of its kind, in the deep of winter near Christmas. A sprig of it is still cut each year and sent to the sovereign for the Christmas table.
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The Acts of Pilate (Gospel of Nicodemus)(Greek, by the 5th century)
Recommended: J. K. Elliott, in The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford)
The apocryphon that gives Joseph the sequel the Gospels withhold, his imprisonment for burying Jesus and his rescue by the risen Christ; Elliott's is the standard scholarly collection, the Ante-Nicene Fathers text the freely readable one.
Public domain: Gospel of Nicodemus, Ante-Nicene Fathers (New Advent)
Glastonbury Abbey: The Holy House at the Head of the Moors Adventurous(English, 1988)
James P. Carley's readable scholarly guide to the abbey and its Joseph legend, learned in Glastonbury's own chronicles and candid about where history ends and legend begins; out of print, best found through a library.
Further reading. The standard account of how the British legend grew is Valerie M. Lagorio, "The Evolving Legend of St Joseph of Glastonbury" (Speculum, 1971), which follows the story from the apocrypha to the late medieval chronicles. The medieval Grail romance itself, the trilogy attributed to Robert de Boron, is translated by Nigel Bryant as Merlin and the Grail: Joseph of Arimathea, Merlin, Perceval (Boydell, 2005).
Online resources. The Catholic Encyclopedia article on Joseph of Arimathea at New Advent is a sober public-domain overview that separates the Gospel record from the later accretions. The apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, or Acts of Pilate, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, is freely readable and is where Joseph's extra-canonical story begins.
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British (Received Pronunciation): Antiquitate /ˌæntɪkwɪˈtɑːteɪ/; Pascha /ˈpɑː.skə/
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servant Joseph of Arimathea, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with him, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.