‘A young man's brow and an old man's beard’

Abstract

Although the accounts of Joseph of Arimathea's mission to England have their origins in the medieval era, it was during the early modern period that they began to provide a polemical purpose. The English had for centuries used Joseph as proofpositive that their Church had been founded in apostolic times. In the Reformation this usefulness only increased as Joseph could now be used to demonstrate that the English Church had been founded independently of Rome. What emerged was something of a theological oddity. This article discusses how the British Reformed writers used exactly the type of myths that the Reformation had set its face against, and how ultimately these legends fell from grace.