Who was Joseph of Arimathea?

Four portraits of one man

Joseph appears only once in each Gospel, at the burial, and each one adds a stroke. Mark sets the scene late on Friday, the day before the Sabbath:

Joseph of Arimathaea, a prominent council member who also himself was looking for God’s Kingdom, came. He boldly went in to Pilate, and asked for Jesus’ body.

• Mark: a prominent council member, waiting for the Kingdom, who needed nerve to ask (15:42–46).
• Matthew: “a rich man,” a disciple, who used “his own new tomb” (27:57–60).
• Luke: “a good and righteous man” who “had not consented to their counsel and deed” (23:50–51).
• John: a disciple, “but secretly for fear of the Jews,” John’s usual shorthand for the Temple authorities; Nicodemus, who first came to Jesus by night, joins him with spices (19:38–40).

Together they draw a man of standing whose sympathies stayed quiet until the worst possible moment. Luke’s note matters, because Mark says the whole council judged Jesus deserving of death (Mark 14:64). Either Joseph was absent, or he said no and lost.

Where was Arimathea?

Luke calls it “a city of the Jews” and nothing more. It is usually identified with Ramathaim, the hill town in Ephraim where the prophet Samuel’s family lived (1 Samuel 1:1), though some suggest Ramleh, near the coast. Either way, Joseph had a tomb cut for his own family in Jerusalem, so the man from Arimathea had made his life in the capital.

Why the body mattered

Rome usually left the crucified on their crosses, sometimes for days, as a warning, and often denied them burial. Jewish law asked for the opposite.

his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him the same day;

Josephus says Jews took even crucified men down and buried them before sunset (Jewish War 4.317), and Philo knew of governors who handed bodies to relatives at festival time (Flaccus 83). Archaeology backs them: in 1968 a family tomb in Jerusalem held the heel bone of a crucified man, Jehohanan, an iron nail still in it, laid properly in an ossuary. So the request was possible, but it was a risk. Pilate, surprised that Jesus was already dead, checked with the centurion before he granted it (Mark 15:44–45). Joseph bought a linen cloth, took the body down, wrapped it and rolled a stone across the door. Christians soon saw in it a line of Isaiah: “They made his grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in his death” (Isaiah 53:9). The tomb itself is the subject of where is Jesus’s tomb?

The legends

The Gospels never mention him again, so storytellers did. The second-century Gospel of Peter makes him a friend of Pilate. The Acts of Pilate has the council lock him up and the risen Jesus set him free. Around 1200 the French poet Robert de Boron gave him the cup of the Last Supper, the Holy Grail, and had his followers carry it west to Britain. The monks of Glastonbury added his voyage to their abbey’s chronicle in 1247, and by 1520 his walking staff had become the Glastonbury Thorn, said to flower at Christmas.

Churches remember the plainer man. The Orthodox honor him with the myrrh-bearing women on the second Sunday after Easter, and sing on Good Friday a hymn that begins “The noble Joseph.” The Roman Martyrology lists him on August 31, beside Nicodemus.