Help! Joseph of Arimathea.

[King_Charles]

I got this from Price's famous book:

"Joseph of Arimathea provides another important piece of the puzzle. Like Judas, Joseph is a fictional character who grows in the telling. For one thing, as Dennis R. MacDonald has shown, he is based on King Priam, begging Agamemnon for the body of his son Hector. It is because he corresponds to the slain hero's father that he is called Joseph.' (Postbiblical legend seems to understand this, since it came close to making this explicit, casting Joseph of Arimathea as Jesus' great uncle,' taking the place of the elderly, then deceased Joseph, husband of Mary.) His town of origin, Arimathea, is made into a pun marking Joseph as another of Todorov's "narrative-men."

Robert M. Price. The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition? (p. 326). Kindle Edition. "

I don't think you have to be a Christian apologist to point out that someone begging/questing/fighting for the body of a loved one for a proper burial was a very common occurrence in real life (in the ancient world, with the importance attached to decent burial in ancient religion), myth and literature and saying it is "copying" the Iliad makes about as much sense saying that every instance of the dawn in literature is copying Homer's description of the dawn, or every description of a duel copying the duel in Homer, etc... it's such a vague parallel that it becomes meaningless.

And anyway it wasn't Agamemnon, it was Achilles who gave Hector's body to Priam. Is that a really a quote? It beggars belief that it could get published with such a glaring mistake.

That aside, the latter stuff about Joseph of Arimathea coming to England with Jesus, a la, "And did those feet, in ancient time....", and him getting mixed up in the Arthurian legends, obviously pious fiction (though darn good pious fiction if I may say so... ).

The gospel accounts? Depends on how historically viable you think the gospels are, but he does appear in the earliest version of of the gospel of Mark, just as the guy who gave up his tomb for Jesus. Plausable enough, but ultimatly unproveable one way or another if he actually existed.