Joseph, the Grail, and the Shroud

Those who know me will understand why I was excited last year when I came across an article whose title promised to tie together three of my favorite subjects: "Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, and the Edessa Icon," by Daniel Scavone. Those unfamiliar with the third item might find the title of an earlier presentation of the same material more eye-opening: "Joseph of Arimathea, the Holy Grail, and the Turin Shroud." On the one hand, Scavone's literary research undermines the popular understanding of the Grail as the chalice of the Last Supper, as well as the association of Joseph and the Grail with Britain. On the other hand, he gives us as much as he takes when he ties Joseph to Christ's burial shroud, the shroud to Edessa and its icon, and, ultimately, the Grail to the shroud. He concludes that the Grail as chalice is a garbled medieval Western interpretation of mysterious Byzantine descriptions of Jesus' burial cloth.

In his article, originally published in Arthuriana (Winter 1999), Scavone pieces together his hypothesis from numerous ancient and medieval texts, carefully laying the foundation before revealing his conclusions. His paper is thoroughly documented and referenced (the lists of texts, endnotes, and bibliography take up more pages than the main text of the article). For those of you who are into that kind of thing as much as I am (and I know some of you are), just click on the first link above and download the PDF. Here I will just try to summarize his more interesting conclusions.

Joseph and the shroud both make their first appearance in the Gospels. Mark (15:46) tells us that Joseph "bought a linen shroud, and taking [Jesus] down, wrapped him in the linen shroud, and laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of the rock." And John (ch. 20) reports that when Simon Peter and the Beloved Disciple came to the tomb on the first day of the week, they "saw the linen cloths lying there." The pseudepigraphal Acts of Pilate picks up the story from there, telling us that Joseph was seized by the Jewish leaders and imprisoned. But Jesus came to him in prison and freed him. In describing that encounter later, Joseph recalled, "And I said to him that was speaking to me, 'Show me the place where I laid thee.' And he carried me away, and showed me the place where I laid him; and the linen cloth was lying in it, and the napkin for his face. And I knew that it was Jesus."

According to a Georgian text from the 5th-8th century, St. Joseph's subsequent missionary activity was associated with that of St. Philip, and the two built a church together in Lydda, directly west of Jerusalem. The NT book of Acts names two Philips, who are associated, respectively, with Samaria/Caesarea in Palestine and Phrygia/Galatia in Asia Minor.

Abgar VIII (r. 177-212), King of Edessa, became a Christian sometime before the year 200. He had a close relationship with Rome, and like many Roman client kings, he took a Roman name: Lucius Aurelius Septimius Megas Abgarus VIII, partially taken from the name of the emperor, Septimius Severus. He was well received on a visit to Rome around 202, and he might very well have corresponded with Pope Eleutherius. In 205 he built a citadel called Birtha in Syriac and Britium in Latin.

It may have been during Abgar's reign that the shroud, known as the Mandylion, came to Edessa. In any case, its presence in Edessa is documented from the fourth century. It was transferred to Constantinople in 944. When it was not kept entirely hidden, it was usually displayed folded, so that only the face appeared. This is probably the source of the acheiropoietos, the "icon not made by human hands," usually known in the West as the veronica, a slight corruption of vera eikon, or "true image." But on special occasions the Mandylion, with elaborate ceremony, would be unfolded in stages to full length, over the course of a day. Worshipers were kept at a distance, so the nature of the unfolding ceremony - and of the Mandylion itself - was not clear to the crowds who witnessed it. But the accounts of those who saw it up close, describing the bloodstained image, make it sound like the object we now know as the Shroud of Turin.

It was around this same time that some new icons of Christ appeared, depicting him in death. Scavone suggests that these were inspired by the Mandylion in its partially and fully unfolded forms. Scavone further speculates that it was reported that Constantinople possessed a mysterious relic associated with Christ, which had collected his blood at the Passion, and which appeared in different forms. When these stories passed to the West, they took the form of the no less mysterious Holy Grail.

The Mandylion disappeared from Constantinople when the city was sacked by Western crusaders in 1204. According to a recent Vatican announcement, the burial cloth now known as the Shroud of Turin was hidden and venerated by the Knights Templar from this point until about a century later, when the Templars were suppressed. Not long after that, the Shroud enters the historical record in the West.

St. Joseph of Arimathea is first associated with Britain in a revision of William of Malmesbury's De Antiquitate Glastoniensis (Enquiry into the Antiquity of the Church of Glastonbury), published in 1247 by the monks of Glastonbury Abbey. According to this revised history, St. Philip, who was operating in Gaul, sent a delegation to Britain headed by his mission partner, St. Joseph. But William's original text, written about 1125, had mentioned Philip only in the most speculative way and had not mentioned Joseph at all! The monks apparently revised their history in an effort to claim an apostolic foundation, which would let them trump rival monasteries.

Moreover, William's speculation regarding Philip's presence in Gaul was based on a misunderstanding of his source, which actually related the traditional story that Philip preached in Galatia. The whole idea that Philip and Joseph preached in the West unravels under scrutiny. There is no reason to believe they ever left the Middle East.

The earlier origin story of the Church in Britain, related by the Venerable Bede, was that the 2nd-century British king Lucius had sent a letter to Pope Eleutherius asking to be made a Christian. Bede was apparently drawing from a line from the Liber Pontificalis (Book of the Popes). But it has been recognized for some time that this King Lucius was probably not a British king, but was the Edessan king, Lucius Abgar, whose citadel was known as Britium.

So the connections of Joseph and the Grail to Britain fall apart. Scavone leaves us, instead, with a connection between Joseph, the Mandylion, and Edessa. He sums up his conclusions thus:

In the apocryphal tradition about Joseph of Arimathea, then, before Joseph's Holy Grail as cup of Jesus' blood, there was Joseph's cloth in which he had captured the blood of Golgotha. Britium's face icon (Mandylion) was over time identified as a burial shroud icon of the body of crucified Jesus. The mysterious tenth-century ritual in Britium/Edessa and the new twelfth-century Byzantine Melismos service, inspired respectively by the presence of this reputed burial wrap, portrayed the infant Jesus becoming the adult Jesus, sacrificial victim of the Last Supper and Passion. The romance Holy Grail also revealed the mystery of the infant Jesus changing to the body of crucified Jesus.

Wolfram’s Grail

On Thursday 18 October 2007, I attended a lecture at Georgetown University, sponsored by the Catholic Studies Program, entitled, “The Holy Grail versus the Crusades: Wolfram’s Concept of the Altar.” The lecturer, G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., is a scholar of German literature. A few years earlier I had attended another program by Fr. Murphy at a church in Georgetown based on his book, The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales. As part of that program he showed Disney’s “Snow White,” but no one could figure out how to get the sound working, so we watched it as a silent movie and he narrated, pointing out and explaining some of the symbolism. I recall talking to him at the reception afterwards about the meaning of mistletoe, which, I had heard, is canonically banned from Anglican churches. The present lecture was based on his most recent book, Gemstone of Paradise: The Holy Grail in Wolfram’s Parzival.


There are three authentic versions of the Grail story, which developed in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.

Chrétien de Troyes (writing 1185-87) was the first to write the word Grail, by which he referred to a deep serving dish, big enough to hold a fish. Like a horn of plenty, it would produce whatever food you wanted – you had only to reach in and take it. The Grail was powered by a host in the bottom. Perceval, in Chrétien, is a naive young man whose mother does not want him to become a knight and get killed. He goes into the woods looking for his mother, sees her faint dead at a bridge, and rides off to look for the Grail. Chrétien never forgives him for letting his mother die. After years spent looking for the Grail, he returns to check on his mother, not seeming to realize she had died. Chrétien did not finish the story, but several other authors wrote endings.

For Robert de Boron (writing 1190-1200), the Grail is the cup from the Last Supper. He picks up on the Eucharist in a way that is very medieval and Catholic. Joseph of Arimathea comes for the body of Christ, a centurion stabs Christ to make sure he is dead, and Joseph catches the blood in a cup from the house of the Last Supper, which he got from Pilate. Being a good orthodox Jew, he wanted to stop the blood from seeping into the ground. The cup containing the blood was buried with Christ, and it was eventually found by St. Helena. [I’m not sure what this last sentence refers to. It does not match Robert de Boron’s version of the Grail story.]

Finally, Wolfram von Eschenbach (writing 1210) depicted the Grail not as a dish, but as a stone – a flat gemstone.

Chrétien’s word graal is not standard French or Latin. It could come from the Latin gradalis (step, a course of a meal) or gratalis (agreeable, gratifying), converted into bad dialectical French and then just transliterated into German.

We must ask the Passover question: Why is this Grail different from all others?

In 1187, Jerusalem had been captured by Muslims. In 1199 it was recaptured by Christians, knights who had sworn an oath to God to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulcher. The Crusades were preached as an appeal to vassals who were needed by their Lord in Jerusalem. Their goals were 1) to free the Eastern Christians from the Muslims, and 2) to free the Holy Sepulcher.

The sign of the Holy Land is the palm. A “palmer” is a crusader. They did not call themselves crusaders, but pilgrims. When they took the oath, a bishop would give them a cloth cross to sew onto their clothes. It was worn on the shoulder because Christ carried the cross over his shoulder. The pilgrim would hold also his sword upside down as a cross. [Actually, a palmer can be any sort of pilgrim, not just a crusader.]

In 1204, greedy crusaders sacked Constantinople. This obviated the first reason for the Crusades. Relics from Constantinople were stolen, bought, or looted and taken to the West. Sainte-Chapelle, for example, was built to house the Crown of Thorns. It was in this context that Wolfram wrote his Parzival, in which he asserted that the Grail was a stone.

Precious metals and stones come from Paradise. (Eden means pleasure. A pleasure garden is a paradise.)

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stones are there. (Genesis 2:10-12)
The Pishon is probably the river that ends at Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece.

Gems are a remnant of Paradise that we can still play with after the Fall. Red and green stones – the ruby/emerald and garnet/peridot – are especially associated with Paradise. The ruby was thought to be formed from coal by geothermal pressure, its red color capturing the fire that is inside coal. Magnetite was a “magic” stone that could attract iron and point north. Amethyst (Greek for “not drunken”) was the color of wine. Turquoise (“from Turkey”) contains life – it never dries out and turns brown, but remains green forever. Rock crystal (quartz) was liked better than diamond because it was easier to polish. Diamond is the hardest stone known to man, yet light passes through it unhindered. Like the Holy Sepulcher – light passed right through it. Wolfram puts a green cloth around the Grail, representing life.

Fr. Murphy’s theory is that the Muslim capture of Jerusalem in 1187 ruined Chrétien’s planned ending of the Grail story, and that was why he abandoned it. But Wolfram picked up the story, revised it, and continued it to the end. In departing from the earlier versions of the Grail as a cup or a dish, Wolfram was not abandoning the Eucharistic symbolism but re-focusing it. In addition the paten and chalice, you need an altar. Priests on the Crusades carried portable altars of stone. The altar stone was cut with five crosses and a rectangular reliquary, called a “sepulcher,” which contains three pieces of the host in addition to a relic. Wolfram is saying, “You’re going off to the Holy Land to slaughter Muslims when every priest is already carrying a sepulcher in his saddle bag.” The medieval portable altar contained a shroud, host, relics, and incense. The lid had a translucent red or green stone. Do you want to see the Body of Christ? You don’t need to go to Turin – just go to Mass. Christ’s place of enthronement is the altar. In the presence of the altar, you’re back in Paradise. To get to Paradise, drop the reins (a Parzival reference).

Wolfram’s story ends with the Christian Parzival and his Muslim rival Feirefiz discovering that they are half-brothers.

There are two portable altars in the Diocesan Museum at Bamberg, Germany. Fr. Murphy believes that one of these, the Paradise Altar, was Wolfram’s inspiration for the Grail.

To illustrate the last part of the lecture, Fr. Murphy showed us an actual altar stone, as well as a half-scale model of a medieval portable altar that he had commissioned. He also showed slides of the Paradise Altar from various angles. He gave each person in his audience two tiny stones – a garnet and a peridot. A photo of the Paradise Altar appears below. This and another color photo appear in Fr. Murphy’s article in Company magazine.

(Addendum: Company magazine has disappeared from the Web. But another Jesuit magazine article can be found here.)