Spring of St. Gildas at Saint Gildas de Rhuys in Brittany.
One of the great old and supposedly academically debunked traditions of ancient Christianity in the West is that St. Joseph of Arimathea came as an Apostle to Britain in the earliest years of Christianity.
Arthurian legend told of him as the bringer of the Holy Grail. His destination according to the tradition was Glastonbury in what became the sub-Roman “Celtic Rim” of southwest Britain.
Coinciding with the declining fortunes of the Church of England and the British Empire, alongside a general “post-Christian” malaise in Britain and scholarly dissing of its legends, Glastonbury in recent times has become the center for all manner of New Age and occult activity in England. It is best known today for its rock-pop music festival.
But it still is identified in popular legend with mysterious early origins of Christianity in Britain. Reportedly a branch from a flowering hawthorn bush associated with the legends of Joseph there is still brought to the English monarch around Christmas time annually. The song “Jerusalem” about the legends, with lyrics by William Blake (“And did those feet…”), still features prominently at the BBC Proms and football matches.
I have argued that although the tradition is unproven and generally discarded by scholars, it personifies in effect the truth of an ancient Christian presence around the Irish Sea, in the post-Roman and early Middle Ages part of the “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” and united with the “Byzantine” Eastern Mediterranean world of the Orthodox Church. Understanding that larger context helps provide insight into the historical and spiritual relation of Orthodox Christianity to the roots of Christian faith in Britain and Ireland.
When the pagan Anglo-Saxons were gaining power and presence in what had been Roman Britain by the time of the fifth century, they encountered older and at least somewhat Christian polities among the “native” Romano-Celtic Britons. In recent times, archaeologists and early medieval historians became interested in signs of continuity between Roman Britain and those western British realms. Historian Kenneth Dark in particular posited that the Irish Sea region was an unusual case in Western Europe, paralleling on a smaller scale Byzantium in the continuity of Romanitas, including an element of early Christianity. Archaeological evidence showed amphorae (wine containers) in the region, suggesting sixth-century trade with the Byzantine world, then resurgent in the West under Emperor-Saint Justinian the Great. The monastic-ascetic emphases of early Christianity in Wales and Ireland also suggested potential influences from the Eastern deserts and Constantinople. If Arthur existed contemporaneously in the sixth century, he could well have been a warlord amid those Christianized sub-Roman regimes in western Britain, fighting the pagan Germanic warlords and their British allies.
In all this, St. Gildas’ rare surviving writing from sub-Roman Britain in the sixth century offers a tantalizing suggestion of an early date for the arrival of Christianity. Known to have been based both in the Southwest of Britain and in Brittany, Gildas indicates that the Christian faith arrived in Britain within several years of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, or at least that that is what he knew in his later era, based on earlier traditions (that interpretation of his Late Antique Cambro-Latin rhetoric is in dispute academically but seems the clearest meaning). Anglo-Norman and French traditions about Joseph of Arimathea arriving at Glastonbury (whose Tor and high areas anciently formed an island amid marshes, near the tin mining centers of the Southwest) survive from a later date, in writings from the 12th to 13th century, although there are indications of an earlier tradition of an apostolic-era Christian foundation at Glastonbury, in an hagiographic text dated around 1000, before the Norman Conquest.
Meanwhile the Orthodox Church preserves traditions of the Apostle Simeon the Zealot (one of the Twelve) being martyred in Britain, as well as St. Aristobulus of the Seventy having done missionary work there, in the earliest days of the Church. Archaeology and a few textual fragments such as Gildas’ work in any case suggests a significant evidence of Christian presence in Roman Britain. One of the most famous Insular saints, St. Patrick, emerged in that milieu, probably in the fifth century, growing up in western Britain before committing later to missionary work in Ireland.
I wrote about all this in my Master’s Thesis in Early British Studies at the University of Wales at Aberystwyth, a hybrid graduate program of historical and literary studies. A published condensed version of the thesis, entitled “Gildas and Glastonbury,” is posted below. Significant new writing about the history of Glastonbury itself has occurred since the mid-1990s. I have kept up with those publications, and maintain still that there is no definitive proof that traditons of early Christianity in the West Country (where Glastonbury is) must be wrong. This 2016 article deals with some of the more recent archaeological and historical analysis, notably the Glastonbury Abbey Project. While there is, in my view, in the recent work a further tone of secular skepticism mixed with condescending 21st-century encouragement of unfactual modern mythical thinking, there remains no definitive evidence one way or another. The recent work as noted in the article does, however, support evidence for fifth-century occupation at the Glastonbury site, overlapping the purported Arthurian era.
Meanwhile, I hold to the conclusions of extensive earlier study (the thesis was much longer than the article embedded below), which was supervised by the historian D.P. Kirby, with significant help along the way in my graduate studies from the Celticist Marged Haycock and archaeologist Jeff Davies, to whom I remain very grateful while acknowledging the conclusions and faults of my study of course to be my own. The bottom line for me remains: The fog of early British Christian history still can not be pierced “scientifically” due to a lack of hard sub-Roman archaeological or historical evidence in one direction or another on the traditions. The traditions of a very early foundation for Christianity in Britain remind us of archaeological and historical evidence for a fairly extensive presence of the faith in Roman Britain as it developed, in relation to Gildas’ text. Perhaps most importantly for me, the traditions point toward formative continuities between the Orthodox Church and the Christian Irish Sea region in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, amid a renewed post-modern interest in Orthodoxy on both sides of the Atlantic today. And they remain a part of traditions of Orthodoxy for many, although the tradition of St. Aristobulus remains perhaps the most and earliest attested for an apostolic-era Orthodox Christian mission to Britain.
May the Apostles Symeon and Aristobulus, and Saints Gildas and Joseph of Arimathea, pray to God for us in the mission work of the Orthodox Church to the lands of the Atlantic today!
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The article below, “Gildas and Glastonbury,” based on my M.A. thesis, appeared in Via Crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J.E. Cross, ed. Thomas N. Hall (Morgantown: University of West Virgina Press, 2002).