The Story of Joseph of Arimathea in AM 655 XXVII 4to

Abstract

The Story of Joseph of Arimathea extracted from the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus represents the earliest and most extensive amplification of the Gospels’ narratives dealing with the finding of Christ’s empty tomb and with the events leading to and following
his resurrection. The present study aims at providing the first survey and edition of the sole surviving extract concerning Joseph’s story in Icelandic translation, extant as item 5 in AM 655 XXVII 4ᵗᵒ, a much-neglected Icelandic homilary dating from ca. 1300 preserved at the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen. The Icelandic Story of Joseph is here compared to and tested against all the Latin and vernacular variant texts of the Gospel of Nicodemus that were known in Iceland by the beginning of the fourteenth century and related to the Marian and eschatological homilies transmitted along with it in A M 655 XXVII 4ᵗᵒ. The survey is followed by a first semi-diplomatic edition of item 5 (Af fangelsi Ioseps), whose deficient or illegible readings have been emended on the basis of its underlying
Latin source.