Gospel of Joseph of Arimathea

The Gospel of Joseph of Arimathea is an alleged gospel on the life of Jesus Christ, authored by Joseph of Arimathea.

A copy, written in a papyrus in the Coptic language, was to be found in Kozra, a Christian colony in Egypt. This was unearthed in March 1927 during Robert Hawes's excavation and the manuscript. Its discovery caused a sensation and was described as the "find of the millennium" among churchmen and lay men. The Holy Grail featured prominently in the text. However expert sources considered the possibility that the manuscript was fake, dating it as late as the 7th AD. The prominence of the Grail had no place in early Christianity, and in that context, the manuscript stroke as a medieval fable.

Once hearing about this discovery, Henry Walton Jones, Sr hoped that it would contain an eyewitness description of the Holy Grail and made daily phone calls to the wire services in New York to hear everything that could be learned about its content. By the next year he saw the papyrus.