The Gospel of Joseph of Arimathea was an alleged gospel on the life of Jesus Christ attributed to Joseph of Arimathea.
A copy, written in a papyrus in the Coptic language, was unearthed in Kozra (a Christian colony in Egypt) in March 1927 during Robert Hawes's excavation. The Holy Grail featured prominently in the text. Its discovery caused a sensation and was described as the "find of the millennium" among churchmen and lay men alike, and the papyrus was taken to the British Museum for study. However, expert sources considered the possibility that the manuscript was fake, dating it between the second and seventh centuries. With prominence of the Grail having no place in early Christianity, the manuscript was dismissed by an anonymous source as a medieval fable; such concerns were published in a news article with the headline "New Gospel's Authenticity Disputed".
Upon hearing about this discovery, Henry Walton Jones, Senior hoped that the gospel 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 but felt unable to have any opinion on its authenticity, other than it having historical significance.