any bush in my garden.

In Glastonbury, as in all noble and humane things, the myth is more
important than the history. One cannot say anything stronger of the
strange old tale of St. Joseph and the Thorn than that it dwarfs St.
Dunstan. Standing among the actual stones and shrubs one thinks of the
first century and not of the tenth; one's mind goes back beyond the
Saxons and beyond the greatest statesman of the Dark Ages. The tale that
Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain is presumably a mere legend. But
it is not by any means so incredible or preposterous a legend as many
modern people suppose. The popular notion is that the thing is quite
comic and inconceivable; as if one said that Wat Tyler went to Chicago,
or that John Bunyan discovered the North Pole. We think of Palestine as
little, localized and very private, of Christ's followers as poor folk,
astricti globis, rooted to their towns or trades; and we think of vast
routes of travel and constant world-communications as things of recent
and scientific origin. But this is wrong; at least, the last part of it
is. It is part of that large and placid lie that the rationalists
tell when they say that Christianity arose in ignorance and barbarism.
Christianity arose in the thick of a brilliant and bustling cosmopolitan
civilization. Long sea-voyages were not so quick, but were quite as
incessant as to-day; and though in the nature of things Christ had not
many rich followers, it is not unnatural to suppose that He had some.
And a Joseph of Arimathea may easily have been a Roman citizen with a
yacht that could visit Britain. The same fallacy is employed with
the same partisan motive in the case of the Gospel of St. John;
which critics say could not have been written by one of the first few
Christians because of its Greek transcendentalism and its Platonic tone.
I am no judge of the philology, but every human being is a divinely
appointed judge of the philosophy: and the Platonic tone seems to me to
prove nothing at all. Palestine was not a secluded valley of barbarians;
it was an open province of a polyglot empire, overrun with all sorts of
people of all kinds of education. To take a rough parallel: suppose some
great prophet arose among the Boers in South Africa. The prophet himself
might be a simple or unlettered man. But no one who knows the modern
world would be surprised if one of his closest followers were a
Professor from Heidelberg or an M.A. from Oxford.

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