The Story of Joseph of Arimathea in AM 655 XXVII 4to 47 DARIO BULLITTA The Story of Joseph of Arimathea in AM 655 XXVII 4to Although only a handful of verses refer to him in the New Testament narratives, Joseph, a noble Jewish counsellor from the city of Arimathea, plays an essential role in the dramatic events following Christ’s cruci- fixion. Neither fully aware of the possibly prodigious outcomes, nor afraid of the wrath of his own community, Joseph played an integral part in the fulfillment of Christ’s passion and burial, as foretold by Isaiah (53:9) and, by implication, in the resurrection process. 1 In contrast to the 1 The early church typologically connected Matthew’s (27:58) account of Joseph’s peti- tion and entombment of Christ’s body to the ‘wealthy man’ of Isaiah (53:9), who assigns a tomb to the suffering servant: ‘And he shall give the ungodly for his burial, and the rich for his death: because he hath done no iniquity, neither was there deceit in his mouth’. On this subject, see for instance Wilkins (2009, 129–132). Unless otherwise stated, all quotations of the Latin Vulgate are taken from Weber et al. (2007); all English translations of its text are taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible, available at http://drbo.org, accessed on 27 May 2016. Bullitta, D., dr, adjunct professor, University of Sassari. “The Story of Joseph of Arimathea in AM 655 XXVII 4 to ”. ANF 131 (2016), pp. 47–74. 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 4 to , 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 AM 655 XXVII 4 to . 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. Keywords: Joseph of Arimathea, the Gospel of Nicodemus, Christ’s Resurrection, Mary’s Assumption, Maríu saga, Niðrstigningar saga, Skálholt Cathedral Library. I wish to thank Hallgrímur J. Ámundason for kindly providing me with his B.A. thesis and diplomatic transcriptions of AM 655 XXVII 4 to and AM 655 XVIII 4 to , Alex Speed Kjeld- sen for discussing with me several paleographical issues, and the anonymous reviewers for Arkiv för nordisk filologi for their helpful suggestions. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Zbigniew Izydorczyk for offering extensive advice and encouragement during my research on the transmission of the Latin Evangelium Nicodemi in Medieval Scandinavia and for careful reading of an earlier version of this article.