Traditions of Glastonbury

Rating:
Summary: Circumstatial evidence says...."yes"
Review: Jesus Christ's "lost years" are presented here primarily by tracking Joseph of Arimethea's travels to Cornwall and Wales. Joseph being Jesus' great-uncle on his mother's side, takes the boy Jesus with him on these travels after the death of Mary's husband, Joseph.

The facts presented in this book are, perhaps, too weak to establish anything more than probability. However, any serious student of history will acknowledge that very little in our past can be substantiated completely. The further back one goes, the more tenuous and ethereal the facts become. Often, as in the existence of ancient Jericho or Troy, one has only a steady stream of probabilities to base a hypothesis on. It is the strength of those probabilities that determines the validity of any research. This book contains a great amount of probability. More probability, I should say, than proved the existence of Troy. And yet, Troy existed.

Rating:
Summary: Speculative but very probable!
Review: The Traditions of Glastonbury is a book that gets you to think. It speculates that Jesus spent years as a youngster in Britain with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, who was in the sea trading business. Although there is no concrete proof that Jesus was there, there is a long tradition that places Joseph there. It is also established fact that Glastonbury was the first Christian church built, outside of Jerusalem, after the ascension of Jesus. How did the church get there? Many mysteries of the Bible are shrouded in mystery. That doesn't make them untrue! Also, well documented and supported scholarly work does not necessarily make for historical truth. It only makes it more accepted. History has been altered and truth is many times concealed in speculation and tradition.

Rating:
Summary: Speculative but very probable!
Review: The Traditions of Glastonbury is a book that gets you to think. It speculates that Jesus spent years as a youngster in Britain with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, who was in the sea trading business. Although there is no concrete proof that Jesus was there, there is a long tradition that places Joseph there. It is also established fact that Glastonbury was the first Christian church built, outside of Jerusalem, after the ascension of Jesus. How did the church get there? Many mysteries of the Bible are shrouded in mystery. That doesn't make them untrue! Also, well documented and supported scholarly work does not necessarily make for historical truth. It only makes it more accepted. History has been altered and truth is many times concealed in speculation and tradition.

Rating:
Summary: A treasure trove to be examined cautiously
Review: This volume, The Traditions of Glastonbury, is aptly characterized as having been "presented" by its author. It is a compilation, useful as a starting point, because it assembles a great deal of lore in a single thin convenient volume, and includes many pictures and maps.

Unfortunately, this is not carefully constructed history, but hodgepodge. The text is full of inconsistencies, conjectures, unsupported inferences, and contains no proper citations or bibliography. Moreover, it does not present and support a thesis, nor even provide a cohesive narrative, but hops about with abandon in space and time. That said, it is still a useful book - but one to be read with caution.

For example, the date for the destruction by earthquake of St. Michael's church is given as 1275 on one page, and 1276 on the next. What difference does a year make? Not much, granted, but if the author and editor did not catch variant dates a single page apart, one wonders how carefully they scrutinized the rest of the book. The name "Cadiz" appears on the first line of a paragraph, but as "Cadis" within the same paragraph. Moreover, the typography clearly shows that the first instance was corrected by the insertion of "wrong font" letters.

Historians cannot support their theses by appealing to "Many Biblical scholars" or to un-named "Experts", but must do so by citing sources which can be verified. This book does so all to infrequently, and when it does, it fails to comment upon the authority of its sources. Should we lend the same weight to the apocryphal "Gospel of Nicodemus" and the canoncal one of Mark? Perhaps yes, perhaps no - we expect authors to help us decide when and if.

One finds it hard to believe that the island "strong-bold" (sic) community of Glastonbury, for which we are given an "artist's conception", could simultaneously have been so compact that it could hold only a few dozen huts, and have raised herds of horses and cows and grown many vegetables. If that happened on the mainland, why not say so? Examples of bronze age artefacts are plentiful in the book, but the author cannot claim that, as he implies, the items in the pictures were all made at Glastonbury.

We are shown a "Jesus Well" in Cornwall, with the suggestion that Christ replenished His ship's stores there. Well, there's a St. Paul's in London. Should we conclude that the Apostle was there?

We do not know where Jesus spent His teens and twenties. But the author does not distinguish between the tradition that He did so in Britain, and the evidence pro or con. That Phoenecian sailors probably mined metals in Britain does not mean that Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea sailed there hundreds of years later - it means that it was technically possible for them to do so. The fact that the 18th Century poet Blake wrote a beautiful hymn based on the tradition tells us much about the persistence of the legend, but nothing about its historical veracity.

The Druid Trinity may have included a person whose name sounded like "Jesu", and mediaeval scholars might well have seen this as a prefigurement of Christ, but the author's contention that Christianity would not have been possible without the Druids is plain silly.

Read the book because of the fine examples, the many pictures and maps, the pleasure of speculation, and to learn the traditions themselves, but do not accept the inferences and conclusions blindly.

Rating:
Summary: A treasure trove to be examined cautiously
Review: This volume, The Traditions of Glastonbury, is aptly characterized as having been "presented" by its author. It is a compilation, useful as a starting point, because it assembles a great deal of lore in a single thin convenient volume, and includes many pictures and maps.

Unfortunately, this is not carefully constructed history, but hodgepodge. The text is full of inconsistencies, conjectures, unsupported inferences, and contains no proper citations or bibliography. Moreover, it does not present and support a thesis, nor even provide a cohesive narrative, but hops about with abandon in space and time. That said, it is still a useful book - but one to be read with caution.

For example, the date for the destruction by earthquake of St. Michael's church is given as 1275 on one page, and 1276 on the next. What difference does a year make? Not much, granted, but if the author and editor did not catch variant dates a single page apart, one wonders how carefully they scrutinized the rest of the book. The name "Cadiz" appears on the first line of a paragraph, but as "Cadis" within the same paragraph. Moreover, the typography clearly shows that the first instance was corrected by the insertion of "wrong font" letters.

Historians cannot support their theses by appealing to "Many Biblical scholars" or to un-named "Experts", but must do so by citing sources which can be verified. This book does so all to infrequently, and when it does, it fails to comment upon the authority of its sources. Should we lend the same weight to the apocryphal "Gospel of Nicodemus" and the canoncal one of Mark? Perhaps yes, perhaps no - we expect authors to help us decide when and if.

One finds it hard to believe that the island "strong-bold" (sic) community of Glastonbury, for which we are given an "artist's conception", could simultaneously have been so compact that it could hold only a few dozen huts, and have raised herds of horses and cows and grown many vegetables. If that happened on the mainland, why not say so? Examples of bronze age artefacts are plentiful in the book, but the author cannot claim that, as he implies, the items in the pictures were all made at Glastonbury.

We are shown a "Jesus Well" in Cornwall, with the suggestion that Christ replenished His ship's stores there. Well, there's a St. Paul's in London. Should we conclude that the Apostle was there?

We do not know where Jesus spent His teens and twenties. But the author does not distinguish between the tradition that He did so in Britain, and the evidence pro or con. That Phoenecian sailors probably mined metals in Britain does not mean that Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea sailed there hundreds of years later - it means that it was technically possible for them to do so. The fact that the 18th Century poet Blake wrote a beautiful hymn based on the tradition tells us much about the persistence of the legend, but nothing about its historical veracity.

The Druid Trinity may have included a person whose name sounded like "Jesu", and mediaeval scholars might well have seen this as a prefigurement of Christ, but the author's contention that Christianity would not have been possible without the Druids is plain silly.

Read the book because of the fine examples, the many pictures and maps, the pleasure of speculation, and to learn the traditions themselves, but do not accept the inferences and conclusions blindly.