legend about Joseph of Arimathea: Roger Wendover (1228) tells how an Armenian prelate, asked about him by the monks of St. Albans, claimed to have seen him under the name Karthaphilos. Matthew Paris repeats the story and adds that twenty-four years later (1252) other Armenians confirmed the story, holding the penal survival of a contemporary of our Lord to be a strong argument for the gospel's truth. It seems certain that the author of 1602 was acquainted with this account of Matthew, as the version is almost the same; but he gives the character a new name. Prof. J. Jacobs, of New York, is probably right in ruling out the influence of the 'slumbering hero' cycle, which contains a somewhat motley crowd from Nero and the Seven Sleepers down to Frederic Barbarossa, Rip van Winkle and Lord Kitchener. Nor will he admit any necessary connexion with Khidr, the omnipresent traveller and unseen guest of the Mahometans.[1] (Lidzbarski (Zeit. für Assyriologie, vii. 116) and Friedlander (Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, xiii. 110) both propose to identify him with Khidr, the peculiar figure of Muslim legend who is in part a sea-demon and in part Elijah, who also never died as other men.) 'This combination,' he says, of eternal punishment with endless wandering has attracted the imagination of numberless writers in almost every tongue of Europe.'[2] May it not be a memory, perhaps unconscious, of the old story of the gipsies, a race accurst because of some impious act towards the Saviour? The Protestant, true to his individualizing instinct, transfers
- ↑ Cf. my article in Folk-Lore, Oct. 1917, on the 'Persistence of Primitive Beliefs in Theology.'
- ↑ For the literary treatment see two recent monographs by Prost and Kappstein, Die Sage vom ewigen Juden and Ahasver in der Weltpoesie, both 1905. In 1844 Grasse wrote a treatise with the same title as Prost used, and in 1874 Helbig, and in 1893 Neubaur followed his example: Moncure Conway represented a learned insular view in his W.J., 1881, Gustave Paris Le J. Err. in the same year, and Morpugo ten years later wrote on the very obscure aspect, L'Ebreo errante in Italia.
