A Document from Joseph of Arimathea Passed Down By His Descendants for Over 1,988 Years

In this episode of ‘The Nutrimedical Report,’ Dr. Bill Deagle is joined by archeologist Jonathan Gray to discuss a document written by Joseph of Arimathea and the amazing story of how his descendants have guarded his writings for over 1,988 years. The full shows can be heard here https://deagle-network.com/nutrimedical-report-show-wednesday-april-3rd-2019-hour-three-jonathan-gray-www-beforeus-com-continuing-joseph-of-arimethia-document-nz-story-amazing-convergence-of-facts-of-jonathans-jerusale/ and here https://deagle-network.com/nutrimedical-report-show-wednesday-march-20th-2019-hour-three-jonathan-gray-www-beforeus-com-support-ministry-with-ebooks-videos-amazing-biblical-truth-archaeology-joseph-of-arimethia-sauls/          .

Bill Deagle:   Welcome back and we have Jonathan Gray here. We’re going to be talking about the continuing story about Joseph of Arimathea with another document that’s right on your desk there in New Zealand and your website is beforeus.com. You’re one of the wise men of the earth literally bringing prophetic and apostolic truth to the population of people who want to or should become believers. Some of the people in the stories in these documents that you have are further able, at the time of the end to collaborate and show that God is the author of the bible and people like Joseph of Arimathea, the uncle of Mary, basically the grand uncle of Yeshua, Jesus has an amazing place in history. So, let’s get into it today.

Jonathan Gray:   Yes, Doctor Bill. Well, I just wish you were with me here today because at this moment on my desk, right before my eyes, sits a document that is actually 1,988 years old, now at this moment.

Bill Deagle:   When did you acquire that document? How long ago would that be?

Jonathan Gray:   About five years ago.

Bill Deagle:  Wow! So this is relatively recent.

Jonathan Gray:   Yes. Now, how I acquired it is in itself a miracle. That’s a story on its own and I’ll try to share part of that this morning. Now, until then we never knew it existed but it has a clearly trackable history and everything I’m going to share today is true history supported by solid archeological evidence. A document we never knew existed but it is 1,988 years old now, this month. Now, you can’t get any closer to an event than this report and we know exactly the day it was finally put together, on April the Twenty-Seventh, 31 A.D., in Jerusalem. The eyewitness author of the document found himself forced into a key role, following the execution of Jesus Christ.

Bill Deagle:   So, this would be right at the time of Jesus’ execution when this document arose.

Jonathan Gray:   Exactly.

Bill Deagle:   An actual physical document you have right in front of you.

Jonathan Gray:   And I have it right in front of me.

Bill Deagle:  Whoa!

Jonathan Gray:  And it was written…it tells us where it was written and when it was written.

Bill Deagle:  Was it written in Aramaic  or in Hebrew text?

Jonathan Gray:   It was written in Aramaic and it was written in the house of the disciple John…his Jerusalem house, immediately after the event.

Bill Deagle:   This must be a very valuable document.

Jonathan Gray:   Oh yes, yes it is. Now, four years after the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the growth of the early followers into an organization, that was proclaiming his resurrection to the world and were eyewitnesses of the event and were persecuted by the establishment for coming public with it. Yet, they were discussing it in the very city where the events happened and thousands of people in that city who could have disproved it if the event hadn’t happened, were converted to follow Yeshua and this ancient document actually was in the possession of Joseph of Arimathea when he was arrested. He and eleven close companions were arrested and exiled to perish at sea and their precious documents went with them, under their cloaks.

Bill Deagle:   Ah, in other words this document was taken with them when they were hauled away by the Romans and cast out to sea. In other words, the document was written at the time of Jesus’ execution and of course, Joseph gave his tomb and had to carve it out another six inches because Jesus was six inches taller than Joseph.

Jonathan Gray:   That’s right. So after…they survived of course, and in 35 A.D., that was four years after the event, they were put to sea, expected to die by their enemies and then two years later having survived. They finally reached the southwest coast of Britain and settled at a little place called Glastonbury, where it has a village there today and here with their records, they lived in peace for about six centuries. It was not until after Rome’s Saxon mercenaries invaded and conquered most of Britain that the Roman Catholic Synod of Whitby ordered the guardians of the Glastonbury records to surrender these non-Latin documents for burning and they did give up some but they continued to guard the most precious of them and that of course, took suspicion off them, that they were smuggling or hiding things because they gave up most of what they had and that was accepted as being all that they had.

Bill Deagle:   So, this document is one of those Glastonbury documents that was actually taken to Britain by Joseph when he was cast off?

Jonathan Gray:   Exactly. That’s right and this document stayed underground during centuries of persecution of Great Britain until ultimately some documents were smuggled out of Great Britain and one of them was smuggled into New Zealand to a spot which I’m  not going to name for the safety of the people even today. They actually are in a spot, we’ll call it spot X. This occurred in the 1800′s.

Bill Deagle:   Is it parchment or sheep skin? What kind of material was it written on?

Jonathan Gray:   It was written on a parchment and it has been translated into English. We can read exactly what it’s talking about. Let me say this, in the 1980′s  and 1990′s our associated archeological teams in Jerusalem were excavating in front of Skull Hill. Now, Ron Wyatt of America was the leader of the group and surveying the crucifixion and burial sites of Jesus Christ and after this, two of the team  and shall I say that was myself and my wife Josephine, received a strong impression to relocate our working base to New Zealand. Now, specifically to the same spot X but not knowing what we were about to discover several years later nor its significance.  We were not aware that the guardians of the document had smuggled the documents out of Britain to New Zealand. We didn’t know that the guardians were at the same spot X yet we were impressed to come to New Zealand  and go to that same spot X to set up our work in New Zealand.

Bill Deagel:   How long ago do you think the documents went to New Zealand?

Jonathan Gray:   Sometime during the 1880′s and then about one hundred years after they were smuggled we were doing archeological work in Jerusalem  and were impressed to come to the same spot X to set up our location and we didn’t know about these documents that had been smuggled to spot X.

Bill Deagle:   Now, why do you think this validation is occurring through you at this time of the end?

Jonathan Gray:   Because this is an age of great skepticism, when the message of the New Testament is being assailed and ridiculed and there are great attempts to discredit it.

Bill Deagel:   People need to grasp how important this is to understand that God sees the end from the beginning  and He provides these documents that are literally on your desk. So you can see this on the show all over the world. Get your books out for ‘The Man With Two Graves’ which is the latest book. In fact,  I have a copy of it sitting literally in front of me here. It’s so amazing to actually see that this book is right here, ‘The Man Who Needed Two Graves’ about Joseph of Arimathea and they can get this on beforeus.com.

Jonathan Gray:   So, there was a startling connection between our expedition findings which were amazingly related to what the Joseph of Arimathea document speaks about. I’ll give some details. I’m opening up the document now  and I’m going to mention something here. Now, when Jesus was crucified, he was put in this tomb and the details of this for example, were described in the book. I’m reading from the document…”A tomb already cut out of the rock…It was a two-chambered cavern. Northwest of the city…having a ledge running around the inside and the entrance faced eastward toward the place of execution… It was the north end of the garden…planted with cabbages, and the guardian was also the custodian of the tomb.”

Now, let me mention some things here. It was not an old tomb. It was a new tomb, already cut out of the rock. Ready for the person who had the land. It was a two-chambered cavern. Now, nobody has ever known that the genuine tomb of Jesus had two chambers in it and that it was northwest of the city. Today, if you go to Jerusalem you’ll find a Roman Catholic tomb of the holy sepulchre but it’s inside the walls of the city and it’s not in the northwest of the city. It’s a fake site anyway. It was found by Constantine’s mother but this description here by Joseph of Arimathea…”it’s already cut out of the rock..It has two chambers…It’s northwest of the city and inside the tomb there is a ledge running around the inside and the entrance of the tomb faces eastward towards the place of execution and it’s on the north side of the garden,’ and so those are facts which were forgotten. 

Now, when Jerusalem was destroyed in the year 70 A.D. The Jewish people were scattered and Jerusalem was totally emptied and became a desolation. That’s in the year 70. This is 39 years after the event of the crucifixion and no one knew what the tomb looked like or where it was or anything like that. And from the year 70 A.D. until British General Gordon in the 1800′s went to Jerusalem. No one had any clue as to where the real tomb was or how it was or its description. So, this description that we gave lined up with the description in Joseph’s book. The fact is that after Joseph took that book away from Jerusalem and Jerusalem was destroyed soon after. No one knew these facts and they could not have been made up. No one had any clue as to what the tomb looked like, where it was or which directions it faced and so on.

Bil Deagle:   Has anyone actually discovered the real tomb site since that time?

Jonathan Gray:   Yes. The tomb site has been found. We were excavating this tomb site.

Bill Deagle:   So, it’s your evidence of the tomb site and the evidence matched up with the book.

Jonathan Gray:   Yes. A very interesting twist of events took place to enable us to meet the guardians of the document. We got contact with a gentleman who lived in spot X, whom we didn’t know about and said, ‘this gentleman will put you in touch with the guardians who have the document.’ 

Now, we went searching then for this man. His name was Dermott and he had bought a house that had been owned by a member of the guardian document group and because of Dermott’s graciousness, we were granted access to the guardians. Now, to our astonishment the spokesperson for the group…This is the group that smuggled the document, their descendants. The spokesperson for the group was already expecting me to phone her and by an absolutely amazing coincidence she already possessed my book, ‘The Ark of the Covenant,’ and while we had been dying to meet her…the guardian of the document. She had been trying to find out more about us and how to contact us! It’s amazing!

So, on our first visit she handed over to us our own personal copy of the document and this document is important because it verifies in stunning detail the genuineness of the tomb  we had been examining in Jerusalem, as archeologists and secondly, it hit us that an independent eyewitness account regarding Jesus himself by one who was personally acquainted with him and had been preserved for two thousand years quite separately from the bible record. An independant, non-biblical confirmation. Now, during the period of 27 A.D. to 31 A.D. one of Jesus’ close acquaintances, in fact his great uncle had been placing on record as they occurred many of the things he saw and heard personally  and then those eyewitness records were brought together in the Jerusalem house of the apostle John after the crucifixion.

Now, Joseph became a marked man for reasons we’ve already discussed. He infuriated the Sanhedrin by giving an honorable burial to Jesus. Finally, Joseph and eleven others close to him were cast adrift, on a boat from which oars and sails had been removed and naturally they took their treasures with them. Including what written records they and the family relatives of Jesus had. They ended up in the Glastonbury area of Cornwall, England and were welcomed by the people there who knew Joseph because of his mining operations. Now, twelve hides of land were granted to them by Joseph’s friend Arviragus. Now, Arviragus was the royal family of Britain at that time…He represented them and still officially recorded in the British royal archives today. In the year 2019, we find these charters of land that were granted to Joseph and his people in 37 A.D. by Prince Arviragus of the Silures and today you are able to examine a record in Britain which contains remarkable details of the original charter and it’s embodied in the Doomesday book of William I. Now, anyone who goes to Britain and gets access to those records will see that original charter given to Joseph of Arimethia and those were them.

Now, Joseph died on July 27, 82 A.D. at the grand old age of 98. That’s on record. When they arrived in Britain they were able to relax from their concerns. The mood changed and they obviously looked on Glastonbury as a new permanent home where the Romans could not persecute them nor the Jews and their ancient scriptures were unpacked and taught, buildings built, trees and crops planted and the Romans were unable to occupy the area, which included Glastonbury. There was an established trading and shipping route operating between the Mediterranean and the British Isles. Now, the safety all came crashing down with the Roman Catholic Synod of Whitby. When the Roman Catholics invaded Britain. They used the Saxons to do it and then they took over most of Britain and the Synod of Whitby in 664 voted to standardize Christianity in Britain under Roman Catholic control, which would involve the use of Latin in the liturgy and acceptance of the Papal authority of Rome and of the Roman Catholic calender and steps were taken to enforce acceptance of the decision. And all non-Latin writings were to be destroyed and as we mentioned earlier, book burnings took place.

Bill Deagle:   What language were they primarily written in…Celtic or Roman? What were they written in?

Jonathan Gray:   In Britain? Celtic, Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic were all used.

Jonathan Gray:   Now, here is something that’s very interesting too. It was in the Apostle John’s house in Jerusalem where this book was written. Where Joseph of Arimathea wrote his report. Now, the same apostle John , who wrote the book of Revelation on the island of Patmos, did so at 37 degrees North. Now, the descendants and heirs of Joseph of Arimathea’s Glastonbury group settled in spot X at latitude 37 degrees South. Isn’t that amazing?