Did Jesus visit Cornwall? Local folklore says he sailed there as a teenager with tin merchant uncle

“And those feet used to walk on the green mountains of England?” For many, this rousing opening line of England’s unofficial national anthem, Jerusalem, alludes to the idea that Jesus briefly created heaven in this land during a visit.

Indeed, William Blake’s 1804 mystical poem, set to music by Hubert Parry, leaves an intriguing conundrum that has been hotly debated over the years – not least at Easter.

The idea that the Son of God traveled thousands of miles across treacherous seas and landed in Cornwall after a shipwreck has long been a matter of folklore.

Throughout the ages, it has been claimed in the Westland that Jesus visited the area with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea.

The suggestion has been derided as a wildly implausible myth.

But by the time Jesus was born, people from the eastern Mediterranean had been visiting Cornwall for at least 1,000 years to trade tin.

Glyn S. Lewis, author of Did Jesus Come To Britain?, has concluded after a lifetime of research that Christ came to our coast twice, visiting Cornwall and Somerset.

And dr. Gordon Strachan, a former Church of Scotland clergyman and history graduate of Oxford, went further, stating that Jesus came here as part of his childhood education and studied sacred geometry and spiritual matters with the druids of ancient Britain at Glastonbury.

Lewis told The Mail on Sunday: ‘The legend that Jesus came here is very strong. It is a historical fact that Christianity came to Cornwall very early.

‘St. Augustine was sent here by Pope Gregory in the 6th century to convert the English, but when he arrived in the western part of Britain he found people already worshiping Christ.”

Lewis claims that the link between Jesus and the ancient Celtic-speaking Britons of Cornwall was Joseph of Arimathea – who the Gospels say was a prominent and wealthy man and a secret disciple of Jesus.

He collected the crucified body of Jesus for burial on Good Friday.

Some ancient texts suggest that Joseph was an uncle of the Virgin Mary and made his fortune as a merchant of metals. This would have taken him to Cornwall, which had been Europe’s best source of tin since the Bronze Age – highly sought after as it is alloyed with copper to make bronze.

Ancient historians such as Herodotus recorded that the Phoenicians sailed from the ports of Tire and Sidon – just over 50 miles from Nazareth – via the Strait of Gibraltar to islands off the western coast of Europe.

However, the Phoenicians jealously guarded the secret of the source of their tin, and ancient Greek and Roman accounts are vague about the islands’ location.

In 2019, a scientific analysis of pure tin ingots recovered from Bronze Age shipwrecks off the coast of Israel proved that the metal had been mined in Cornwall.

Traditionally, Christians assume that young Jesus was a carpenter in Nazareth along with his father Joseph, rejecting claims that he ever traveled beyond what is now the Holy Land.

But Lewis and Dr. Strachan disagreed. They have claimed that Jesus traveled to Britain – an experience that helped him develop his extraordinary wisdom.

Both men scoured the West Country for ancient legends about Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea, who in Arthurian mythology was the original bearer of the Holy Grail – the vessel that held Christ’s blood – and brought it to Glastonbury.

For Lewis, one of the most important clues is an intricately carved stone arch above the door of the now-disused St. Anthony’s Church on Cornwall’s beautiful Roseland Peninsula.

“The building has signs that it is something other than a church in Phoenician times,” he said. “The church was originally a tin trading post.”

The 1,000-year-old arch features a series of carved icons said to be copied from Phoenician carvings.

Lewis said the carvings were first interpreted by an archaeologist in the 1970s, who claimed they told of Jesus’ birth and visit to Cornwall, and are the first documented evidence of the local legend that Jesus visited Cornwall with Joseph. It is said that their ship foundered on the rocks of St. Anthony’s Head and that they were rescued by Phoenician sailors trading with the locals.

Lewis said, “The Phoenicians carved an account of the incident in wood with the date. This is copied on the stone arch.’

He added that the traveling uncle and cousin may have been looking for fresh water in Padstow.

“If you follow the little white markers by the golf course,” Lewis explained, “you’ll find Jesus Well. There is no other place in Britain called Jesus Well. People in the Middle Ages brought their children there to be cured of illnesses.’

According to local legend, Joseph and Jesus also went to the Ding Dong mine near Madron, which had been operating for centuries by then.

Lewis believes that on a later visit, Joseph and Jesus went north, along the coast from Devon and Somerset to Burnham and Weston-super-Mare, then by log cabin through the flooded Somerset Levels, trading Baltic beads and amber for tin.

“When Joseph acted, Jesus had time to spare. It is thought that he went to Glastonbury to a Druidic school. The druids believed in atonement and one who died for sin. The death of Jesus on the cross as atonement for sin would have been readily accepted by them.

“There is no record of the druids resisting Christianity and in fact they got into it because of this doctrine of atonement, which Easter is all about.”

It is generally acknowledged that the medieval monks of Glastonbury in the 13th century played up the legend of the ‘visit’ of Joseph of Arimathea to raise the status of their abbey and stimulate the lucrative pilgrimage trade.

But the legend predates the abbey. Historical records mention a church on the site in the 10th century. And research by archaeologists at the University of Reading found fragments of high-quality Roman pottery from 450AD.

No doubt the truth of whether Jesus visited the South West of England will never be proven. There will be endless debates over mysterious hieroglyphs and ancient place names said to be evidence. But few experts took seriously the local legend in County Antrim that a Spanish Armada galleon had wrecked on their shores until the late 1960s, when divers discovered a treasure from the Armada ship Girona in a place known to locals for 400 years as ‘Spanish Rocks’. ‘.

Lewis insists that the legends are, in fact, rooted. “There’s a conflict between people who say, ‘If it’s not in the Bible, I can’t really accept it’ and those who say, ‘Well, where was He for 18 years when He was growing up?’ ‘

But there is no doubt that Christianity was sown in Cornwall. Churches sprang up in the South West much earlier than in any other part of Britain, and by the time St Augustine arrived in AD 597, there was a thriving church community.

Whatever the truth, when someone sings the first two stanzas of Jerusalem, they are patriotically expressing the belief that Jesus Christ traveled to England—where He built a Holy Land.