the first keeper of the Grail
Joseph of Arimathea
The man who buried Christ, and who carries the vessel to Britain in the French tradition.
The Vulgate's first branch gives the Grail a genealogy running back to the Crucifixion: Joseph of Arimathea catches the blood, keeps the vessel, and his line carries it to Britain, where his descendants become its guardians down to Pelles and Galahad. It is this move that converts a mysterious object in an unfinished French poem into a Christian relic with a lineage — and that makes purity, rather than compassion or attention, the qualification for reaching it.