Most people today are familiar with the concept of a “saint,” but the question of when and how this concept arose is a very interesting one. The basic idea behind the Christian conception of sainthood can be traced all the way back to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, which contains stories about holy people using their special connection with God to perform miracles for the benefit of others.
This idea is expanded on in the writings of the New Testament and in other early Christian texts. Early Christian ideas about sainthood may have been influenced to some extent by similar Greek and Roman stories about holy men performing miracles. By late antiquity, a conception of sainthood similar to the one most people today are familiar with had developed. Although saints have become less prominent in western Christianity since the Protestant Reformation, ancient and medieval stories about saints continue to influence contemporary western culture.
Stories about holy people performing miracles in the Hebrew Bible
The concept of “sainthood” is fundamentally rooted in the idea that some human beings are, in some sense, more in touch with the Divine than others and that they can use their special connection with God to help others who may not be as well connected.
This idea is already present—at least in a nascent form—in the Hebrew Bible. For instance, in the First Book of the Kings 17:17–24, the prophet Elijah is described as calling upon the power of God to raise the son of a widowed woman from the dead. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV):
“After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. She then said to Elijah, ‘What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!’ But he said to her, ‘Give me your son.’ He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed.”
“He cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?’ Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the Lord, ‘O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.’”
“The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, ‘See, your son is alive.’ So the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.’”
It is primarily from stories like this in the Hebrew Bible about holy men performing miracles for the benefit of others that the later Christian concept of saints having the power to heal people and perform miracles derives.
ABOVE: Wall painting from the Dura-Europos Synagogue dated to around the early third century CE, depicting the prophet Elijah raising the son of the widow of Zarephath
Stories about holy people performing miracles in the New Testament
The writings of the New Testament further advanced and reinforced the idea that some people who are more in touch with the Divine can call upon the power of God and channel it to perform miracles. The Book of the Acts of the Apostles in particular is full of stories about Christian believers performing miracles—especially healings and exorcisms—through the power of God.
For instance, in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 3:1–10, we get a story about Peter and John healing a man begging in the street in Jerusalem who has been unable to walk since birth. The passage reads as follows, as translated in the NRSV:
“One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon. And a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms.”
“Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, ‘Look at us.’ And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. But Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong.”
“Jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognized him as the one who used to sit and ask for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.”
All the works that are now included in the New Testament were originally written in Koine Greek. The Greek word that is used in these texts to describe things as “holy” or “sacred” is ἅγιος (hágios). In earlier times, this word had originally meant “untouchable” and referred to people and things that either could not be touched because they were devoted to the deities or could not be touched because they were accursed and touching them would result in a person becoming ritually defiled. In the gospels, however, the word is exclusively used in association with sanctity.
ABOVE: The Healing of the Cripple, painted by a member of Raphael’s workshop at some point between between c. 1515 and c. 1516
Ancient Greek stories of holy men
We should not, however, ignore the fact that early Christianity developed in a distinctly Greco-Roman cultural context. The ancient Greeks and Romans told their own stories about holy people (usually men) and these stories have undoubtedly had some influence on Christian conceptions of sainthood.
For instance, the Greek writer Diogenes Laërtios, who lived in around the third century CE or thereabouts, tells the following story about a legendary holy man named Epimenides in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, book one, chapter ten, as translated by R. D. Hicks:
“Epimenides, according to Theopompos and many other writers, was the son of Phaistios; some, however, make him the son of Dosiadas, others of Agesarchos. He was a native of Knossos in Krete, though from wearing his hair long he did not look like a Kretan. One day he was sent into the country by his father to look for a stray sheep, and at noon he turned aside out of the way, and went to sleep in a cave, where he slept for fifty-seven years.”
“After this he got up and went in search of the sheep, thinking he had been asleep only a short time. And when he could not find it, he came to the farm, and found everything changed and another owner in possession. Then he went back to the town in utter perplexity; and there, on entering his own house, he fell in with people who wanted to know who he was. At length he found his younger brother, now an old man, and learnt the truth from him. So he became famous throughout Greece, and was believed to be a special favourite of heaven.”
“Hence, when the Athenians were attacked by pestilence, and the Pythian priestess bade them purify the city, they sent a ship commanded by Nikias, son of Nikeratos, to Krete to ask the help of Epimenides. And he came in the 46th Olympiad, purified their city, and stopped the pestilence in the following way. He took sheep, some black and others white, and brought them to the Areios Pagos; and there he let them go whither they pleased, instructing those who followed them to mark the spot where each sheep lay down and offer a sacrifice to the local divinity.”
“And thus, it is said, the plague was stayed. Hence even to this day altars may be found in different parts of Attica with no name inscribed upon them, which are memorials of this atonement. According to some writers he declared the plague to have been caused by the pollution which Kylon brought on the city and showed them how to remove it. In consequence two young men, Kratinos and Ktesibios, were put to death and the city was delivered from the scourge.”
“The Athenians voted him a talent in money and a ship to convey him back to Krete. The money he declined, but he concluded a treaty of friendship and alliance between Knossos and Athens.”
In this story, we see several elements that become prominent in later Christian stories about saints:
- Epimenides undergoes a transformative experience (i.e., falling asleep in a cave for fifty-seven years) and afterwards is found to be in close connection with the Divine.
- There is a calamity that is causing hardship for the people of a certain city (i.e., a plague that is ravaging the city of Athens).
- Epimenides uses his close connection to the Divine to end the calamity.
- The people of the city are grateful, but Epimenides refuses all offers of payment.
Epimenides is, in some ways, a sort of prototypical “pagan saint.” It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Epimenides is indirectly referenced in the writings of the New Testament not once but twice. In the Book of the Acts of the Apostles 17:28, the apostle Paul is portrayed as quoting a poem that was attributed to Epimenides in antiquity, known as the Kretika and, in the Epistle to Titus 1:12, the pseudepigraphical author pretending to be Paul references a different line from the same poem. In neither case is Epimenides mentioned by name, but, in both cases, he is alluded to as a Greek poet.
ABOVE: Imaginative illustration of Epimenides of Knossos, printed in 1553 in the Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum
The emergence of sainthood
The Greek word ἅγιος was translated into Latin as sanctus, which is where we get our English word saint from. Eventually, the idea developed that, even in death, holy people could pray to God on behalf of less holy people and persuade God to show favor on those people. Thus, the whole idea of praying to saints arose.
As I discuss in this article from April 2020, to some extent, the idea that deceased saints could be venerated, prayed to, and asked to intercede on behalf of living people served to perpetuate traditional polytheistic modes of worship. When people converted to Christianity, many of them effectively abandoned the worship of many deities for the veneration of many saints. In a similar manner to how people had once worshipped images of the traditional deities, people began to venerate icons of Christian saints.
Many early Christian saints even bear specific resemblances to older traditional deities. For instance, in the late Roman Empire, the Virgin Mary took on many aspects of the Greek warrior virgin goddess Athena. The Parthenon in Athens, which was originally built as a temple to Athena in the fifth century BCE, was converted into a Christian church dedicated the Virgin Mary in the late sixth century CE. There is even a story that, during the siege of Constantinople in 626 CE, the Virgin Mary appeared on the ramparts of the city, clad in armor, brandishing a spear, and exhorting the people to fight.
In ancient Greece and Rome, Asklepios was the god of healing and medicine. He had shrines known as Asklepieia, where people sometimes practiced a ritual known as incubation. As part of this ritual, people would sleep in one of his shrines in expectation of miraculous healing. After the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, Asklepieia were replaced with shrines to the healer saints Kosmas and Damianos, where people would practice incubation in almost exactly the same manner that earlier worshippers of Asklepios had done.
ABOVE: Illustration of the healer saints Kosmas and Damianos, from Les Grandes Heures d’Anne de Bretagne by Jean Bourdichon, painted circa 1503 and circa 1508, who stepped in to fill Asklepios’s old role as the god of healing
Medieval hagiography and its influence on modern folklore
In the Middle Ages, stories about saints of all kinds were wildly popular. Hagiographies (i.e., works written about saints) formed an entire genre of medieval literature. Although most people today are not closely familiar with this genre of literature, it has influenced some of our contemporary customs and traditions.
Notably, as I discuss in this article I published in December 2019, a Byzantine hagiography written by a man named Michael the Archimandrite in around the ninth century CE tells an influential story about Nikolaos of Myra, a Greek saint who supposedly lived in Asia Minor in around the fourth century CE.
Supposedly, Nikolaos heard about a poor man who had three daughters, but couldn’t afford to pay for any of their dowries, meaning they would almost certainly never be able to marry and would therefore be forced to become prostitutes in order to survive and make a living. To prevent this, Nikolaos secretly came to the man’s house at night and tossed a bag of gold coins in through the window. He did this for three consecutive nights, thereby giving the man enough money for him to pay for all three of his daughters’ dowries.
On the third night, the father stayed up to see who it was that was doing this wonderful thing for him and his three beloved daughters. He heard the bag of gold fall in from the window and immediately ran outside to see who was there. He threw himself at the saint’s feet, thanking him profusely for his extraordinary generosity. Nikolaos, however, raised the man from the ground and told him never to tell anyone who it was that had helped him.
Over the centuries, this story has passed through a range of different folkloric traditions, changing and evolving through each one. Eventually, it morphed into the modern American folktale about “Santa Claus” (a corruption of “Saint Nikolaos”) coming down the chimney at night to give children presents on Christmas Eve.
ABOVE: Thirteenth-century Byzantine icon of Saint Nikolaos of Myra from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, Egypt
You omitted the ancient association between sainthood and martyrdom, which was already present in Judaism; Jewish martyrs for the faith are usually referred to as qedoshim.
Nice article.
Thank you!
It is historically unlikely that anyone whom we might recognize as Epimenides of Knossos ever actually lived; he is a legendary figure, not a historical one. Your claim, however, that no one had heard of Epimenides until the nineteenth century is demonstrably wrong. He is mentioned in multiple surviving ancient Greek and Roman sources, including in Diogenes Laërtios’s book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, which I have quoted in the article above. We have manuscript copies of these texts dating at least as far back as the Middle Ages.
Epimenides is also mentioned in texts that were written during the Middle Ages and during the Early Modern Period, both of which come before the nineteenth century. In the article above, I have included an illustration of him that was printed in the Promptuarii Iconum Insigniorum in 1553. The illustration is unambiguously identifiable as Epimenides by the fact that the caption reads “Epimenides Creten,” which means “Epimenides of Krete.”
J. Rendel Harris is only noteworthy here because he discovered, edited, and translated a Syriac commentary dated to around the ninth century CE that quotes a Syriac translation of the text of the Kretika, a poem that was attributed to Epimenides in antiquity.
I have explained to you multiple times that that is not how historical methods work. Just because we don’t have an original, autograph manuscript written by Diogenes Laërtios himself in his own handwriting doesn’t mean we can’t use his work as a source. You can’t reasonably expect to have an original manuscript of any particular text written over a thousand years ago, but we have plenty of copies of works that were written in antiquity. Unless there is specific evidence to indicate that a work is a forgery, there is no reason to assume that it is one just because we don’t have an original manuscript written by the author.
In the case of Diogenes Laërtios, all evidence indicates that his work was written in around the third century CE or thereabouts. The work itself is written using third-century CE language, it relies on sources that would have been available in the third century CE, it doesn’t contain any identifiable anachronisms, and there are surviving works written after the third century CE that reference Diogenes Laërtios’s work. The most parsimonious conclusion is that The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers was really written in the third century CE.
No, you are not “following the rules of evidence as laid down by historians”; you’re making up your own rules of evidence, which are obviously silly to any human being with two grains of sense. You are literally arguing that, if something does not currently exist or cannot currently be examined, that automatically means that it never existed at all, even if there is compelling empirical evidence that it once existed. This is an inherently dumb argument that no credible historian would ever make. According to your logic:
* If you photocopy a document and then destroy the original, that means that the original document never existed and the text only ever existed as a photocopy.
* If you write multiple drafts of an article, but only publish the final draft and throw all the rough drafts away, that means you never actually wrote any drafts at all and the article only ever existed in the form that it was eventually published.
* Dinosaurs never existed; those fossilized bones archaeologists keep digging up were always just fossilized bones, never living creatures.
* Anyone who is not currently alive never really existed at all. Even if there are photographs of a person, documents bearing their signature, and living people who remember having met the person, those photographs and documents must automatically be forgeries and the people who remember the person as having lived must be misremembering, because it is currently impossible to sit down with the dead person and talk to them.
* If it is summer and there is no snow outside currently, that means snow never existed there at any point in time.
Clearly, this is all totally ridiculous, but yet all of the statements listed above are fully consistent with your “rules of evidence.”
Even if we totally leave aside the matter of how laughably flawed your reasoning is, your facts still don’t hold true. Your claim that the oldest surviving manuscript of Diogenes Laërtios’s Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers was produced in the nineteenth century is demonstrably false; there are multiple surviving manuscripts of the text from the Middle Ages. The most accurate of these manuscripts by far is Codex Borbonicus (Graecus Gr. III. B 29), which is currently held in the National Library in Naples and dates to around 1200 CE. The second best surviving manuscript is Codex Parisiensis (Gr. 1759), which dates to around 1300 CE.
There are also countless printed editions of Diogenes Laërtios’s text from before the nineteenth century. The earliest surviving printed edition of any part of Diogenes Laërtios’s text was produced 1497. The first printed edition of the complete Greek text was produced in 1533 in the city of Basel, Switzerland, by the Renaissance humanist scholar Johann Froben, based on a medieval manuscript similar to the surviving manuscript Codex Lobkowicensis, which is currently held in the library of the Lobkowicz family.
For goodness sakes, Harriet, you’re being both dumb and hopelessly ignorant. Try to do better.
It is absolutely no mystery why copies of ancient texts are more likely to survive than the originals. The reasons for this are extremely well understood.
The first reason why copies of ancient texts are more likely to survive than original manuscripts is because there are usually a lot more of them. By definition, there can only be one original manuscript of any ancient text. If anything happens to that one original, then it is gone forever and no one will ever be able to retrieve it. The number of copies of an ancient text that can be made, however, is infinite. Thus, a group of scribes could (in theory) produce a thousand copies of a single text. If, for some reason or another, six hundred of those copies get destroyed, then there are still four hundred copies left. We can be almost certain that the manuscript copies of ancient texts that have survived to the present day represent only a tiny fraction of all the manuscript copies that ever existed.
The second reason why copies are more likely to survive than originals is because they were produced later. If a manuscript was produced two thousand years ago, that means two thousand years have passed since it was produced. That’s a lot of time for something to have happened to destroy it. If the text was only produced a thousand years ago, though, that means that only a thousand years have passed since it was produced. That is half as much time for something to have happened to it. Thus, a text that was only produced a thousand years ago is much more likely to survive than a text that was produced two thousand years ago. A thousand years from now, many of the manuscripts that were produced a thousand years ago that still exist today will be gone. That’s just how the universe works.
The third and final reason why copies of ancient texts are more likely to survive than original manuscripts is because, generally speaking, the copies are written on more durable material. In ancient times, most people wrote on papyrus scrolls, which, under normal conditions of wear and use, typically had about the same shelf life as modern acid paper books. A papyrus scroll typically breaks down within less than a century. Only under extraordinary conditions is a papyrus scroll likely to survive for two thousand years. This is the reason why the vast majority of ancient papyrus manuscripts and fragments that have survived to the present day are recovered from dry Egyptian tombs that have been sealed for thousands of years or from the dry sands of the Egyptian desert.
By the Middle Ages, however, most people were writing in parchment codices. Parchment is made from animal skin and it is much more flexible and durable than papyrus. The format of a codex also reduces wear and allows the material to survive much longer. A parchment codex can easily survive for a thousand years; whereas most papyrus scrolls probably couldn’t.
It is interesting how the modern process of canonisation – the formal definition of a saint – still includes the remnants of the history you outline. Nowadays you have to be dead, and you do not have to have performed any miracles, which would probably have surprised St Paul. Our current definition is simply ‘one who has gone to heaven’, and may include people whose lives were in general far from exemplary, as long as something occurred sufficiently convincing to make the Catholic Church, at least, certain that they did go to heaven when they died. However, in order to be certain of this at least one miracle does have to be attributed to them after they’ve died, mostly in the form of miraculous healing after specific appeal to them has been made.
I also agree that a generous proliferation of saints absorbed an apparent human need for supernatural superintendents. You might have mentioned that a great many saints have been designated “patron saints” of places, organisations, trades, churches or abstract concepts, and seem to have performed much the same functions as the pagan gods who preceded them.
Good points, Hugh, especially in your 2nd paragraph. Thank you.
Greek and Latin writing degree bearing Classicist here.
Harriet. This is like saying the moon is made of cheese. And that you suggested Spencer needs to be thorough in “checking sources”–when you not only clearly made zero effort to check your own, but persisted in obvious error. (And again, clearly made no effort to verify your statement.)
Open a copy of the “Oxford Classical Dictionary” and turn to Epimenides and you’ll get a concise list of people who referenced him. He’s referenced in Plato’s Laws for crying out loud! (Or is the written work of man born in roughly 428 BCE too recent for you?)
Bless you Spencer Alexander McDaniel for trying to explain things, when Harriet’s aforementioned statement is the very definition of absurd.
Oh my… i’ve come across this article only today, but i really cannot refrain from replying to Harriet’s last comment, left unanswered by Spencer for unknown reasons (maybe he got tired of wasting time). Ok, i’ll try.
“Unless someone can produce an original manuscript, the only means of verifying authorship is by contemporary reference elsewhere”.
I thought the ‘contemporary reference’ obsession was a mental problem of the Jesus Mythicists only. The DSM should be updated. Ok. By contemporary reference you mean ‘written during the lifetime of the author or within 30 (or less) years after his demise’, maybe? Even if there was (I didn’t bother to check, it’d be useless after all), i’m 99% sure that: the original autograph document that contains such reference to Laertius is no longer extant; and the earliest extant manuscript of a copy of this document is medieval (in the vast majority of cases, not before the X cent.). So, you are right anyway (if your own historical method is valid). It follows that all of the so-called Greco-Roman literature is, in fact, medieval. It does makes sense after all: who could doubt that Lucretius’ De rerum Natura and the Priapeia were written by Christian monks?
About Epimenides: if we accept that he was a real person, then the claims that he slept for 57 years and lived for three centuries are obviously not true. In the quote from Laertius given by Spencer in this article there is a chronological indication: the 46th Olympiad (the four-years period between two Olympic games). So… the 590s BCE i guess? Who was writing historical works in that time in Greece? The logographoi. The earliest logograph whose works are preserved in fragment is Hecataeus of Miletus, born 550 BCE circa. Of course he must’ve written his works later, not as a child. Don’t know when the historical Epimenides died, but i think that Hecataeus’ works are not contemporary by your standards. The problem is: if you apply this ‘contemporary reference’ thing not only to be sure when a literary work was written, but also if an historical person really existed or if an historical event really took place, you’ll end up throwing the first two centuries of the ancient roman republic (509-300 BCE) in the realm of myth, together with the Monarchy period. If you have studied ancient roman history, i need not to tell you why.
“Interesting you refer to a thousand years.”
Mm.. why int’resting?
“The foundations of the earliest monasteries are dated by archaeologists to the 11th century and it was of course monks…”
Okay, can already smell the odour of Fomenko’s armpits coming this way. If it was useful, i could tell you that there are lotsa monasteries that archeaologists and historians date before the 11th century: Bobbio Abbey (614), Luxeuil Abbey (590s), St. Gallo Abbey (VIII century), Reichenau Abbey (724), Prum Abbey (720 original foundation), Streoneshalh, then Whitby Abbey (657), Monkwearmouth/Jarrow Abbeys (VII cent.), and so on and on… Did I forget Montecassino? There really are regions of Europe where the earliest monastery was founded after 1000 AD: Finland, Baltic States… Only God knows why.
However, everyone knows that archeaologists and historians are paid by the Vatican: Christianity did not exist before XI century. In fact, all of the monasteries mentioned above have not survived in their original form: to justify this, historians have invented Viking raids, Saracens raids, Magyars raids, Gremlins raids, Henry VIII of England, the French revolution anticlerical frenzy, fires and earthquakes. Everithing to manipulate us and make us believe that Western history is longer than it actually was, for reasons that are obvious to everyone. Intelligent people should put this fictional junk aside and stick to science, a field where you can empirically check yourself if something said by a scientist or a science textbook is true. For example, they say that the atmosphere of Neptune is composed by hydrogen (80% circa), helium (19% circa) and methane (1,5% circa). If you’re not convinced, or you think it’s a conspiracy, you can easily control that yourself (everyone knows how to do it).
Btw, the plural of codex is codices.