Fraud/Invention in the lives of Saints

Luther criticized the Catholic Church, but one of the reasons was the amount of forged relics and saints.

Take Marina, a pious woman who abandons her family, dresses like a boy, and secludes herself in a monastery, only to be accused of misconduct and outed as a woman after her death. It’s a great story, but the events are practically identical to those in the lives of Sts. Pelagia, Eugenia, Euphrosyne, Theodora, Margaret, and Apollinaria.

1. In the case of Sts. Chrysanthus and Daria, it’s a Christianized version of an Indian, Hindu story. Of the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Indian prince who became the Buddha. This is no secret, but it’s not common knowledge either. Since the nineteenth century scholars have recognized the similarities and acknowledged that this story is simply the legend of Siddhartha thinly covered in a Christian glaze. A companion of Marco Polo, Diego de Couto, noticed the similarities too and argued in his continuation of the Décadas (5.54.6.2) that the Buddhist legend was dependent on the Christian one. I cannot help but admire his optimism. All scholars since have recognized that it is the Christian story that is derivative. Hippolyte Delehaye encapsulates the prevailing view when he writes, “And which of us today is unaware that the life of the saints Barlaam and Josaphat is merely an adaptation of the Buddha legend?” (The Legends of the Saints [Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1961], 63).
2. So we have Buddha as a saint.

The invention of Josaphat was not a deliberate forgery; it was the result of human error. The story grew and spread, moved from one region to another, and was translated and retranslated until Christian hagiographers mistakenly set it in literary stone. It is impossible to ascertain when Josaphat was canonized, but by the time Cardinal Caesar Baronio sat down to revise the official church calendar in the late sixteenth century, Barlaam and Josaphat were included under November 27. In a cruelly ironic twist Barlaam and Josaphat became wildly popular. Their story was translated into every European language, and it even makes a cameo in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Some historians have sought to soothe religious anxieties about this mistake, even arguing (no doubt correctly) that the Buddha was very saintly. Max Müller, a scholar of “oriental religions” and one of the first to explore the parallels between Buddha and Josaphat, tries to argue for the retention of Josaphat alongside other “not always more saintly saints” in Last Essays by the Right Hon. Professor F. Max Müller, First Series (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), 277. It’s difficult not to admire Professor Müller for his honesty and ecumenical spirit.

These stories are so common and are copied and copied off of other stories.