The Christian religious tradition includes the cult of the saints as one of its pillars. The similarities with Greco-Roman custom are (at least) too great not to know.
A wonder of the Hermitage Sanctuary of San Tirso and San Bernabé (Merindad de Sotoscueva). Photo by MJ Valiño.
We can discern at least two details in the Christian miraculous tradition. One of these is the early appearance of similarities between pagan heroes and Christian saints, for example a pair of saints that are curiously similar to what the classical tradition claimed about the most famous doctors in mythology. Cosme and Damián were two medical twins born of Christian parents and dated in the years. III. They practiced medicine in Cilicia, especially in the Aegean (modern Ayas), even if it is said for free. When their knowledge was not enough, their faith in God gave them the most necessary healing, to the point that they succeeded in converting many Gentiles. His death took place during the persecution of Diocletian: they were arrested along with his three younger brothers and subjected to torture, stoning and crucifixion, but they came out alive. Finally, his beheading was proclaimed, which was apparently effective.
The legend of these martyrs includes not only the wonder of their persistent resistance to torment. It is very interesting to see how, once they were dead, they behaved like another immortal doctor, Asclepius, who performed the cure or inspired the cure while asleep. So the most famous miracle of these saints is the healing of a leg affected by critical ischemia. Deacon Justinian, attached to the basilica of these saints in Rome, suffered dangerous gangrene in one of his legs. One night, after praying a lot to the brothers, they appeared to him in a dream discussing how to fix the problem. They decided to amputate the leg and then replace it with the leg of a recently murdered Ethiopian who “wouldn’t need his anymore”. Upon awakening, the deacon felt recovered and found that his illness had already passed from his body.
The resemblance to the miracle of Asclepius that I mentioned in post 049 is great. And all the more so is the fact that the saints were brothers, like the mythical Machaon and Podalirio, who appear in the Iliad as the doctors of the Greek army. The most famous remedy for this is the one they reached for Philoctetes, one of the Greek leaders who was bitten by a snake on the island of Tenedos during the trip to Troy. The incident caused a horrible rotting and smelly infection that led his companions to leave him on the island. When Philoctetes was brought to Troy as a result of an oracle to conquer the city, the brothers cured him of this kind of gangrene.
The second interesting detail of the Christian tradition about miracle saints (in fact almost all of them), is the existence of many shrines of the same that celebrate the extraordinary healings: through paintings, sculptures and poems related (sometimes in the form of a precedent of the modern comics) the history of these healings, a practice we have captured perfectly in Epidaurus, where Asclepius inspired healing during dreams. One of the many examples is the image at the head of this post, taken in the sanctuary of San Tirso and San Bernabé in the caves of Ojo-Guareña. The ceiling of the cave and the walls from a certain height are covered with frescoes depicting miracles, aided by poems to explain the images.
On the peculiarity of miracles, this time linked to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, here’s a link to an interview Gabriel Andrade gave me a few months ago:
Regards.