Quote:IN THE NEARLY FOUR centuries since the Bollandists were founded, they and subsequent generations of Dutch, German, Italian, and French scholars have whittled away at the canon of saints’ lives. If the saints are supposed to participate in the heavenly banquet, what was once a crowded buffet now resembles an intimate dinner party. Once scholars had stripped away the pious frauds, entertaining forgeries, and well-intentioned legends, they were left with only a small handful of martyrdom stories from before 250 that they judged to be historically reliable.
The remaining accounts were either greatly edited and expanded or composed long after the events by people who hadn’t met an eyewitness to the events they described, much less witnessed them themselves. Many of the discarded accounts were religious romances long on adventure and intrigue and short on probability and accuracy. Others were implausibly anachronistic and referred to institutions, ideas, and concepts that didn’t exist at the time their protagonists lived. Others still were forgeries that copied the form, style, and sometimes words of earlier martyrdom accounts. Some, like the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, turned out to be literary houses built on sand; their protagonists never existed. A few were more slippery and presented themselves as simple transcriptions of court affairs, when in fact they were written long after the events.11
Once the pious chaff had been separated and the forged weeds cut, out of the hundreds of martyrdom stories only six accounts remained from the earliest church.12 These so-called authentic accounts are as follows:
1. Martyrdom of Polycarp
2. Acts of Ptolemy and Lucius
3. Acts of Justin and Companions
4. Martyrs of Lyons
5. Acts of the Scillitan Martyrs
6. Passion of Perpetua and Felicita
Prof. Candida Moss
And then, Professor Moss takes even those silly stories apart.
