What do invented saints tell us about Christianity?

[Belacqua]

Thank you. That's more people, and more authoritative, than I would have expected.

Could be inspired by a literal interpretation of verses like in Revelation. Says nothing about the original intent of the author though.

The thing is, though, that in the OT the Earth cosmology seems to be that of a disc rather than a rectangle. And I'm not aware of contemporary Greek models of Earth implying a rectangular form of a flat earth.

I see that I was speaking too strongly about when the round-earth ideas became widely accepted. This was my mistake, I guess in reaction to false claims that people believed it all the way up to Columbus. It was not as widely accepted as I had thought, in the first four centuries AD or so. So mea culpa!

I think you're right, though, to say that we still can't conclude anything much about the intention of the author of the Revelation of John. Most of his symbolism is adapted from the Old Testament, and if he's using a squared-off version of a flat earth in the midst of all the other symbols, it still makes sense to see it as a literary device. 

There are also aspects I don't know about -- like idioms in use in Greek at the time. If we weren't eager to pounce on each other's expressions, I think we wouldn't be bothered by saying something like "Captain Kirk searched every corner of the galaxy but could never find an alien girl to satisfy him." It wouldn't imply a real galaxy with corners. 

So I think I'll stick with "unknown" for the geographic beliefs of the author of Revelation, and concede that he might have been a flat-earther. But he may well not have cared much, just as Augustine says we should leave it up to the experts. John's Revelation seems to be mostly about the eventual triumph of the church in the face of Imperial opposition, and the shape of the earth is about as relevant there as the outcome of a double slit experiment.

Here is a relevant passage from a different page on Wikipedia:

The myth of the flat Earth is a modern misconception that Earth was believed to be flat rather than spherical by scholars and the educated during the Middle Ages in Europe.[1][2][3]

During the Early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint, which had been first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. From at least the 14th century, belief in a flat Earth among educated Europeans was almost nonexistent, despite fanciful depictions in art, such as the exterior of Hieronymus Bosch's famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, in which a disc-shaped Earth is shown floating inside a transparent sphere.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

Again, I'm surprised that the belief continued until so late -- Dante clearly describes a spherical earth about 1300, and never got in trouble for it. 

I'm glad that the author mentions Bosch's painting there, because it acknowledges that non-scientifically accurate images can still be used in the arts, and that these weren't intended to deceive. (Bosch was educated.) 

Historian Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat-Earth error flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over biological evolution. Russell claims "with extraordinary few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the Earth was flat", and ascribes popularization of the flat-Earth myth to histories by John William Draper, Andrew Dickson White, and Washington Irving.[2][7][8]

[...]

In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell describes the Flat Earth theory as a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization and creationism.[7][2][3]

James Hannam wrote:

The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.[9]

So at least in part the idea that medieval people were generally flat-earthers can be attributed to an ideological campaign.