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Saint legends

To the early church a legend meant the narrative of the life of a saint or a martyr, especially the account of his triumphs over temptation and of the miracles he witnessed or performed. Even to-day in some monasteries such stories are read at meals while the monks eat. It is interesting to note that the church distinguishes between legenda, things to be read, and credenda, things to be believed. What appears to be the earliest of these legends and the model of the others is said to have been written by St. John of Damascus, a monk of Syria, who lived in the eighth century. It is called "Barlaam and Josaphat" and contains besides the lives of the prince and the prophet many beautiful parables, one of which Shakespeare immortalized in the casket scene in the "Merchant of Venice". The life of Josaphat is in turn said to be the legendary life of the Buddha. There are many beautiful Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Christian stories of this type. In the Cynewulfian group of Anglo-Saxon Lives of the Saints, the "Andreas" is considered very fine. With its account of St. Andrew's miraculous rescue of St. Matthew from prison among the heathen is a sturdy, realistic description of a stormy voyage on northern seas. "The Golden Legend", published by Caxton in 1483, is a translation of a celebrated medieval collection of lives of the greater saints, composed in Latin by Jacobus de Voragine, a Dominican archbishop of Genoa, in the thirteenth century.