Opinion

There may have been two St Patricks, and St Brigid might not have existed. But there are no doubts about Jesus

The self-sacrifice of Jesus affects us more than you might think, and more than any saint ever did

Documents left behind by St Patrick are mentioned in the Book of Armagh, which is stored in Trinity College library. Photograph: Cyril Byrne
David Wilson
Sun Jul 28 2024 - 00:30

This year started innocuously enough. But we had scarcely left January before we were dragged through St Brigid’s Day. After being deluged with the reported goodwill for Brigid, I thought it was only right to perform the due diligence on her record. It turns out that it was centuries later before someone claimed they had ever heard of such a person. I’ll spare you the long Wikipedia story but, suffice it to say, there is a major question mark over whether our dear Brigid existed at all.

[ Who was St Brigid? ]

Then, before my equilibrium was re-established, St Patrick’s Day appeared in jig time. It turns out that Patrick did leave written documents behind him (two, to be precise). The first time anybody mentioned them was nearly 400 years later in the Book of Armagh (that’s one of those famous books in Trinity College library, although it’s a really small one). Next, I learned that there could have been two Patricks (this may explain why he got a whole bank holiday festival) which wobbled my school memory a bit because I know we were definitely told that “Patrick came to Ireland in AD 432″.

Easter Monday was another vacuous, vaguely religious-sounding bank holiday as if Jesus was yet another saint. One thing he was not was a saint. Sorry, no halo, no ethereal glow. The ancient Hebrews who foretold a messiah didn’t promise one who would look at all special. The prophet Isaiah, the daddy of them all, specifically said that he would have “no special appearance that we should want to follow him”. You could have easily passed Jesus in the street. He was like a tradesman – like say a plumber, an electrician, a plasterer, a gardener. He actually was mistaken for a gardener. And that was after he had risen from the dead.

Nor did it take centuries for his contemporaries to write down the details of that first-century excitement. Within a lifetime it was all recorded in black and white. Then those documents got unique treatment given to no other such manuscripts – they went mad on copying them, like they were expecting them to be needed all over the world. More than 5,000 copies of the Greek versions have been found so far. Indeed, in our very own Dublin Castle the Chester Beatty Library holds the earliest book of letters written by the apostle Paul.

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I was in London at the turning of the millennium. To mark the occasion, Westminster City Council had commissioned the sculptor Mark Wallinger to produce a suitable piece to stand on a plinth at Trafalgar Square. Wallinger obliged by sculpting a life-size statue of Jesus, in a loin cloth, with a crown of thorns made out of barbed wire. Not everybody liked the statue. The art historian Sir Roy Strong wrote a scathing column about it in the London Evening Standard newspaper saying why he thought it was ill-advised. He thought the artist was mistaken because any Trafalgar Square statue should be in keeping with the huge statues of the Roman gods and their chariots that swirl around the tops of the surrounding buildings.

Richard Chartres, bishop of London, saw things differently and wrote a letter to the editor of the Standard pointing out that Sir Roy had missed the point because “Jesus came to be exactly our size”.

I was so delighted with his letter that I phoned the bishop’s office right away and made an appointment to see him, so I could tell him, “you need to know that your attitude helps me get up in the morning”. The self-sacrifice of Jesus affects us more than you might think, and more than any saint ever did. We feel confident about discussing the precise date we give to Patrick as “432″. But where do we get the 432 from? It was 432 years after the birth of Jesus. Jesus is our benchmark.

That is why your newspaper prints the number of years since Jesus’s birth on the front page. Every day.

David Wilson, founder of Agapé Ireland, works to foster the spiritual welfare of students. He is the author of The Electrician’s Children