h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

when did saints start making an appearance????

were there jewish saints

if not, how did they spill out of their graves at jesus's death, if they did not exist yet????

Hmm, not sure.

I do know that the word 'saint' has slowly changed in meaning over the years. It used to mean simply 'Christian' (and some denominations still use it that way). But I couldn't tell you what it (or the Greek word translated as 'saint') originally meant off-hand.

I'll have a flick through a couple of books and see if I can find anything. But clearly the text isn't referring to people canonised by the Pope!

Gif

Did you find an answer?

Ah, no, competely forgot, sorry.

I'll see if I can do a little better at remembering over the next few days...

Gif

OK, here goes.

Asmiov's Guide to the Bible says:

< quote >
In the Psalms, the expresion "saints" usually refers to godly, pious people, very much in the modern manner, and is a translation of hasid ("pious"). Thus:

Psalm 31:23 O love the Lord, all ye his saints...

In the time of the persecution of the Jews by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, in 170 BC, and afterward, the beleaguered Jews began to picture themselves as a people devoted to God and surrounded by hordes of evil idolators. All believing Jews were kadesh [holy people] and could be refered to in translation as "saints". When Daniel predicts that the Jews will eventually be secure, and glory in an ideal kingdom set up by God, he says:

Daniel 7:18 But the saints of the Most High shall take the kingdom...

In the New Testament, Paul commonly takes the same view of the beleaguered early Christians. To him, writing in Greek, they are oi hagioi ("the holy ones" or "the saints"). Thus:

Philippians 1:1 Paul and Timotheus... to all the saints... which are at Philippi...
< / quote >

Gif

So the ones crawling out of the tombs are dead Jews sanctified by the 'evil-dooers' that surround them?

I mean if they went into the ground before Jesus was running round stirring up trouble they were not 'early Christians' practically by definition.

Hmm, tricky. We're dealing with Matthew here - the 'Jewish one': A54141112 - who saw the Jesus movement as a continuation of Judaism. To him, Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, as foretold in the Torah. So yes, I would guess he's thinking of Jewish holy men - the idea that Christianity was a separate religion, rather than a branch of Judaism, took hold surprisingly slowly and for a long time the movement was split. Paul and James are thought to have had a bust-up over a related issue, with Paul allowing uncircumcised gentiles to convert and James insisting that to become a Christian you had to become a Jew and follow Jewish ritual law. Ehrman will have more details in 'Lost Christianities'.

Gif

a couple of notes:

'saints' is, of course, nothing other than the Latin word 'sanctus' moved into English, and 'sanctus' is the Latin translation of the Greek of Gif's note above. In the 'Sanctus' bit of the Roman Mass it is translated 'Holy'.

Perhaps the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) can shed a little more light on the question:

In LDS doctrine (as in all churches of a Restorationist persuasion) the Church established by Joseph Smith is a re-establishment not only of the church founded by Jesus upon the rock known as St. (Sanctus) Peter, it is a re-establishment of the church that has existed since the time of Adam (except for the dozen or so centuries of the Great Apostasy, i.e. the time pretty much between the death of the last Apostle and the arrival of Joseph Smith.

In this context, the pre-Christian Jews (Earlier-Day Saints) belonged to exactly the same church as contemporary Mormons (Latter-Day Saints). And I would argue that those who wrote the bits about the resurrection of the Saints in the Bible were not thinking in any way about the quasi-demi-god saints of the Catholic Church: they were simply talking about the virtuous dead, sort of in the way my mother utters the oath 'My Sainted Aunt Patricia!' -- it is not that Aunt Patricia is a Catholic Saint or even that she was particularly virtuous, I suspect -- she's simply dead, and death makes holy.








And my mother never had an Aunt Patricia, so I'm not sure what the hell she's talking about when she utters that oath.

That makes sense.

Also I had to chuckle at the great apostasy - I was listening to a podcast by some ex-Mormons, and they mentioned the enmity which is reserved for, for instance, Catholicism.

Just to be clear that I didn't think these were the quasi-divine Saints of Rome
(I wonder Does Catholicism count as a quasi poly-theism? Something to ponder...)
but following on from the OP, curious what 'saints in this context referred to.

I like the early-day / later day saints example that makes sense; I suppose is this extended sense of a church being the collective noun of believers.