Saint Christopher

Грешник · Post by **Грешник** » Sat 22 January 2005 9:50 pm

I am looking for information on the life and Martyrdom of Saint Christopher. I have seen many different "tales" or "superstitions" but can not seem to find an actual account.

I know as a Latin there were stories ofSaint Christopher and I saw this life repeated on a few Orthodox websites and then there was an account like this...

There are various suggestions about his descent. According to some historians, he was descended from the Canaanites, according to others, from "Cynoscephalai" [literally "dog-heads", located in Thessaly].

St. Christopher was a man of great stature and unusual strength, and his face was brutish. By tradition, St. Christopher at first possessed a handsome appearance, but wishing to avoid temptation for himself and others, he besought the Lord to give him an unseemly face, which was done. Until Baptism he had the name Reprebus [Reprobate] which was connected with his disfigured outer appearance.

This excerpt is from the OCAwebsite and is the only place I have seen a story such as this in regards to saint Christopher.

Any help in this is appreciated.

Ephraem · Post by **Ephraem** » Mon 24 January 2005 3:57 pm

Here is a link to a scholarly assesment of the extant sources for St. Christopher. It includes a link to the earliest Latin source for his life, BHL 1764. The BHL is the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Latina, which is a database/collection of Latin sources.

http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/chrsorig.html
http://www.ucc.ie/milmart/BHL1764.html

The latest issue of Road to Emmaus has a 50+ page article on the travels of the Apostle Andrew. It includes a bit of discussion of the Cynocefaloi or dog-headed people, and the author theorizes that St. Christoher's terrifying appearance comes from the possible tribal practice of disfiguring the face, cutting the cheeks, filing the teeth, cropping the ears, and reshaping the skulls of infants (to make themselves scarier to possible enemies).