The Christian religious tradition includes the worship of saints as one of its mainstays. The similarities with Greco-Roman custom (at least) are too great not to be known.
A miracle of the Hermitage-Sanctuary of San Tirso and San Bernabé (Merindad de Sotoscueva). Photo of MJ Valiño.
We can distinguish at least two details in the miraculous Christian tradition. One is the rapid emergence of similarities between pagan heroes and Christian saints, for example, a pair of saints who curiously is very similar to what the classical tradition claimed about the most famous physicians in mythology. Cosme and Damià were two medical twins born to Christian parents and dated to the s. III. They practiced medicine in Cilicia, specifically in Aegean (modern Ayas), it is even said to be free. If their knowledge did not reach, their faith in God gave them the most healing needed, to the point that they managed to convert many pagans. His death occurred during the persecution of Diocletian: they were captured along with his three younger brothers and subjected to torture, stoning, crucifixion, but all this came out alive. Eventually, his beheading was decreed, which apparently was effective.
The legend about these martyrs not only includes the miracle of their persistent resistance to torture. It is very interesting to observe how, once dead, they acted as did another immortal doctor, Asclepius, who during sleep performed the cure or inspired the remedy. Thus, perhaps the best known miracle of these saints is the healing of a leg affected by critical ischemia. The deacon Justinian, attached to the basilica in Rome of these saints, suffered from dangerous gangrene in one of his legs. For one night, after much prayer to the brothers, they appeared to him in a dream discussing how to cure the problem. They decided to amputate and then replace the leg with one of a recently dead Ethiopian who “was no longer going to need his.” Upon awakening, the deacon felt restored and found that his evil had already disappeared from his body.
The similarity to the miracle of Asclepius that I mentioned in post 049 is great. And more so is the fact that the saints were brothers, like the mythical Macaon and Podalirio, who in the Iliad appear as the doctors of the Greek army. The best known cure of these is that obtained by Philoctetes, one of the Greek chiefs who, during the voyage to Troy, was bitten by a serpent on the island of Tenedos. The incident caused him a horrible rotten and stinking infection that led his companions to leave him abandoned on the island. When, as a result of an oracle, Philoctetes was taken to Troy to conquer the city, the brothers cured him of this kind of gangrene.
The second interesting detail of the Christian tradition about miraculous saints (actually almost all of them), is the existence of many shrines of the same that celebrate extraordinary healings: through painting, sculptures and poems that relate (sometimes as a precedent for comics modern) the history of these healings, a custom we have perfectly recorded in Epidaurus, where Asclepius inspired healing during dreams. An example among many is the image that heads this post, taken in the sanctuary of San Tirso and San Bernabé in the caves of Eye-Guareña. The ceiling of the cave and the walls from a certain height are covered with frescoes that represent miracles helped by poems for explanation of the images.
On the particular of miracles, this time linked to the figure of Jesus of Nazareth, here is a link to an interview that Gabriel Andrade did to me a few months ago:
Best regards.