"I think a lot of people drew the incorrect conclusion that because someone was removed from the universal calendar, that they were declared nonpersons," said Msgr. William B. Smith, academic dean of St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, N.Y., who has written about Christopher's status change.
In recent years, an Irish historian, after careful scrutiny of Roman Empire records and early church writings, has argued that the existence of St. Christopher "has a genuine historical core." David Woods, a professor of ancient classics at University College Cork, suggests that Christopher was really St. Menas, an early Egyptian martyr.
The life Woods postulates for Christopher differs entirely from the myths contrived about him during the Middle Ages: that he was a wicked giant who, in seeking to serve the strongest master, accepted Jesus in the form of a child he carried across a perilous river, and that Christopher died a brutal martyr's death after converting 40,000 pagans.
The earliest Greek and Latin texts, Woods contends, show that Christopher was a member of a tribe from western Egypt in what is now Libya. According to this theory, he was captured in war by the Romans in 301 or 302 and pressed into Roman military service in far away Antioch, Syria. There, he converted to Christianity and in 308 was executed for his beliefs.
According to the early texts, the martyr's body was transported to his unidentified native land for burial. Woods suggests that that was accomplished through the intercession of an Egyptian Christian bishop who is believed to have been traveling in Syria.
Some years after the persecution of Christians ended, Woods contends, members of the church in Antioch collected what little they knew about the martyred foreign solider. Because they were unable to discover the man's real name, they referred to him as "Christopher," or "Bearer of Christ" -- an honorific applied to virtuous Christian men -- and over time it came to be taken as his real name.
By the 4th century, meanwhile, a cult had sprung up over the burial place in western Egypt of a martyr named Menas. According to the cult's tradition, Menas had been a soldier, had been executed in a faraway land and had had his remains returned to his native soil.
"The cult of St. Christopher and that of St. Menas developed independently of one another in separate regions but with the same historical person at their core," Woods wrote in an e-mail.
