Legends of Saints and Martyrs

Summary

In Legends of Saints and Martyrs, Joseph McCabe turns a sharp historical eye on one of Christianity’s most cherished traditions: the heroic age of persecution. With biting wit and relentless skepticism, he examines the legends of early saints and martyrs, arguing that many were not preserved by history but manufactured by pious imagination, clerical invention, and institutional need. Moving from apocryphal gospels to medieval hagiography, from Nero’s Rome to the Bollandist scholars, McCabe distinguishes genuine persecution from later exaggeration. The result is a provocative study of faith, fraud, memory, and myth-making—a challenge to the stories through which religions traditionally obtain their validation.