Welcome back to Life and Books and Everything. I'm Kevin DeYoung. Today, just a short piece that I've reworked from something I wrote years ago about St. Patrick.

Thought I'd clean it up, make it a little more of a generic piece that perhaps people can revisit from time to time or year by year when we come up to the St. Patrick's Day holiday.

So this is simply called Who Was St. Patrick?

You can find it on clearlyreformed.org.

I've heard it said that representatives from Ireland have come to America to see what we do for St. Patrick's Day.

It's a strange holiday on the American

calendar filled with shamrock shakes, green-died rivers, and lots and lots of drinking. I'll leave it

to the Irish to decide if we've captured the essence of their culture, but we certainly haven't

captured the essence of St. Patrick. As is the case with many saints and heroes from the

early church, getting to the, quote, historical Patrick can be difficult. One reliable source,

however, is Richard Fletcher's excellent book, the Barbarian conversion from paganism to Christianity.

For a readable scholarly treatment on the long, slow, amazing transition in Europe

from paganism to Christianity, there is no better book. And what does Fletcher say about Patrick?

First off, we need to know what Patrick did not do. Here's a paragraph from Fletcher's book.

He did not expel snakes from Ireland. The snakelessness of Ireland

had been noted by the Roman geographer Solanus in the third century. He did not compose that wonderful

hymn known as St. Patrick's breastplate. Its language postates him by about three centuries. He did

not drive a chariot three times over his sister, Lupate, to punish her unchastity.

He did not use the leaves of the shamrock to illustrate the persons of the Trinity for his converts.

True, he might have done so, but it is not until the 17th century that we are told that he did.

Determining fact from fiction for Patrick is particularly

tricky because his writings were not always passed along reliably and because he wrote in remarkably

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