Another selection of Saints, those specially touched and blessed by God, for you to meet!
As you may know, there is a Saint for almost anything. We have chosen several of the most interesting/famous in this (and the previous) quiz to challenge you.
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Jude is traditionally associated with loss (and rediscovery). So far as we know, there is no patron saint of gambling (Answer 4) which is not an activity particularly consistent with Christian values.
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Apparently he survived this onslaught and was later put to death by other means, but this story seems to have inspired a vast number of disturbing classical artworks.
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Answer 1 refers to another woman whom Jesus encountered at an earlier point.
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... in Chapter 3, verse 16 of his Gospel. There is a very famous musical setting of this text in John Stainer's (Victorian) cantata The Crucifixion.
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Mary of Magdala may or may not have had a chequered past, but Jesus' acceptance and friendship with her was a practical example of how God would still love and accept anyone, however evil they might previously have been, as and when they had come to Him with a genuine change of heart. Plenty of other saints had been sinners; you may have recognised an echo of the repentant Mary Magdalene's behaviour in Question 3, Answer 1.
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Most Christians broadly accept all of these as being true. We can only infer from the Gospels that Joseph was dead before Jesus 'went on the road', by his otherwise surprising absence from the stories: Mary turns up at various key points later on, while Joseph is unmentioned and conspicuous by his absence.
It seems Jesus had younger (half-) brothers and possibly sisters; had Joseph died, of old age or whatever, when (say) He was in his upper teens, Jesus would (of course) have followed his obligations, by default, to carry on Joseph's business and see that the younger ones were provided for. There is also the 'Glastonbury legend' whereby the young Jesus (say, as a student-age 'carpenter's apprentice') may have travelled abroad with Joseph of Arimathea (who later gave his tomb for Jesus' use): this Joseph was a prosperous, well-connected man of the world who may have known Joseph of Nazareth through the building trade, and may have had his own trading interests as far afield as Britain; he may have brought the young Jesus on a trip to see the Cornish mines where tin, copper and possibly lead were sourced. We know that traceable British west-country lead was used in Pompeii; British copper may well have been in use for practical and ornamental fittings elsewhere across the Roman Empire. If this in turn is true (which it at least could be, in Jesus' 'gap'), then, as William Blake puts it in that famous poem Jerusalem, it becomes possible that 'those feet in ancient time walked upon England's mountains green' etc. |
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Saul, after his conversion at Damascus, became St Paul. He had perhaps 'travelled' the furthest of any Saint, after being vehemently anti-Christian to this earlier extent; another astonishing example of Jesus' influence turning someone's life completely round.
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The Cyrillic alphabet takes its name from him; more recently he has been canonised as one of the Patron Saints of Europe.
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The Benedictine Order, its 'Rule' of living, and indeed the famous liqueur originally made by its Brothers at Fecamp in Normandy, all trace back to St Benedict. Among much else he has become the Patron Saint of students.
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His prayer was famously incorporated into the musical Godspell (under the title Day by Day).
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