A paper on St. Patrick by Roy Flechner of Cambridge is causing quite a stir today. Flechner claims (from a CNN article titled “Was Patrick a Slave-Trading Tax Collector?”):
"The traditional story that Patrick was kidnapped from Britain [at the age of 16], forced to work as a slave, but managed to escape and reclaim his status, is likely to be fiction…. The traditional legend was instigated by Patrick himself in the letters he wrote, because this is how he wanted to be remembered."
I’m seeing article after article on the web about this, but not much criticism of the reasoning used by Flechner to come to this conclusion. The articles leave the impression that this new view of Patrick’s life is based on new evidence. But here’s the core of Flechner’s actual reasoning in a nutshell: What often happened in Patrick’s day was X, therefore X happened to Patrick.
We’ve seen this approach to history used before by people trying to determine the “real” story behind the Gospels. For example: The New Testament documents say Jesus was crucified and then buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. But in Jesus’ day, someone in His position would normally have been buried in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs. Therefore Jesus was buried in a shallow grave and eaten by dogs.
So the documented testimony we actually have is rejected in favor of what “generally happened” at the time. This seems to me to be a ridiculous way to do history. History is not governed by natural laws, such that when we determine the usual course of things on average, we therefore know every individual’s course. History is filled with unique events because people—and their choices—are unique. So testimony of what actually happened ought to be preferred to an argument from what generally happened. And while there might be legitimate evidences (including counter-testimonies) to doubt a person’s testimony, an argument that depends on what commonly happened at the time does not seem to be one of them—certainly not one strong enough to declare a testimony “likely fiction.”
Now to the specifics of Flechner’s argument (British spellings retained throughout):
"The problem with [Patrick’s] account is that he was telling this story in response to accusations levelled against him that he fled to Ireland for financial gain," Flechner said in a telephone interview.
We see from this quote that what Flechner intends to build his case on is this: If Patrick was attempting to counter charges that he was in Ireland for monetary reasons, then perhaps that financial-gain-based story was the true story (after all, escaping slavery is far too unlikely), and the counter-argument was fabricated by Patrick.
But here’s the first problem: the idea that Patrick was being accused of “fleeing to Ireland for financial gain” is itself only conjecture on Flechner’s part. In fact, this is the only documentation we have about the accusation leveled against Patrick (quotation marks denote biblical references):
When I was attacked by some of my elders who came and threw my sins at my burdensome office as bishop, I make no secret, on that day “I took a mighty blow”…yet the Lord spared his stranger in a foreign land, so kindly is his Name. Indeed, he bore me up…. For although I was put down and shamed, not too much harm came to me: I can only pray to God that “this be not counted as a sin against them.” “They dug up this pretext against me”—from thirty years before—a deed I had confessed just before I was made deacon. My mind was worried and depressed, so that I confided in my closest friend something I had done one fateful day as a boy, to be precise in the space of one hour. Then I had not yet learned to master my self-control….
For “God is my witness that I have not lied” in any of these words that I have laid out before you. But I would rather grieve for my own dear friend [to whom I had confessed]…I had handed over my own soul to him!... So how did he take it into his head afterward, to dishonor me so publicly, before good and ill alike, over a matter which before he had been so glad to pardon, as had the Lord himself, who is “greater than any man.”
There’s no mention of a “financial gain” charge. Perhaps there were more charges that were unmentioned (who could know?), but only one specific charge is mentioned, and while people can and do speculate about what the specific, one-time sin in question might have been, nobody knows. Flechner agrees with me on this in his paper:
Patrick was to return again to Britain later in his life, when he was already a bishop. During that visit he was put on trial by his seniores ‘elders’ on a charge that is not specified. According to Patrick, the trial was only an occasio ‘pretext’ that his elders used to settle an open score with him. The offence for which he was charged had been committed thirty years earlier, before Patrick reached the age of fifteen, and he admits he had confessed it to a friend (emphasis mine).
So where does Flechner’s idea that Patrick was responding to charges of financial gain come from?
In an attempt to explain why Patrick should stress his generosity and meekness, Thomas Charles-edwards proposed that ‘in part Patrick emphasised his attitude to gifts because of the accusation that he had gone to Ireland in the hope of enriching himself’. Echoes of this accusation can also be found in Patrick’s insistence that he did not go to Ireland of his own free will. Charles-edwards’s comment is the impetus for the present essay, which asks why Patrick was suspected of going to Ireland for financial gain (emphasis mine).
We can speculate that perhaps Patrick was also being accused of seeking financial gain, but this seems to be shaky ground on which to reimagine Patrick’s entire story, especially if Patrick did not consider it central enough to mention and refute in his defense.
Nonetheless, having decided that Patrick’s confession is really a defense against a “financial gain” charge, Flechner then attempts to uncover the “true” story that would lead to people charging Patrick with seeking financial gain. Here’s the historical background that directs Flechner’s reimagining:
Decurions [an office held by Patrick’s father], also known as curiales after the local administrative councils, curiae, of which they were members, made up the great bulk of aristocratic landowners in the late empire. Any individual who possessed enough property to qualify as a decurion was obliged to serve on the council if nominated…. Sons of decurions were nominated as soon as they came of age, in their eighteenth year, but in practice children as young as seven or eight are known to have been nominated.
Of [the roles of decurions], the most onerous obligation was tax collecting, because a decurion was expected to make up for any shortfall in tax revenues from his own pocket. This inconvenience was believed to have contributed to a surge in curiales seeking to escape their position on councils. During the fourth and fifth centuries emperors show a growing concern with what has come to be known as the ‘flight of the curiales’….
From 313 [AD] a favourite escape route for curiales was to join the clergy.
So here is the version of the story that Flechner promotes:
There were (at least) two distinct contemporary narratives for the events that Patrick described and alluded to in the Confessio: one was Patrick’s and the other was a rival narrative that discredited Patrick. But can the evidence reviewed here shed any light on the rival narrative? I believe the evidence can – at the very least – allow us to sketch a hypothetical background for that narrative, which would read as follows: when Patrick’s father took holy orders he would have been legally obliged as a decurion to install his son in his place at the curia and surrender much of his property to him. But Patrick, like his father, would have been loathe to serve on the curia in the decades leading up to or immediately following 400, a period characterised by social, economic and political unrest. At such times curial obligations such as collecting and underwriting taxes would have been extremely difficult, and even risky, to discharge. Patrick might then have decided, perhaps with his father’s consent and encouragement, that the best escape route open before him would be to set himself up in Ireland and by so doing to ensure that the family wealth would not be depleted through the underwriting of taxes or malicious lawsuits. All this, of course, contradicts Patrick’s version that he did not leave Britain willingly and that he legitimately sold his nobility rather than relinquished it as a means of avoiding curial obligations. If we are to choose between Patrick’s version and the rival one, then the latter can at least be said to offer a more plausible narrative which better suits the historical context.
Is this really “more plausible”? Because there seems to be quite a bit of speculation necessary to come to this historical conclusion.
I don’t expect someone who’s not a Christian to recognize what they see in Patrick’s Confession. It can’t really be the case that God would rescue him from his slavery in Ireland, and there must be secrets in his past he’s trying to cover up in order to elevate his position in the eyes of others, right? If there’s one thing I’ve found, it’s that non-Christians fail again and again to recognize what truly motivates Christians.
But if you’re a Christian, I urge you to take up Patrick’s Confession, read it for yourself, and see what you find there. It’s brief, and you can read the Kindle version on your computer for only $.99.
(And if you’re wondering about the slave-trading charge in the CNN headline, we have no words from Patrick on this, even though there would have been no reason to hide such a thing in that culture. Rather, this is how Flechner reasons about “the question of Patrick’s source of wealth”: “Another way in which Patrick could have secured the funding he needed [other than the source Patrick actually cited of the selling of his nobility] was by selling the family slaves or by bringing them with him to Ireland. Slaves were in fact a convenient form of ‘movable’ property for wealthy travellers like Patrick. Not only could they have been ferried across the Irish Sea, but there would certainly have been a market for them in Ireland’s non-monetary economy.”)
