HistoricalChristian.Faith

Barlaam and Josaphat

Two figures once kept in the calendars of both the Latin and the Greek churches — the hermit Barlaam and the Indian prince Josaphat, who renounced a throne for the ascetic life — are, on the settled judgement of modern scholarship, the Buddha. The Christian romance of Barlaam and Josaphat is a Christianized retelling of the life of Gautama Siddhārtha that travelled for a thousand years across languages and religions — from Sanskrit through Manichaean Middle Persian, Arabic, Georgian, Greek, and Latin — picking up a Christian dress along the way until, in the medieval West, its hero was venerated as a saint whose very name is a worn-down form of bodhisattva. This page is not a life of a man; it is a history of a legend and of how the church came to hold it, set out earliest source first: the Buddhist ancestor-texts, the first Christian notices that the Buddha even existed, the Manichaean and Arabic carriers, the Georgian book that first made the tale Christian, the Greek and Latin versions that spread it, the saints'-lives collections and calendars that canonized it in effect, and the nineteenth-century scholarship that traced the whole chain back to India. Its “witnesses” are the datable sources that carry the story, ordered by the age of the source — not a claimed chronology of the events they narrate.

Related doctrines: Saints, legends, and the transmission of holy lives — see also the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus · Saint Christopher the dog-headed · Dhū’l-Qarnayn and the Alexander Legend · Saint George · Saint Guinefort, the holy greyhound

Timeline

The Sanskrit life of the Buddha (1st–3rd c.)

At the head of the chain stand the Sanskrit lives of the Buddha — Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita (early 2nd c.) and the fuller legendary Lalitavistara (compiled c. 1st–3rd c.). They narrate the sheltered prince Siddhārtha, kept from all sight of suffering, who is confronted on his rare excursions by the “four sights” — an old man broken by age, a sick man, a corpse, and a serene wandering ascetic — and, awakened to the reality of death and the possibility of release, abandons palace and kingdom for the religious life. This narrative skeleton — the cloistered prince, the encounters that shatter his illusions, the Great Renunciation — survives intact, a millennium later and half a world away, as the story of the prince Josaphat.¹

The first Christian notices of the Buddha: Clement and Jerome (c. 200 & c. 393)

Long before the legend reached them, Christian writers of the Greek and Latin world already knew that a teacher called the Buddha was worshipped in India. Clement of Alexandria, listing the “barbarian philosophers,” records that “some, too, of the Indians obey the precepts of Buddha, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours.”² Two centuries later Jerome, arguing for virginity against Jovinian, reports the Indian tradition that “Budda, the founder of their religion, had his birth through the side of a virgin” — a striking early Christian awareness of the virgin-birth motif in the Buddha-legend, and proof that the raw material was known in the Christian West centuries before it was Christianized.³

The Manichaean bridge and the Arabic Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf (3rd–8th c.)

The road from the Buddha to the saint ran through the Manichaeans. Fragments of the tale survive in Manichaean texts from Turfan in Uighur, Parthian, and Persian — evidence, the Encyclopædia Iranica concludes, that “it was the Manicheans who transmitted this Indian tale to the West” — and the Buddha’s title bodhisattva appears among them as Middle Persian Bōdisav. From the Manichaean Middle Persian the story passed into Arabic as the Kitāb Bilawhar wa-Būdhāsaf (the Book of Bilawhar and Budhasaf), in circulation in ʿAbbasid Baghdad by the eighth century and connected by the bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm with the translation circle of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ; a version even entered Shīʿite devotional literature.⁴ It is in the Arabic transmission that the decisive slip of the pen occurs: the initial b of Būdhāsaf (ـبـ) is miscopied as y (ـيـ), giving Yūdāsaf — the ancestor of the Georgian Iodasaph, the Greek Ioasaph, and the Latin Josaphat.⁵

The Georgian Balavariani: the tale made Christian (9th–10th c.)

The Georgian Balavariani is the first fully Christianized form of the legend. Here the Indian prince Iodasaph is not merely awakened to the vanity of the world but converted to Christianity by the ascetic Balahvar, and the whole is recast as a Christian saint’s life. David Marshall Lang, who edited the long recension from a unique manuscript in the Greek Patriarchate at Jerusalem, argued that the Georgian stage is the hinge on which the Buddhist tale turned Christian; how early the Georgian version is has been disputed — Lang, Kekelidze, and Abuladze independently placed it in the ninth or tenth century, against Shalva Nutsubidze’s (now-abandoned) argument for a seventh-century original.⁶

The Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph, wrongly credited to John of Damascus (before 1028)

The Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph — the version from which every later European retelling descends — was translated and reworked from the Georgian Balavariani by Euthymius the Athonite (Euthymius the Iberian), the Georgian monk of the Iviron monastery on Mount Athos who died in 1028. Most Greek manuscripts credit only “John the Monk”; later scribes identified this John with the great theologian John of Damascus, an attribution the Roman Martyrology later enshrined and the standard editions long carried. Modern scholarship rejects it: Robert Volk’s critical edition classes the work among the Damascene’s spuria and confirms Euthymius as the author.⁷

The Latin West and the saints'-lives collections (1048 → c. 1260)

A Latin translation made in 1048 opened the legend to the Latin West, and every later European version derives — “without exception” — from either the Greek or that Latin. In the thirteenth century the tale entered the great reference-works of Christendom: Vincent of Beauvais gave it in full in his Speculum Historiale (c. 1250s), and Jacobus de Voragine included it, abridged, among the saints’ lives of the Legenda Aurea (Golden Legend, c. 1260) — the collection that made Barlaam and Josaphat a standard Western saint’s life, read across Europe. From there the story spread into the vernaculars — Rudolf von Ems’s Middle High German verse romance, the Old French poems of Gui de Cambrai and Chardri, an Old Norse Barlaams saga made for the Norwegian court, and versions in Middle English, Swedish, and Icelandic; its embedded parable of the three caskets reached Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice through Caxton’s English Golden Legend.⁸

Other branches of the legend: Hebrew, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Syriac (13th c. onward)

The westward Christian road — Arabic → Georgian → Greek → Latin → the European vernaculars — was not the tale’s only route. From the same Arabic Bilawhar wa-Būdhāsaf the story forked into at least three other branches. It entered Judaism directly: Abraham ibn Ḥisdai of Barcelona rendered the Arabic into the Hebrew Ben ha-Melekh ve-ha-Nazir (“The Prince and the Hermit”) in the early thirteenth century, recasting the prince’s renunciation in a Jewish philosophical frame — proof that the Indian tale crossed into a third religion on a road of its own, wholly apart from the Christian Greek line. A separate Christian Arabic recension was carried south into Ge’ez as the Ethiopic Baralām and Yěwāsěf. And off the Greek grew a further Christian sub-branch: F. C. Conybeare showed that the old Armenian version is an abridgement of a lost Syriac rendering of the Greek. The legend, in short, did not travel a single line but repeatedly forked — into another faith, down another continent, and along a second Christian road east.⁹

The calendars: veneration as saints (medieval)

Both came to be commemorated as saints, though by inclusion in the calendars rather than by any formal canonization act (a distinction weighed below). They stand in the Roman Martyrology on 27 November and in the Greek calendar on 26 August; the Russian and other Slavic churches keep “Ioasaph, prince of India, and Abenner the King, his father” on 19 November. Thus the Buddha, under a corrupted form of his own title, received Christian liturgical honour.¹⁰

The Buddhist origin recovered (1859–1860) and modern scholarship

The identity of Josaphat and the Buddha was worked out by nineteenth-century scholars — independently by Édouard Laboulaye (1859) and Felix Liebrecht (1860) — and by 1913 the Catholic Encyclopedia stated it flatly: the story “is a Christianized version of one of the legends of Buddha, as even the name Josaphat would seem to show,” a corruption of Joasaph, itself from the Middle Persian Budasif (= Bodhisattva). The full language-by-language chain — Sanskrit → Manichaean Middle Persian → Arabic → Georgian → Greek → Latin — was reconstructed in the twentieth century above all by David Marshall Lang, with F. C. Conybeare, Ilia Abuladze, and (as a case study in cross-traditional history) Wilfred Cantwell Smith.¹¹

Arguments

Claims adduced for the identification, weighed adversarially and cutting across the timeline above.

Related arguments — the transmission

Two arguments turn on the same long road the legend travelled — Sanskrit → Middle Persian → Arabic → Georgian → Greek → Latin. One asks whether the saint’s name really descends that chain from bodhisattva; the other asks how secure the chain’s most-contested link, the Manichaean bridge between the Indian source and the Arabic book, actually is.

• Is “Josaphat” a corruption of bodhisattva? — sound. The pivotal name descends down a chain documented at every joint (Sanskrit bodhisattva → Middle Persian Bōdisav → Arabic Būdhāsaf/Yūdhāsaf → Georgian → Greek → Latin), turning on a routine Arabic scribal ambiguity (bāʾ/yāʾ, one dot apart) that the surviving Būdhāsaf/Yūdhāsaf doublet directly confirms; only the mentor’s name (Barlaam ← Bilawhar) has an unsettled ultimate etymon, a caveat on a secondary name rather than a crack in the core identification. The same accident — a single mis-copied letter, as a legend crossed languages, manufacturing a saint’s identity — shaped a figure in a sister legend: St Christopher’s “Canaanite” lineage is Latin canineus (“dog-like”) misread as Cananeus (see why Christopher is dog-headed and “Canaanite”).
• Did the tale reach Christianity through a Manichaean intermediary? — plausible. The Manichaean routing is the leading, well-motivated reconstruction — the name-form behind the Arabic (Bwdysdf) is distinctively Manichaean, and the Manichaeans were the attested trans-Asian carriers who provably held the tale — but the early Manichaean bridge it needs is reconstructed rather than preserved, and the one substantial Manichaean-script manuscript that survives is late (10th c.) and appears to descend from the Arabic; the Buddhist origin and the name-identity stand either way, so this concerns the road, not the destination.

Four further arguments stand outside that group — one adding a third pillar to the identification alongside the name and the route, two fixing when the tale became Christian and then Greek, and one on the church’s reception of its saints:

• Does the story of Josaphat trace the Buddha’s life closely enough to be borrowing, not coincidence? — sound. Not that any single motif is uniquely the Buddha’s — a prophesied holy child and an isolating royal father are hagiographic commonplaces — but that the ordered cluster (sheltered prince → birth-prophecy → isolating father → the four sights in sequence: age, sickness, death, the ascetic → the Great Renunciation), plus a freight of demonstrably Indian embedded parables (the “man in the well”; the three caskets, later in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice), plus the documented name- and text-chains, jointly rule out independent origin. Four converging lines make the derivation certain, even granting that no Buddhist doctrine travelled with the story.
• Who wrote the Greek Barlaam and Ioasaph — Euthymius the Athonite, not John of Damascus? — sound. The Greek is a translation-and-elaboration of the Georgian Balavariani, which the eighth-century Damascene could not have used; the “John the Monk of St Sabas” of the manuscripts was only later, speculatively, read as John of Damascus (and enshrined by the martyrologies and the Loeb edition). The positive attribution to the Georgian monk Euthymius (d. 1028) is triangulated by that textual dependency, by the near-contemporary Georgian Life of John and Euthymius that lists the Balahvar romance among his Georgian-to-Greek translations, and by internal features (the embedded Apology of Aristides), and is the verdict of Volk’s critical edition, which files the piece among the Damascene’s spuria. Only fine questions remain — composed or commissioned, translated or recomposed — all on the Euthymian side. This fixes the tale’s Greek-and-Christian moment at c. 980s on Athos, downstream of the Georgian, not in eighth-century Damascus.
• How early is the Georgian Balavariani — 7th century (Nutsubidze) or 9th–10th (Lang)? — sound. The Georgian stage — where the Buddha-tale first became a Christian saint’s life — belongs to the ninth–tenth century, the dating on which its three editors (Lang, Kekelidze, Abuladze) independently converged. Shalva Nutsubidze’s rival seventh-century thesis — that the romance is an original by the Byzantine writer John Moschus, “the Georgian” — is unsupported: its linchpin etymology is false, its New-Persian loanwords bar a pre-ninth-century date, and, decisively, the Georgian descends from an eighth-century Arabic book, so a seventh-century Georgian is chronologically impossible (Devos refuted the thesis in 1957 and no one advocates it now). What stays open is narrow — ninth versus tenth century, and which recension is prior — all inside the mainstream window; this timeline therefore places the Georgian by its safer, later bound.
• Were Barlaam and Josaphat ever formally canonized? — contested. A terminological dispute where both sides are partly right. There is no canonization decree, cause, or process for either figure in either communion — they entered the Western calendar through Petrus de Natalibus’s Catalogus Sanctorum (c. 1380) and Baronius’s Roman Martyrology (27 November), and the Eastern through the synaxaria (Greek 26 August; Slavic 19 November) — so the careful thesis “venerated, never formally canonized” is factually right against the popular “the Church canonized the Buddha.” But “never formally canonized” measures pre-modern saints by a papally-reserved process invented centuries after their cultus was fixed; by the operative standard of their own era (and of Orthodoxy still), inclusion in the calendar of saints simply is the recognition of sainthood, which is why OrthodoxWiki’s “were canonized” is defensible too.

See also (weighed on another doctrine): the same India→West tale-migration mechanism carried a second saint’s legend out of India — did the holy greyhound Guinefort’s cult descend from the Indian “faithful animal wrongly slain” fable? on the Saint Guinefort timeline.

Sources