The Acta and Their Condemnation

Among the earliest Latin documents to mention George is one that condemns the text written about him: the Decretum Gelasianum (c. 494, De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis, traditionally ascribed to Pope Gelasius I) lists the Passio Georgii among writings “not to be received,” composed by heretics or by unknown and incompetent authors. This file sets out that condemnation precisely and reads the source problem from both sides: the Church’s own early tradition flagged George’s Acts as unreliable — yet the verdict fell on the text, not the martyr, whose cult continued unbroken.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Great Martyr; the Trophy-Bearer)

A Condemnation as Early Witness

It is one of the peculiarities of George’s dossier that one of the oldest datable Latin references to him is not a celebration but a censure. The early Acts or Passio of George — the legendary martyrdom-cycle whose primitive “Dadianus” form and later “Diocletian” form are described in the companion file (see The Confession Before Diocletian) — were in circulation early enough, and were sufficiently notorious for their fabulous character, that a Latin canonical document of around the year 494 singled them out for rejection. That document is the Decretum Gelasianum, in its third and most famous part the list De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis — “On books to be received and not to be received” — which sorts the writings known to its compiler into the accepted and the rejected (ed. Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum, TU 38.4, Leipzig 1912). Among the rejected — the apocrypha, the books non recipienda — stands the Passio of George.

This is a fact of real weight, and the methodology of this collection requires that it be stated plainly rather than softened (METHODOLOGY §3, §3.5; the broader treatment is in What Can Be Known). The unreliability of George’s Acts is not a verdict reached by modern source criticism and imposed on a defenseless tradition from outside. It is, in the first instance, the Church’s own early judgment, recorded in a Latin canonical list before the close of the fifth century. When Delehaye, Krumbacher, Walter, and Riches conclude that the Acts are legend, they are confirming, with the tools of philology, what the Decretum Gelasianum had already said with the authority of a canonical catalogue (Delehaye, Les légendes grecques des saints militaires, 1909, 45–76; Riches, St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth, 2000, 13–32).

What the Decree Says

The Decretum Gelasianum does not condemn George’s Passio in isolation; it condemns it as a member of a class. In the section listing the apocrypha, the Decree groups together the gesta — the “acts” or “deeds” — of certain martyrs whose narratives it judges untrustworthy, and it gives its reasons in general terms. These narratives, the Decree explains, are not received because the names of their authors are unknown and they are thought to have been written by infideles or by idiotae — by unbelievers, or by incompetents (the word idiota here meaning an untrained, unlettered person rather than its modern sense) — and because they contain matter unsuitable or excessive, such that, to avoid even the occasion of derision, they are not read in the holy Roman Church (Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum, 1912; on the section, Riches, 2000, 13–32). The Passio Georgii is named within this class, alongside a small number of other suspect gesta martyrum (the acts of saints such as Cyricus and Julitta, and of George, are the names most often cited from this rubric).

Several features of the wording deserve to be held exactly, because loose paraphrase distorts the Decree’s meaning. First, the censure attaches to authorship and reliability, not to the existence of the saints. The reason given is that the authors are unknown and possibly heretical or incompetent, and that the matter is excessive — a textual and literary judgment. Second, the Decree’s stated motive is pastoral and prudential: such writings are kept out of the liturgical reading of the Roman Church ne … occasio … subsannationis oriatur, lest they give occasion for mockery. The concern is that fabulous acts, read in church, would expose the faith to ridicule — exactly the danger that George’s seventy-two-kings, multiple-resurrections cycle would in fact pose. Third, the grouping is by genre: the Decree is disciplining a whole category of unreliable martyr-romance, of which George’s Passio is a conspicuous example, not issuing a special anathema against George.

The Latin should be cited with care and not over-claimed. The Decree’s phrasing condemns the gesta as written by persons unknown, thought to be infideles or idiotae (and, in the broader framing of the apocrypha section, as the kind of thing produced ab haereticis vel scismaticis — by heretics or schismatics); it does not assign George’s Passio a named heretical author or a specific sect (Dobschütz, 1912; Riches, 2000, 13–32). The collection’s master README rightly renders the general charge as composition “by heretics or schismatics,” which is the Decree’s own framing of the apocryphal class; the more exact point for George is that the author is unknown and the text is judged unreliable and excessive — which is precisely the source-critical verdict, arrived at independently.

The Source Problem From Both Sides

The Decree creates a source problem that must be read from both sides at once, and reading only one side falsifies the situation.

From the one side, the Church’s own early tradition flagged George’s Acts as unreliable, and this collection says so without flinching. The honest description of George’s documentary state is not that modern skeptics have undermined a once-secure biography, but that no secure biography ever existed: the principal narrative text about George was, within roughly two centuries of the persecution, listed by a Latin canonical authority among the books not to be received. The legend that the Acts contain — the confession before the (originally Persian, later imperial) ruler, the impossible tortures, the threefold death, the conversions, the dragon added later still — is exactly the material the Decree had in view when it spoke of gesta unfit for reading. The Church did not naïvely transmit George’s romance as history; an early and authoritative voice within it rejected the romance as a text (see The Tortures and the Threefold Death; on the late dragon, The Origin of the Dragon Legend).

From the other side, the condemnation fell on the text, not on the martyr, and the distinction is the whole point. The Decretum Gelasianum nowhere denies that a martyr named George existed or was rightly venerated; it rejects an unreliable book. And the consequence is striking: the condemnation of the Passio had no effect whatever on the cult of George. He kept his feast; his shrine at Lydda (Diospolis) in Palestine remained a center of pilgrimage; his veneration spread East and West across the fifth, sixth, and following centuries with extraordinary speed and reach (see The Earliest Evidence). The very same Roman Church whose canonical list refused to read George’s acta honored George the martyr. This is not an inconsistency; it is the Church distinguishing, with precision, between the witness it venerated and the worthless text that had grown up about him (Delehaye, 1909; Riches, 2000, 13–32; Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition, 2003, 109–144).

This double reading is the heart of the matter and the model the whole collection follows. A martyr may be real, his cult ancient and legitimate, and his surviving Acts both fabulous and officially repudiated — all at once. George is the sharpest case in the calendar of exactly this configuration, and the Decretum Gelasianum is the document that makes it explicit (the source-critical method is set out at length in What Can Be Known and Martyr and Myth).

The Heretical-Origin Question

A further question hangs on the Decree’s language: if George’s acta were written by infideles or idiotae, and the apocrypha as a class are framed as the work of heretics or schismatics, was George’s Passio in fact composed in a heretical — specifically a Manichaean or otherwise dualist — milieu? Some scholarship has connected the fabulous, dualist-flavored romance of the primitive George legend (with its endless deaths and restorations) to a heterodox, possibly Manichaean, environment of composition; others read the Decree’s charge as a general formula for “unknown and untrustworthy authorship” rather than a precise heresiological identification, and treat the legend’s extravagance as a feature of popular hagiographic romance rather than evidence of a specific sect (Delehaye, 1909, 45–76; Riches, 2000, 13–32). The evidence does not permit a confident verdict.

[Disputed: the milieu of George’s early Acts. The Decretum Gelasianum groups the apocryphal gesta martyrum — including George’s — as the work of unknown authors thought to be infideles/idiotae, and frames the apocryphal class generally as composed by heretics or schismatics (Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum, TU 38.4, 1912). Some scholars have inferred a heterodox, even Manichaean/dualist, origin for the fabulous primitive recension; others read the Decree’s wording as a generic charge of unreliable and anonymous authorship, not a specific sectarian attribution, and explain the legend’s extravagance as ordinary hagiographic romance (cf. Delehaye, Les légendes grecques, 1909, 45–76; Riches, St George, 2000, 13–32). No primary source names a heretical author of the Passio Georgii; the heretical-origin thesis is a scholarly hypothesis, not a documented fact.]

The Decree’s Own Date and Authorship

The Decretum Gelasianum presents one further complication that integrity requires stating: the Decree’s own dating and authorship are themselves debated, which qualifies — though it does not overturn — the weight of its testimony. The document as transmitted ascribes its canonical list to Pope Gelasius I (492–496), whence its conventional name and the conventional date of c. 494. But the work is composite, its parts may not all be of one origin, and scholars have variously placed it: some associate elements with an earlier council under Pope Damasus (366–384); the modern critical consensus, following Dobschütz, regards the Decretum Gelasianum in its received form not as an official conciliar act of Gelasius but as a private compilation of the early sixth century, probably Italian, that gathered and edited older material under the prestige of the Gelasian name (Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum, 1912). On any of these views the document is a witness of roughly the late fifth or early sixth century to the acta of George being judged unreliable; what shifts with the dating and authorship question is its precise canonical authority, not the basic datum that an early Latin source repudiated George’s Passio.

[Disputed: the date and authorship of the Decretum Gelasianum. The received text attributes its list (De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis) to Pope Gelasius I, giving the traditional date c. 494; some scholarship has connected parts of the material to an earlier decree under Pope Damasus (366–384); the modern critical view, following Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum (TU 38.4, 1912), holds the document in its transmitted form to be a private, probably Italian, compilation of the early sixth century rather than an official Gelasian conciliar act. On every view it is a late-fifth- or early-sixth-century Latin witness rejecting the Passio Georgii as apocryphal; the dispute concerns its formal authority, not the fact of the condemnation.]

Why the Condemnation Matters for an Orthodox Reader

It would be easy to treat the Decretum Gelasianum‘s flag on George as an embarrassment to be managed. The methodology of this repository treats provenance as a topic, not an embarrassment (METHODOLOGY §2.4), and the Decree is in fact a gift to the honest reader of George’s cult. It supplies, from within the Church’s own tradition and from very near the time, exactly the warning that the legend most needs: that the Acts are not to be believed as history. An Orthodox veneration of George that knows the Decree is on firmer ground, not weaker, than one that does not, because it venerates the martyr while holding the legend at the distance the Church itself prescribed.

The cult, for its part, never depended on the Acts. George was venerated at Lydda before the surviving recensions reached their developed form; the inscriptions, the shrine, and the explosive spread of his veneration are independent of the Passio and untouched by its condemnation (see The Earliest Evidence). The Decree thus draws, with unusual sharpness, the line this whole collection is written along: on one side a real, anciently venerated Great Martyr and Trophy-Bearer, commemorated on 23 April; on the other a fabulous text the Church’s own canonical tradition declined to receive. Honoring the first while disowning the second is not a modern compromise. It is what the Decretum Gelasianum did in the fifth century, and what the collection does now (see Legacy and Assessment; on the persecuted Church of George’s age, The Pre-Schism Church).

References

Decretum Gelasianum (De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis). Critical edition: Ernst von Dobschütz, Das Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis in kritischem Text, Texte und Untersuchungen 38.4. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912. (The early-sixth-century Latin list; names the Passio Georgii among the apocryphal gesta martyrum “not to be received,” with the reasons of unknown/incompetent or heretical authorship and unsuitable matter; the basis for the discussion of the Decree’s wording, date, and authorship.)
Delehaye, Hippolyte. Les légendes grecques des saints militaires. Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 1909, esp. 45–76. (The critical study of the George legend as fabulous; the relation of the Acts to the Decree’s verdict.)
Riches, Samantha. St George: Hero, Martyr and Myth. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000, esp. 13–32. (The principal modern cultural history; the Decretum Gelasianum‘s condemnation of the Passio, the cult’s continuation, and the heretical-origin question.)
Walter, Christopher. The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003, esp. 109–144. (The cult of George in the Byzantine world, independent of and surviving the condemned Acts.)
Krumbacher, Karl. Der heilige Georg in der griechischen Überlieferung. Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1911. (The Greek Passio tradition condemned by the Decree, in its primitive and historicized recensions.)