The Miracle Collections

The Miracles of St Menas are the corpus of healing, protection, and justice wonders reported to have been wrought at and through the shrine of Abu Mena, surviving in a Greek collection of thaumata preserved in the manuscripts and in a Coptic collection edited and translated by James Drescher in Apa Mena (Cairo, 1946), where they stand alongside the Passio and an encomium attributed to a “John, archbishop of Alexandria.” This file surveys the corpus as a literary and devotional artifact — its typical miracle-types, its incubation setting, and what it reveals about the function of the shrine — reporting each wonder as the claim of its text under METHODOLOGY §3.5, and flagging the uncertain identity of the encomium’s attributed author.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox / Coptic (Great Martyr; Wonderworker)

What the Collections Are

Beside the Passio, which tells of the soldier-martyr’s confession and death (see The Passio), the second great body of text attached to St. Menas is a collection of post-mortem wonders: the Miracles of St Menas, a corpus of healings, rescues, and acts of justice said to have been worked at his desert shrine in the Mareotis and through contact with what came from it. Unlike the Passio, which is a single connected narrative, the Miracles are an open and accretive form — a set of discrete episodes, each self-contained, each turning on a need brought to the saint and a wonder granted. This is the characteristic shape of a shrine’s miracle-book in late antiquity: not a biography but a register of the saint’s continuing activity, compiled and added to as the cult lived. The Menas corpus survives in more than one language and recension, the two principal witnesses being a Greek collection and a Coptic one.

The Greek Miracles of St Menas — the thaumata, “wonders” — are preserved in Byzantine hagiographic manuscripts and catalogued among the Menas material in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (the standard catalogue of Greek hagiographic texts; cited here as a catalogue without a fabricated entry number). The Greek collection is the chief witness to the shrine’s incubation and healing practice as the Byzantine world remembered it, and it was made available to scholarship in I. Pomyalovsky’s edition of the Greek text (St. Petersburg, 1900). The Coptic Miracles survive in Sahidic and Bohairic and were edited and translated, together with the Passio and an encomium, by James Drescher in his volume Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas (Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946) — the central modern edition of the Coptic Menas material and the text to which the Coptic wonders are pinned here.

The two collections are neither identical nor wholly independent: they share the basic repertoire of the genre and some specific episodes, while differing in selection, order, and detail, as one expects of a cult-text transmitted across languages and centuries. For the purposes of this file the Greek and Coptic Miracles are treated together as the corpus, with the source named where a specific episode is in view.

The Encomium and the Uncertain “John, Archbishop of Alexandria”

Among the Coptic texts Drescher edited is an encomium — a formal homily of praise — on St. Menas, attributed in its own heading to a “John, archbishop of Alexandria.” The encomium belongs to a familiar Coptic homiletic type: a panegyric delivered or framed for the saint’s feast, rehearsing his martyrdom and miracles and exhorting the faithful to his veneration. As a witness it is valuable for the shape of the cult’s self-understanding — how the saint was praised, what wonders were held up, how the shrine was spoken of from the ambo — rather than for biography.

The attribution to “John, archbishop of Alexandria” is, however, not secure, and the file flags it rather than resolving it. The patriarchal throne of Alexandria held several patriarchs named John across late antiquity and the early medieval period, and the encomium’s heading does not by itself fix which is meant; nor is an attributed authorship in a Coptic homiletic heading by itself a guarantee of authorship, since such headings frequently assign texts to great names of the see by way of authority rather than record.

[Disputed: the encomium on St. Menas edited by Drescher (Apa Mena, 1946) is attributed in its heading to a “John, archbishop of Alexandria,” but which John is meant is uncertain — candidates discussed in the scholarship include John III of Alexandria and figures of the circle of John of Nikiu, among others, while the attribution itself may be honorific rather than authorial in the manner of much Coptic homiletic transmission. Drescher edits and translates the text as that of a “John, archbishop of Alexandria” without certifying the identification; this compendium reports the attribution as the text gives it and the identification as unresolved (Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946; cf. the Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Atiya, 1991, entries on Menas and the Alexandrian patriarchs named John).]

The honest position is the one the edition itself takes: the encomium is a witness to the cult attributed to a “John, archbishop of Alexandria,” and the precise identity of that John is open.

The Typical Miracle-Types

The wonders of the Menas corpus fall into a small number of recurring types, and the value of surveying them is that the repertoire itself tells us what the shrine was for. These are pinned to the Miracles of St Menas per METHODOLOGY §3.5: they are reported here as what the collections claim the saint did, not as documented events.

The cheated merchant restored. The most celebrated of the Menas miracles, and the one most often retold, is the story of the deceived merchant (or traveller) and his gold. In the episode as the collection gives it, a man entrusts a sum of gold (or a valuable deposit) to another, or carries an offering toward the shrine, and is robbed or defrauded — and in some forms murdered — by the very man trusted with it; St. Menas intervenes, the truth is forced out, the stolen wealth is restored, and the wrongdoer is exposed and, where he has killed, raised victim and confession both stand to the saint’s vindication of justice (Miracles of St Menas; cf. Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). The story circulated widely and is one of the signature Menas wonders; its point is that the saint is a guarantor of honest dealing and a righter of fraud, a protector of the vulnerable against the powerful and the dishonest.

The lame, the blind, and the possessed healed. The staple of the corpus, as of every shrine miracle-book, is bodily healing. The lame walk, the blind see, the paralysed are loosed, the deaf and dumb are restored, and the demon-possessed are delivered, after the sufferer comes to the shrine, keeps vigil, and is touched by the saint’s power — frequently in sleep (Miracles of St Menas; Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). These are the wonders for which Abu Mena was above all sought, and they are continuous with the healing function attested by the shrine’s baths and by the ampullae that carried its blessing home (see Incubation and Healing).

The protection of pilgrims. A further type concerns the road rather than the shrine: the saint protects those travelling to or from him. Pilgrims in danger — from robbers, from the desert, from the perils of the journey — call on Menas and are delivered, the saint sometimes appearing in person, often as a soldier on horseback, to drive off the threat (Miracles of St Menas; Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). This type binds the saint’s military identity (the soldier of the Passio) to his protective office: the martyr who was a soldier remains, in the wonders, a defender.

The justice miracles. Closely allied to the cheated-merchant story is a wider class of justice wonders, in which the saint vindicates the wronged, exposes the false, punishes perjury and theft, and forces restitution. The shrine, in these episodes, is a place where oaths are sworn and disputes are brought, and where the saint himself sees that truth prevails — a sacred court as much as a sacred clinic (Miracles of St Menas; cf. Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte, 2001, on the social functions of Egyptian saints’ cults).

The repertoire — healing, rescue on the road, and the righting of injustice — is conventional for a late-antique shrine, and that conventionality is itself worth noting: the Menas Miracles draw on the common stock of the genre, which is one reason they bear on the cult’s function far more securely than on any biography of the saint.

The Incubation Setting

The setting in which many of these wonders occur is incubation — the practice of sleeping at the holy place to receive healing or a saving dream. The sufferer comes to Abu Mena, keeps vigil and prays at the tomb, and lies down to sleep within the precinct; the saint appears in the dream, speaks, prescribes, or simply touches, and the petitioner wakes healed (Miracles of St Menas; Drescher, Apa Mena, 1946). This dream-cure is the characteristic mechanism of the Menas healings, and it set the shrine within a long Mediterranean tradition of incubation — the practice associated in the pre-Christian world above all with the cult of Asklepios, and continued, transformed, at the great Christian healing shrines, of which Abu Mena was one of the foremost (Frankfurter, ed., Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, 1998).

The material remains of the shrine fit this literary picture. The excavated complex at Abu Mena included a great bath establishment fed by the holy water of the site, and the architecture of the pilgrimage-city is that of a place built to receive, house, and treat crowds of the sick (see The Great Pilgrimage City; on the practice, Incubation and Healing). The pilgrim ampullae — the small clay flasks stamped with the orant saint between his two camels — carried the holy water or oil of the shrine away with the cured and the hopeful, extending the incubation cure beyond the precinct: the blessing of the tomb travelled home in the flask (see The Menas Flasks).

What the Collection Reveals About the Shrine

Read as a body, and held to what it can bear, the Miracles of St Menas are a rich witness — not to the life of the third-century soldier, but to the function and reach of the shrine that grew over his tomb. Three things stand out.

First, the Miracles tell us what the shrine was for. The repertoire — healing above all, then rescue and the righting of wrong — defines Abu Mena as a healing centre and a place of justice: people came to be cured, to be protected on the road, and to have their disputes and frauds set right by the saint. The wonders are the cult’s account of its own business.

Second, the Miracles attest the social breadth of the cult. The petitioners of the episodes are merchants and travellers, the sick poor and the defrauded, men and women, Egyptians and foreigners; the shrine in the wonders is a crossroads, drawing the needy of many sorts (cf. Papaconstantinou, Le culte des saints en Égypte, 2001). This breadth is exactly what the material record independently confirms, for the ampullae carried the cult across the Mediterranean (see Archaeology Versus Passio).

Third — and this is the methodological discipline — the Miracles cannot be cashed as biography or as documented event. They are conventional in their types, open and accretive in their form, and uncertain in date; the encomium that prefaces some of the Coptic material is attributed to a “John, archbishop of Alexandria” whose very identity is unresolved. Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, the wonders are reported as the claims of the Miracles of St Menas — what the texts and the faithful behind them say the saint did — and pinned to their source, not certified as history. Their evidentiary weight is for the cult: that, by the time these texts took shape, Menas was venerated across a wide world as a healer, a protector, and a guarantor of justice, and that his shrine in the Mareotis desert was the engine of that veneration. For the firm side of the case — the city, the basilica, the baths, the datable flasks — the companion file sets the textual record against the material one and asks what each can and cannot establish (see Archaeology Versus Passio).

References

Drescher, James. Apa Mena: A Selection of Coptic Texts Relating to St. Menas. Cairo: Société d’archéologie copte, 1946. (The central edition and translation of the Coptic Passio, Miracles, and the encomium attributed to a “John, archbishop of Alexandria”; the source for the Coptic wonders and the encomium’s disputed attribution.)
The Greek Miracles of St Menas (the thaumata), preserved in the Byzantine hagiographic manuscript tradition and catalogued in the Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca (cited as a catalogue, without a fabricated entry number); the Greek text edited by I. Pomyalovsky (St. Petersburg, 1900). (The Greek collection of wonders; the edition is cited as the standard publication of the Greek text without reproducing a page reference not verified here.)
Frankfurter, David, ed. Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (Incubation, dream-cure, and the Egyptian shrine context.)
Papaconstantinou, Arietta. Le culte des saints en Égypte des Byzantins aux Abbassides. Paris: CNRS, 2001. (The documented cult of Menas and the social functions of Egyptian saints’ shrines.)
The Coptic Encyclopedia, ed. Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (Entries on Menas, Abu Mena, the Miracles, and the Alexandrian patriarchs named John.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository. (The rule that hagiographic and miraculous claims are pinned to their earliest written attestation and reported as the source’s testimony.)