What the Relics Tell Us

Unlike the documentary record, the relics of St. Nicholas are a physical object that can be examined, and they have been — most notably by the anatomist Luigi Martino during the 1957 reopening of the tomb at Bari, and in later analyses. This file reports what those forensic and anatomical studies found and, with the discipline of the whole section, is rigorous about the difference between what science can establish (an ancient skeleton, certain physical traits, consistency or inconsistency with a hypothesis) and what it cannot (the identity of the bones, the truth of any story, the sanctity of the man).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Great Hierarch)

A Physical Object to Examine

Everywhere else in this collection the evidence is textual and late. The relics are different in kind: a body of human bone, venerated as the saint’s, that has survived and can be subjected to physical examination. This makes them tempting as a shortcut around the thin documentary record — surely the bones can tell us what the texts cannot. The discipline of this section requires caution about exactly that hope. The relics can tell us some things with real authority and others not at all, and the whole value of examining them lies in keeping the two apart. The relics in question are those at the Basilica di San Nicola in Bari, brought there from Myra in 1087 (the translation itself is treated in The Translation to Bari (1087)); a portion is also claimed by Venice, a complication taken up there.

The Martino Examination of 1957

In 1957, during restoration work on the basilica, the tomb of St. Nicholas at Bari was opened, and the ecclesiastical authorities commissioned an anatomical and anthropological examination of the relics. The work was led by Luigi Martino, professor of human anatomy at the University of Bari, who measured, photographed, and radiographed the bones and produced a detailed report (Martino’s study, as reported in English 2012; Jones 1978). The principal findings, as transmitted in the scholarship, were these:

The remains were those of a single individual, an elderly man, consistent with a person who had died at an advanced age.
The skeleton showed signs of having been damaged and fragmentary — consistent with the relics having been disturbed, moved, and not perfectly preserved over the centuries (and consistent with the hurried, partial removal of 1087).
From the bones, certain physical characteristics could be reconstructed — stature on the shorter side, and pathological features including indications consistent with chronic conditions; the skull permitted, much later, a facial reconstruction.

These are the kinds of statement forensic anatomy can responsibly make: the sex, the approximate age at death, the general state of preservation, and reconstructable physical traits of the person whose bones these are.

It is worth being exact about how each of these inferences is reached, because the method fixes its own limits. Sex is read from the morphology of the pelvis and the robustness of the skull; age at death from the fusion of the cranial sutures, the wear of the joints, and the degenerative changes of an old skeleton; stature from the long bones, by regression formulae of known but imperfect accuracy; and pathology from the marks that disease and injury leave in bone. Each of these is a probabilistic reading of physical remains, sound within its margins and silent past them. None of them yields a name, a date precise to the year, or a deed. The discipline of forensic anthropology is precisely the discipline of saying what bone can and cannot bear, and an honest account of the Bari relics is bound by the same restraint (Martino, in English 2012; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Later Analyses

Martino’s data were revisited in subsequent decades. In the 2000s, a team led by the forensic anthropologist Caroline Wilkinson (then at the University of Manchester) used Martino’s measurements and radiographs to produce a facial reconstruction of the man whose skull these were — the much-publicized image of a broad-faced older man with a broken nose (English 2012). More recent work has applied radiocarbon dating to relic fragments associated with Nicholas; a fragment tested by an Oxford laboratory was reported to be consistent with the fourth century, which is to say not inconsistent with the traditional date of the saint’s life. Each of these advances is real, and each must be read with exactness about what it shows.

The limits of each technique deserve their own statement, lest the cumulative impression overreach the individual results. A facial reconstruction is not a photograph: it builds the soft tissue back onto the skull by average tissue-depth tables, so that the bony framework is recovered with some confidence while the perishable features — the exact set of the eyes, the line of the lips, the color of hair and skin — are estimated or supplied by the artist. Two competent practitioners working from the same skull will produce kindred but not identical faces. Radiocarbon dating, for its part, returns a calibrated date-range, not a single year, and it dates the death of the organism whose bone is tested; on relics that have been handled, washed, moved, divided, and venerated for centuries, contamination and the small size of testable fragments widen the uncertainty further. What the radiocarbon result can therefore do is exclude a gross anachronism — a body centuries too late — and place the material within an antiquity compatible with the fourth century; what it cannot do is certify the year of death or the identity of the man (English 2012; METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What Science Can Establish

Set out plainly, the studies can establish:

That the Bari relics are the bones of a single elderly man, damaged and incompletely preserved, of generally modest stature, with certain reconstructable physical features (Martino, in English 2012; Jones 1978).
That the material is ancient and consistent with — not contradictory of — a fourth-century date, where radiocarbon results are available, within the limits of such testing on fragmentary, much-handled relics.
A face, in the sense of a scientifically grounded reconstruction of the skull’s owner (Wilkinson, in English 2012).

These are genuine results, and they are not nothing: they show that the venerated bones are those of an old man of roughly the right antiquity, not, say, an obvious medieval substitution or a much later body. To that extent the relics are consistent with the tradition of an aged fourth-century bishop.

What Science Cannot Establish

The harder and more important half is what the studies cannot show, and the methodology requires that this be stated as plainly as the findings:

Identity. No examination can establish that these bones are those of Nicholas of Myra specifically. Anatomy can show an elderly fourth-century-consistent man; it cannot put a name to him. The identification rests on the chain of custody and the cult — the tradition that these are the relics taken from Myra in 1087 — not on anything the bones themselves declare.
The truth of any story. That the man was old and short tells us nothing about whether he dowered three daughters, rescued three generals, calmed a storm, or struck Arius. The deeds are not the kind of thing bones can attest. (A broken nose, sometimes linked in popular accounts to the slap of Arius, establishes nothing of the sort: a healed facial injury in an elderly skeleton has countless possible causes and cannot be tied to any narrated event.)
Sanctity. This is the deepest point. Holiness is not a physical property and leaves no forensic trace; no examination of relics can confirm or deny that the man was a saint. The Church venerates the relics because it venerates the saint, on the authority of the cult — not because anatomy has certified him.

[Disputed: the popular association of the broken nose found in the Bari skull with the slap of Arius at Nicaea has no scientific basis — a healed facial injury cannot be tied to any specific event, and the slap is itself a late legend (see the Nicaea section). Forensic study establishes physical traits of the skeleton, not the historicity of any episode in the saint's life.]

The Venice Complication

The relics question is further complicated by a second claim. When the Bari merchants seized the relics in 1087 they did so hurriedly and, the accounts admit, incompletely, leaving fragments behind; in 1099–1100 Venetian crusaders are said to have gathered remaining relics from Myra, and Venice (at the church of San Nicolò al Lido) has long claimed to hold a portion of the saint (Jones 1978; English 2012). Comparative anatomical study has been used to argue that the Bari and Venice relics may indeed be complementary parts of one skeleton — a finding that, if sustained, would cohere with the tradition that the Bari removal was partial and the remainder later taken to Venice. This is treated more fully with the translation history (see The Translation to Bari (1087)). For the present purpose it underlines the same lesson: anatomy can speak to whether two sets of bones could belong to one body; it cannot speak to whose body, nor settle the rival claims by itself.

The Honest Conclusion

The relics, examined with the best science available, yield a figure consistent with the tradition and silent on everything beyond it: an elderly man, of roughly the right antiquity, whose face can be reconstructed and whose identity, deeds, and holiness lie wholly outside what the examination can reach. This is neither a vindication nor a refutation of the saint, and it should be presented as neither. It is, rather, the same result the whole section reaches by a different road: the physical evidence, like the documentary evidence, can carry the frame — an old fourth-century bishop is consistent with these bones — while the cult alone carries the content — that this is Nicholas, the wonderworker and almsgiver whom the Church venerates. Science describes the relic; the Church venerates the saint; and the two statements, kept distinct, do not compete.

References

English, Adam C. The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. (Reports the Martino examination of 1957, the Wilkinson facial reconstruction, the physical findings, and the radiocarbon and Venice-comparison work; the cautions on what the relics can and cannot show.)
Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (The relics, the translation, and the Venice claim.)
Martino, Luigi. Anatomical examination of the relics of St. Nicholas, Bari, 1957 — as reported and discussed in English (2012) and the relic literature. (Original report not consulted directly; cited via English.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3.5, this repository.