Stealing a Saint

According to church tradition, Saint Mark founded the church in Alexandria and ultimately was buried in the church.  I should note that my source for this part of the story is satirist, Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad.   According to Twain, a fifth century Venetian priest had a dream of an angel who told him to steal the body of Saint Mark.  According to the angel, if Mark's body resided in Venice, then the city would rise in prominence among the nations.  If Mark's body ever left Venice, the city would perish from the earth.[1]  Leaving Twain, everyone seems to agree that centuries later AD 828, Venetian thieves managed to finally pull it off.  In the seventh century, the Egyptian Arabs had converted to the pork avoiding religion of Islam. Some enterprising Venetians stole the body from the church and buried it in pork products.  The Muslims came to search the ship, but shunned the halal sections which were forbidden.  The stolen body was entombed in St. Mark's Basilica.[2]

Here the Basilica has a slightly less nefarious version of events.  According to the Basilica, the Muslims were actually going to destroy the Alexandrian church for the marble.  The Venetian thieves took the body to comfort the Alexandrian Christians and save it from the Muslims.  Even in this overly amicable retelling of the story, they still have to deceive the local Christians.[3]

After the Basilica burned down, in 1094, supposedly Mark miraculously revealed his body out of solid stone.

It may seem incomprehensible today to believe that a human being can emerge from a column, from a block of stone. We are accustomed to considering stone and walls as inorganic, dead substances. But it wasn't that way in the pre-"rationalistic" ages. In the writings of Andrea Palladio (I quattro libri dell'architettura, 1570) we again find the concept of stone as being literally living, with characteristics we would now call organic. We may imagine a sort of identification between St. Mark and the structure of his burial place. The central point in the "legend" of the miracle of the column consists not only in linking the saint with the basilica which, since it contained his tomb, became a sepulchral basilica, but also in creating a direct bond between the material structure of the building and an event concerning the saint in person. An important effect of the miracle must have been intensified concrete contact with the patron saint and his relics, which is to say his body. The miracle occurred during a period of reinforced popular sensitivity about holy matters and it is legitimate to suppose that precisely this collective desire lay at the heart of the "legend".[4]

According to the Orthodox Church the thieves left the head of Mark, which the church ultimately lost over 250 years ago.  In 1968, the Catholic Church ultimately returned some of Mark's relics to Alexandria, but apparently some still remain in Venice.[5]

This feud between Venice and Alexandria should put Calvinism and Arminianism into perspective.  I follow the Coptic Pope on facebook and he recently commemorated the discovery of Mark's head.[6]