Was St George Real? Did St George Exist?

St George might be hailed as a national hero, but he was actually born – in the 3rd century AD – more than 2,000 miles away in Cappadocia (modern day Turkey).

He is thought to have died in Lydda (modern day Israel) in the Roman province of Palestine in AD 303.

Very little is known about George’s life, but it is thought he was a Roman officer of Greek descent from Cappadocia who was martyred in one of the pre-Constantinian persecutions.

There are two main versions of the legend, a Greek and a Latin version, which can both be traced to the 5th or 6th century. The saint’s veneration dates to the 5th century with some certainty, and possibly still to the 4th. The addition of the dragon legend dates to the 11th century.

The earliest text which preserves fragments of George’s narrative is in a Greek hagiography which is identified by Hippolyte Delehaye of the scholarly Bollandists to be a palimpsest of the 5th century.

An earlier work by Eusebius, Church history, written in the 4th century, contributed to the legend but did not name George or provide significant detail.

The work of the Bollandists Daniel Papebroch, Jean Bolland, and Godfrey Henschen in the 17th century was one of the first pieces of scholarly research to establish the saint’s historicity, via their publications in Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca.

Pope Gelasius I stated in 494 that George was among those saints “whose names are justly reverenced among men, but whose actions are known only to God.”