The True Saint Nicholas: Why He Matters to Christmas

by William J. Bennett

He is elusive even to scholars who study such matters. They believe that Saint Nicholas served as a bishop during the fourth century in the town of Myra, on the coast of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. He may have attended the famous Council of Nicaea convened by Constantine the Great in 325 to resolve issues troubling the Christian Church. But the details of his life and work remain sketchy. If he wrote anything, it is long gone. The first known Nicholas “biography” dates to the eighth or ninth century, long after his death, when a Greek monk known as Michael the Archimandrite assembled a collection of tales about him.

Why bother with the history of Saint Nicholas? For one thing, his is a fascinating story. Its sheer vastness of scale is astounding. It stretches from the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa to the Americas and beyond. It crosses oceans, deserts, and frozen arctic climes. This is an adventure tale complete with emperors, knights, villains, shipwrecks, kidnappings, treasure, and dark dungeons. It is the age-old struggle of good against evil, of right against might. But there is a larger reason to remember Saint Nicholas: He matters to Christmas. This saintly man who lived so long ago has come to influence one of our holiest seasons and most beloved holidays. This influence that has come across so many centuries is a kind of miracle. It is evidence of God’s love.

Theophanes and Nonna were a well-to-do couple. Perhaps they inherited land and money. Theophanes may have run a prosperous trade in cloth or milled grains. History does not tell us. We know only that, according to one old chronicle, they were people “of substantial lineage, holding property enough without superfluity.” Their comfortable lives were troubled by one great unhappiness: though they had been married for many years, they had never managed to have children. As time passed, they wept and waited, but no child came. Still, Nonna refused to give up hope. Instead, she did something very wise. She prayed. Like Hannah in the First Book of Samuel in the Bible, she poured out her soul to God, asking him to remember her. It must have seemed like a miracle when late in life, after so many hopes and tears, Nonna’s prayer was answered around the year A.D. 280 with the birth of a son.

Some say that when Nonna’s child was placed in his bath right after birth, he stood up by himself and raised his arms as if in praise of God. Others say that on Wednesdays and Fridays, traditional days of fasting for early Christians, he refused to nurse until after sundown. Such are the legends. But there must have been something that made the proud parents hope that their child would someday serve God and his fellow men in some remarkable way. They christened the baby Nicholas, a name that in Greek means “people’s victor,” after an uncle who was an abbot at a nearby monastery.

Nicholas’s parents taught him early on that Christians served God by serving the less fortunate. In an age when the general rule of existence was “Fend for yourself or die,” a Christian’s duty was to help others. Churches organized to care for the poor and sick. “See how those Christians love one another!” pagans marveled.

THEN SOMETHING HAPPENED THAT surely must have tested his faith: a plague swept through Lycia, passing from town to town, cutting down whole families, striking rich and poor alike. Theophanes and Nonna were among the dead. Nicholas, left alone in the world, went to live with his uncle at the monastery to recover from the blow. Slowly, bewilderment and despair gave way to acceptance. He asked God for strength and discovered that it came to him. As he healed, he resolved to train for the priesthood. As a first step, he made up his mind to give away his possessions, including the inheritance left to him by his parents. This decision gave rise to the most beloved story about Nicholas.

In Patara, there lived a family that had fallen on hard times. They had once been wealthy, but misfortunes had overtaken them, and now they were so poor they had barely enough to live on. The father had tried to find work, but when people saw his soft hands, which had never known any kind of hard labor, they took him to be lazy, and turned him away. The man had three daughters of marriageable age, but their chances of finding husbands were grim since the father could offer no dowries. (In those days, a young woman needed a dowry to attract an offer of marriage.) As their financial situation grew desperate, the father realized that the only way to ensure the survival of his children was to sell them into servitude. At least that way they would have enough to eat. When news of the family’s plight reached Nicholas, he at once set about thinking of a way to help them. He remembered Jesus’ teaching that “when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret” (Matthew 6:3–4 NASB). He soon came up with a plan. That night, he put several gold coins into a small bag and started out for the home of the father and his three daughters. The hour was late and the streets deserted when he arrived. Inside the house, the family was sleeping. Nicholas crept up to a window, reached through, and dropped the bag of gold. (Some say that it landed in a shoe, others in a stocking that had been left hanging to dry.) Then he h...

The man rushed out of the house, ran after the shadowy figure that was hurrying away, and caught it by the cloak. When he recognized Nicholas, he fell to his knees and began to kiss the hands that had helped his family so graciously. Nicholas asked him to stand, and told him to thank God instead. He begged the father not to tell anyone the secret of who had left the gold. Despite his longing for anonymity, Nicholas’s act of generosity set him on the path to becoming the world’s most famous gift giver.

When the time came to go home, Nicholas returned to Caesarea and struck a bargain with the captain of a merchant vessel to drop him off in Patara. On such journeys, passengers had no cabins or beds. They had to content themselves with a spot on deck amid the stacks and piles of cargo. The ship set out with a fair wind. Nicholas passed the time by chatting with the seamen and gazing at the passing coastline. Then the weather changed. A storm blew out of nowhere, lashing the boat with fierce gales, and waves crashed over the bow.

Nicholas tried to calm the mariners with prayers for deliverance. When the storm finally subsided, they were still afloat, but they discovered that the rudder had been smashed. They drifted for days with no land in sight, until the sailors gave up hope of any fate except dying of thirst on the open sea. Nicholas refused to give in to despair. One morning as the crew woke, one of them gave a shout. There, on the horizon, lay the coast. The winds and currents pushed them steadily toward land, and as they drew near they were astonished to realize that they had drifted to Patara.

The years passed quickly, and Nicholas’s reputation for kindness and generosity spread. The Christian community in Patara grew. “As people observed his goodness, many followed his example and teachings,” Symeon Metaphrastes says. “They scorned a material, transient existence and placed their trust in the eternal.” Eventually Nicholas’s dedication led to a promotion and high honor. He was chosen to be bishop of Myra, an important city several miles east of Patara on the Lycian coast.

There is an old, strange story about how Nicholas became bishop. The man who had served as the bishop of Myra for many years had died, and the other bishops of the region gathered in the city to elect someone to succeed him. They discussed the matter for several days, and prayed over it, but reached no agreement over who would be the right choice. Finally one of the oldest and wisest bishops stood and suggested that they should put the matter into God’s hands. He announced that he had had a dream in which a voice told him to watch the doors of the church before morning prayers. The first person named Nicholas to enter the church would be the man they were looking for. Would the bishops be willing to try it? They would. As the time for the morning prayer service approached, the old bishop stationed himself near the church door and waited. Meanwhile, Nicholas, in town to pay his respects to the memory of the deceased bishop, had awakened at dawn. Dressing quickly, he headed to church to spend some time in quiet meditation before the prayer service began. As he stepped through the door, an old bishop he did not know stopped him. “What do people call you, my son?” the old man asked. “My name is Nicholas, your servant,” he answered with humility. “Follow me, child.” Taking him by the hand, he led him before the other bishops and cried, “Here, my brothers, is Nicholas. Let us greet our new bishop.”

The bewildered Nicholas at first refused the appointment, insisting that he wasn’t ready for such responsibility. But it is a difficult thing to say no to a room full of bishops, and he finally accepted. Did it really happen that way? No one knows. Certainly, in those days people put much more stock in dreams and visions than we do today. They often looked for signs from God to help them reach a decision. Congregations sometimes chose leaders b...

THE YOUNG BISHOP HAD barely settled into his new role when he met the greatest test of his life. The tragedy known as the Great Persecution fell upon the Christian Church.

In Myra, Nicholas heard the reports of the spreading horror and prepared himself. He did not have to wait long for the tromp of Roman soldiers in the street, the banging on the door, the command to surrender to Caesar’s will. He followed the soldiers into the depths of a black, suffocating prison, wondering if he would ever see daylight again. He must have asked himself that question countless times during the following years. Threats were the first weapons his captors used to break him down. When those didn’t work, they tried hunger and thirst. When that failed, they moved on to beatings. Nicholas refused to renounce his beliefs. They pulled him from his cell, tortured him until he lost consciousness, then threw him back into his hole and left him alone until he grew strong enough to be tortured again.

Then came even better news. Constantine, ruler of Rome’s western provinces, led an army against another Roman leader for control of the empire. Before the battle, Constantine had a vision of a flaming Chi-Rho cross, a symbol of Christ, emblazoned in the sky. Beneath the cross, he saw the words, “In this sign you shall conquer.” He ordered that the cross be painted on his soldier’s shields, and he marched on to win the battle. In A.D. 313 Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which granted freedom of worship to all religions, including Christianity, and ordered the return of Christian properties.

One day Nicholas got word that some grain ships en route from Alexandria to Constantinople had stopped off at Myra. He hurried down to Andriake, Myra’s port, to see if the ships’ captains could offer help for his starving people. By the time he got down to the harbor, an anxious crowd had gathered. He pushed his way to the front, spoke to the sailors standing guard on the wharves, and managed to arrange a conference with the captains. Nicholas wasted no time in asking for some of the grain. “We can’t do it,” they answered. “The cargo was measured in Alexandria. If we arrive in Constantinople with any less, we must answer for it.” “I’m not asking you to give it away,” Nicholas said. “We have good money to pay. We need grain. Come with me.” The reluctant captains followed him through the streets, where they saw for themselves the results of the famine. “Trust in God,” Nicholas told them. “Look into your hearts, and do what you know to be right.” The captains talked it over at length, and in the end they agreed to unload a portion of their grain. It was enough to help the people make it through the worst of the crisis, and it provided seed with which to plant new crops. Many years later, a legend arose. It told how when the grain ships reached Constantinople and the captains unloaded their ships, they were dumbfounded to find that they had just as much grain in their holds as when they had left Alexandria.

ONE OF THE OLDEST stories about Nicholas depicts him as a champion of justice and protector of the innocent. According to the story, the bishop of Myra was living proof that “the righteous are bold as a lion” (Proverbs 28:1 RSV). The Emperor Constantine, faced with a revolt in the region of Phrygia, dispatched troops under three trusted generals to quiet the unrest. Rough seas forced the troop ships to stop off at Andriake for a while. The three generals, named Ursos, Nepotianos, and Herpylion, granted their men shore leave while the ships waited to get underway again. Before long, a brawl erupted between some of the soldiers and locals. Looting and destruction of property followed. When Nicholas heard of the trouble, he hurried down to the port. “Where are you from, and why are you here?” he asked the three generals. They explained that they were simply passing through. “Well, if your mission is to promote the peace,” Nicholas told them, “you’re not doing a very good job, because your troops are causing trouble in my town.” The embarrassed generals quickly ordered their officers to restore order and repair any damage. Once things had quieted down, Nicholas patched things up by inviting Ursos, Nepotianos, and Herpylion to come dine with him.

As they climbed the road to Myra, they heard shouts and saw a group of citizens rushing down the hill in search of the bishop. It took Nicholas a moment to untangle the report they brought him. The local magistrate, a thoroughly corrupt man by the name of Eustathios, had accepted a bribe to sentence three innocent men to death. The victims were only moments away from execution. Nicholas rushed to the center of town, followed by the three generals. The crowd there made way for him when they saw him coming. The three men knelt on the ground with hands bound behind their backs. The executioner stood behind them, sword raised, ready to carry out the sentence. The bishop strode up to the executioner and grabbed the sword from his hand. He quickly untied the three bound men and set them free. The executioner made no objection. News of what had happened raced through the streets of Myra as people streamed in and out of the town center. Hearing the excited reports, Eustathios hurried to the place of execution. When Nicholas saw him coming, he made straight for the magistrate. “Evil man!” he cried. “You can be sure that I’ll send word to Emperor Constantine about just what sort of man you are, and what sort of justice you administer.” When Eustathios saw the three generals standing at Nicholas’s side, fear seized him. In a matter of seconds, the truth came out. Two city leaders, looking to get rid of some old enemies, had bribed Eustathios to condemn the men on a false charge. At f...

Tradition says that Nicholas was one of the bishops attending the great council. As he sat listening to Arius proclaim views that seemed to him blasphemous, his anger mounted. He must have asked himself: Did I suffer through all those years in prison to listen to this man betray our beliefs? His anger got the best of him. He left his seat, walked up to Arius, faced him squarely, and slapped his face. The bishops were stunned. Arius appealed to the emperor himself. “Should anyone who has the temerity to strike me in your presence go unpunished?” he demanded. “Indeed, it is unlawful for anyone to lift his hand in violence before the emperor,” Constantine replied. “But I will leave it to this assembly to decide whether to punish this act.” The bishops decided to strip their colleague from Myra of his clerical garments and place him under guard for the rest of the meeting. Nicholas found himself under lock and key in another wing of the palace. But in the end, the bishop of Myra got the result he wanted. When the arguments were done, the council rebuked Arius for his beliefs. The bishops drew up a statement that came to be known as the Nicene Creed, which affirms faith in the Holy Trinity and declares that Jesus is “of one substance with the Father.” Perhaps Constantine secretly enjoyed watching someone put Arius in his place. Perhaps some of the bishops admired Nicholas for standing up forcefully, if overzealously, for his beliefs. Nicholas must have had friends and supporter...