The Real Saint Nicholas: Defender of Truth, Puncher of Heretics, Destroyer of Temples

The 21st century has been hard on the legacy of Jolly Old St. Nicholas.

The Norwegian government just released an ad featuring a gay Kris Kringle titled, “When Harry Met Santa.” In a sequence that sexualizes the innocent Christmas memories of children throughout the ages, a man pines for Santa year after year, waiting up to spy him coming down the chimney. Finally, the big guy grants the man’s wish and takes a vacation from delivering presents so the two can spend the evening making out. Merry Christmas.

Not to be outdone, Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen produced an R-rated animated movie that imagines Santa as a patriarchal white oppressor trying to keep Jewish women from breaking the gingerbread ceiling and claiming his job. So if you’ve always wanted your holiday cheer with a side of raunchy complaints about toxic masculinity, “Santa Inc.” is the movie for you.

Given what the historical records tell us about the original Santa Claus and his commitment to truth and righteousness, you have to wonder just how St. Nick would deal with these defamers of his name were he around today. Chances are, they wouldn’t like Santa when he’s angry.

Early church records assure us that, yes, Virginia, there was a real Saint Nicholas. Born in the late 3rd century to a wealthy Greek family in modern day Turkey, Nicholas of Bari was orphaned at a young age. Driven by a desire to use his inherited fortune for good, he developed a reputation for charity and generosity. One famous account — likely what sparked the legend of gift giving — found him secretly throwing bags of gold coins into the window of three penniless young women by night (some traditions say the bags fell into stockings drying on the hearth). Thus, he provided them dowries, sparing them from lives of prostitution.

But it was not the legends of stealthy beneficence that most merited Nicholas’ place in early church records, rather it was his passion for truth.

Made a bishop at a young age, Nicholas became known for his fiery opposition to heresy and the influence of paganism. One notable example was his battle with the idolators at the temple of Diana in the then-Greek city of Myra.

Preaching on the church at Ephesus, another Greek city now found in modern day Turkey, Bible teacher John MacArthur describes how worship of Diana, also known as Artemis, was practiced at that time:

The goddess of Ephesus, Diana, worshiped as a sex goddess…and there were thousands of priestesses and temple prostitutes, singers, dancers, and a whole great big orgy occurred.  One writer says the worship was a kind of hysteria, where the people with shouts and music worked themselves into frenzies of shameless sexual activity, including self-mutilation.  Heraclitus said the temple was, quote, ‘The darkness of vileness.  The morals were lower than animals, and the inhabitants of Ephesus were fit only to be drowned,’ end quote …  It was a vile, sinful world for those early Christians to live in.”

So, rather like the sort of people who would turn an innocent childhood myth into an object of adult sexual obsession (cough, cough Norway).

It’s hardly surprising then that Nicholas would have a violent reaction to find shrines and altars to this goddess in his diocese. The 9th century Vita Compilata tells us that whenever he encountered evidence of her worship, he destroyed the edifice in a wrath (I like to imagine him giving Samuel L. Jackson’s “furious anger” speech from “Pulp Fiction.”):

Now when [Nicholas] discovered that many of the shrines of the idols still existed and that the great broods of demons dwelt therein and were disturbing some of the citizens of Myra, incensed in mind he set out with force and holy zeal to rage through the whole infested region. Wherever he found such a shrine, he tore it down, reducing it to dust. This way he drove the mass of demons away and brought about tranquility for the folk to enjoy. 

Eventually, Symeon the Metaphrast relays, good St. Nick took the battle to the goddess’ very house of worship in Myra:

[He] attacked it also, doing with it as he had done with the others. The temple was outstanding – remarkably beautiful and unsurpassed in magnitude. It had been a most felicitous resort for demons. But when Nicholas launched his attack against the temple, an attack both vigorous and devastating, he not only destroyed everything that towered aloft, and hurled that to earth, but he uprooted the whole from its foundations. Indeed, what was highest, at the very pinnacle of the temple, was embedded in the earth, and what was in the earth was impelled into the air.

The evil spirits, it was said, “fled howling before him.” But perhaps the pinnacle of Santa’s legend as a warrior for the faith comes from the 4th century