Barlaam and Josaphat - The Legend

The Legend

The Greek legend of "Barlaam and Ioasaph" is sometimes attributed to the 7th century John of Damascus, but actually it was transcribed by the Georgian monk Euthymius in the 11th century. The first Christianized adaptation was the Georgian epic Balavariani dating back to the 10th century. A Georgian monk, Euthymios of Athos, translated the story into Greek, some time before he was killed while visiting Constantinople in 1028. There the Greek adaptation was translated into Latin in 1048 and soon became well known in Western Europe as Barlaam and Josaphat.

It was ultimately derived, through a variety of intermediate versions (Arabic and Georgian), from the life story of the Buddha. Wilfred Cantwell Smith traced the story from a 2nd to 4th century Sanskrit Mahayana Buddhist text, to a Manichee version, which then found its way into Muslim culture as the Arabic Kitab Bilawhar wa-Yudasaf (Book of Bilawhar and Yudasaf), which was current in Baghdad in the 8th century.

The story of Barlaam and Josaphat was popular in the Middle Ages, appearing in such works as the Golden Legend, and a scene there involving three caskets eventually appeared, via Caxton's English translation of a Latin version, in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice". A Middle High German version was described as "Perhaps the flower of religious literary creativity in the German Middle Ages" by Heinrich Heine. The story of Josaphat was re-told as an exploration of free will and the seeking of inner peace through meditation in the 17th century.

Although Barlaam was never formally canonized, Josaphat was, and they were included in earlier editions of the Roman Martyrology (feast day 27 November) — though not in the Roman Missal — and in the Eastern Orthodox Church liturgical calendar (26 August in Greek tradition etc. / 19 November in Russian tradition).