Saint

In Christian belief, a saint is a person who is recognized as having an exceptional degree of holiness, likeness, or closeness to God. However, the use of the term saint depends on the context and denomination. Official ecclesiastical recognition, and veneration, is conferred on some denominational saints through the process of canonization in the Catholic Church or glorification in the Eastern Orthodox Church after their approval. In many Protestant denominations, and following from Pauline usage, saint refers broadly to any holy Christian without special recognition or selection.

While the English word saint (deriving from the Latin sanctus) originated in Christianity, historians of religion tend to use the appellation "in a more general way to refer to the state of special holiness that many religions attribute to certain people", referring to the Hindu rishi, Sikh bhagat or guru, the Shintoist kami, the Taoist immortal or zhenren, the Jewish tzadik, the Islamic walī/fakir, and the Buddhist arhat or bodhisattva also as saints. Depending on the religion, saints are recognized either by official declaration, as in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, or by popular acclamation (see folk saint).

The English word saint comes from the Latin sanctus, with the Greek equivalent being ἅγιος (hagios) 'holy'. The word ἅγιος appears 229 times in the Greek New Testament, and its English translation 60 times in the corresponding text of the King James Version of the Bible.

The word sanctus was originally a technical one in ancient Roman religion, but due to its globalized use in Christianity the modern word saint is now also used as a translation of comparable terms for persons "worthy of veneration for their holiness or sanctity" in other religions.

Many religions also use similar concepts (but different terminology) to venerate persons worthy of some honor. Author John A. Coleman of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, wrote that saints across various cultures and religions have the following family resemblances:

The anthropologist Lawrence Babb, in an article about Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, asks the question "Who is a saint?" and responds by saying that in the symbolic infrastructure of some religions, there is the image of a certain extraordinary spiritual person's "miraculous powers", to whom frequently a certain moral presence is attributed. These saintly figures, he asserts, are "the focal points of spiritual force-fields". They exert "powerful attractive influence on followers but touch the inner lives of others in transforming ways as well".

In the Hebrew Bible, English "saints" most often renders terms of holiness, especially the adjective qādôš ("set apart, consecrated, holy"), and in the plural it appears as "holy ones" or "saints," with emphasis on consecration and ideally the absence of moral and ceremonial defilement. The Old Testament does not present a fixed category of individual "saints," though related ideas appear in prophet and martyr traditions in later narratives.

In the Apostolic Age, New Testament writers use "saints" predominantly in the plural as a collective designation for Christians in a given locality; the only clear singular instance is distributive in Philippians 4:21 ("every saint"), so the term marks the church as a people set apart for God rather than an elite subgroup.