Saint Pelagia

Pelagia ( Pelagius ) (* in Antioch, † 457 on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem) applies in church history as one of the great penitents and is revered as the patron saint of comedians and actors.

Your Vita was written in the second half of the 5th century by a deacon Jacob in Greek, who claims to have been an eyewitness. It was at first, later translated into Syriac into Latin. According to the Vita led Pelagia under the name ' Margarita or Marina in Antioch a life as a prostitute, actress and dancer. In a sermon by the Egyptian bishop Nonnus Pelagia was taken internally converted and was baptized. She gave jewelry and money to the poor, pretended to be a man and was referred to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem under the name of Pelagius a cell. She died after a few years of hard penance.

The present research considers the Vita Pelagias in general contamination of the report in a sermon of John Chrysostom with features of the Pelagia of Antioch.

Hermann Usener had argued that the legend of Pelagia a transformation of mythical material underlies that this was attributable to the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite, which is discarded in today's research.