Some saints are not remembered people at all but accidents that hardened. Delehaye’s examples are concrete and none of them involves anyone lying. A trivial catacomb epitaph, once scholars had no way of telling which tombs had actually been venerated, was made to yield a full narrative down to the martyr’s interrogation — and the inscription may not even have belonged to the body found in the grave. An abbess was buried in a reused sarcophagus whose carved bust had been damaged, and the mutilated face alone produced the story that she and forty companions cut off their noses to escape the Saracens; a later writer then cited the carving as confirming the tradition. Two heroes of a chanson de geste were rewritten as a saint’s life and given chapels. A robed crucifix of the Lucca type, read as a bearded woman on a cross, became a saint with a legend and a name in several languages. An obscure church title on the Appian Way produced a story about Peter dropping his bandage on the spot. ⚠ The point is not that hagiographers invented. It is that a picture, a stone or a title can generate a person, and that once generated the person acquires a day, a shrine and a dossier like any other.
The Legends of the Saints: an Introduction to Hagiography · ch. III §II p. 86 (the epitaph), ch. II §II pp. 46–47 (the sarcophagus and the church title), ch. IV pp. 109–110 (the chanson and the crucifix)