Introduction
From the Greek meaning “to prick; to burn in marks; brand” (Perschbacher 2004). In the ancient Greco-Roman world, stigmata were the brand marks inflicted on slaves by their owners. The term is today most often associated with Christianity and refers to physical wounds, similar to those inflicted on Jesus of Nazareth during his crucifixion, that appear spontaneously on the body of a believer. The first use of the term in connection with Jesus appears in the New Testament, where the apostle Paul refers to his scars from injuries inflicted during imprisonment as “the marks of Jesus branded on my body” (Galatians 6:17); most scholars take his meaning to be that the scars mark him as belonging to Jesus the way a brand marks a slave. This is the sense given to the term in writings of early Christian theologians like Jerome and Augustine. Paul Orosius, a fifth-century Spanish theologian, first used it in reference to the actual wounds inflicted on Jesus. In the thirteenth...
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Burns, C.P.E. (2020). Stigmata. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24348-7_1
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