Do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? You do if you’re like most Americans. Six in 10 celebrate March 17 by wearing green clothing, drinking green beer, and holding leprechaun parades. The explosion of celebration for all things Irish might seem strange until you realize that 10 percent of Americans have Irish ancestry. There are far more Irish living in America than in Ireland. And today, millions of them are celebrating one man.

But who was Patrick? Why is he a saint? What does this day teach us about our traditions, our history and our religions?

In contrast to the merrymaking here in the United States, observing St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland is more like keeping a holy day. Ever since 1631, it has been an official Roman Catholic feast day commemorating the death of a Romano-British missionary. According to legend, St. Patrick arrived in Ireland in a.d. 432, miraculously drove away all the snakes that had infested the area into the sea, used the three leaflets of the shamrock to explain the concept of the trinity, ordained 450 bishops, founded 300 churches, baptized 100,000 pagans, and raised 33 people from the dead.

Most people who know the legend realize that it’s at least partially untrue.

Ecologists assure us that snakes never infested Ireland, and historians remind us that we only have two primary sources proving that a missionary using the penname “Patrick” arrived in Ireland around a.d. 432. The first source, St. Patrick’s Confession, tells us that this man lived in Ireland as a slave before escaping back to Britain and later returning as a missionary. The second source, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, places him in the time of Ceretic Guletic, who was the king of Strathclyde in the fifth century. Most other details about Patrick’s life weren’t written down until centuries later.

If St. Patrick’s Confession has not been tampered with by later editors, it does indeed indicate that Patrick was a trinitarian Christian. Yet it never refers to shamrocks or a commission from the Vatican. It is almost certain that Patrick was not in full communion with the Vatican because he was never mentioned in any of the extensive Vatican records of the time.

Just a year before Patrick allegedly arrived in Ireland, Pope Celestine i sent another missionary to Ireland—a Gaulish deacon named Palladius whom Prosper of Aquitaine (a.d. 390–455) called the “first bishop to the Scotti believing in Christ.” Scotti is the Latin name for the Gaelic or Irish people, so this statement implies there was already a sizable Christian population in Ireland before Patrick arrived in the Emerald Isle—a population with no Catholic bishop.

Numerous documents indicate that these Irish Christians believed that God did not punish one person for the sins of another. They rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine that all human beings are born tainted by Adam’s sin.

Palladius’s mission was to correct this “Pelagian heresy” and bring Ireland under Rome’s authority. Yet judging from the earliest sources, Patrick seems to have been on a separate mission to convert the pagan O’Neill dynasty in Northern Ireland. The exploits of these two men were later conflated. Why? To blot out Ireland’s true history. That glorious history extends back all the way to the sweet psalmist of Israel, King David!

Rewriting Ireland’s History

Irish tradition states that there were only three Christians in Ireland before the coming of St. Patrick: King Conchobar mac Nessa of Ulster, King Cormac mac Art of Tara and the wise judge Morann. Yet this tradition is demonstrably false.

These three figures may indeed have been Christians, but they were not the only ones. The sixth-century British monk Gildas wrote in his book On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain that the first Christians came to the British Isles in the latter part of the reign of Tiberius Caesar (a.d. 14–37). Some of these Christians spread from Britain to Ireland.

Irish tradition relays that Aristobulus, one of the 72 disciples commissioned by Jesus to preach the gospel around the world, founded a church on the Irish islet of Skellig Michael. Plus, Jerome of Stridon (a.d. 374–420) accused Pelagius of being “stuffed with Scottish porridge,” indicating that his unorthodox beliefs were strongly associated with Ireland.

There is even evidence of Sabbath-keeping Christians in Ireland around this time. They were taking advantage of the fact that Ireland allowed a measure of religious freedom from the Roman Empire, which had outlawed Sabbath-keeping. (You can read more about this history in The True History of God’s True Church, by Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry.)

Patrick’s ancestors may have been among this Sabbath-keeping community. The Hymn of Fiacc, a bard who allegedly knew Patrick, records that Patrick’s real name was Succat, and the Book of Leinster records that his ancestors were Jews who fled to Britain after Emperor Vespasian destroyed the second temple. Reports that Patrick himself was a Sabbath keeper are unsubstantiated, but Sabbath-keeping and Passover observance were fairly common practices in fifth-century Ireland and Scotland.

Thus, when Prosper of Aquitaine wrote that Pope Celestine made Palladius the “first bishop to the Scotti believing in Christ,” he meant that Celestine made Palladius the first Roman Catholic bishop of Ireland. Palladius landed in the Kingdom of Leinster and likely appointed Auxilius, Secundinus and Iserninus as his deputies. These three men have traditionally been associated with Patrick, but more recent research published in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography indicates Patrick’s influence was limited in Leinster. There is no record of Palladius and Patrick ever meeting unless you count one cryptic reference in the Hymn of Fiacc about Patrick visiting the “other Patrick” before he died.

The records from this time are sparse, but the church Patrick is most strongly associated with is the Church of Armagh. Interestingly, Christians at Armagh were known for opposing how the Roman Catholics calculated the date of Easter. If Patrick was a Catholic bishop who founded 300 churches, baptized 100,000 pagans, and raised 33 people from the dead, fifth-century Ireland would have had more religious uniformity. Instead, within two centuries of Patrick’s arrival, we find a divided nation where the Church of Armagh is opposing Roman Catholic influence from Leinster.

The legend of St. Patrick was written to cover up this controversy—and the fascinating history that came before it.

Inventing a Catholic Saint

After years of living in poverty, traveling and enduring much suffering, Patrick died on March 17, 461. Throughout this period, the controversy over calculating the date for Easter continued.

The Catholic Church had convened the Council of Nicea in a.d. 325 largely to settle this issue. Churches that had been keeping it on the biblical “Jewish” date were told they must keep it instead on the first Sunday after the first full moon in spring. Yet even after Nicea, many Irish Christians insisted on fixing the date of Easter to the Sunday falling in the seven days from the 14th to the 20th of its lunar month, according to an 84-year cycle. This is not the way the Bible tells Christians to calculate the date of Passover (see Exodus 12, Leviticus 23, Numbers 9, etc). Yet it was not the way the Roman Catholic Church told Christians to calculate the date of Easter either. So Pope Honorius wrote to the Irish in a.d. 630 threatening to excommunicate all Irish from the Catholic Church if they did not conform to the Vatican’s methods and keep Easter Sunday. Palladius had failed to convince the Irish to celebrate Jesus Christ’s resurrection on Easter Sunday, and there is no evidence Patrick even tried to promote Easter observance in Ireland.

As a result of Honorius’s letter, the southern churches in Ireland met in Leighlin in County Carlow and sent a delegation to Rome led by a Leinster bishop named Laserian. Upon his return, the southern churches accepted the Roman Catholic Easter Sunday doctrine to avoid excommunication. The only major churches that refused to adopt the Roman custom were Armagh (likely founded by Patrick), and Iona (founded by Columba, the great-grandson of the first O’Neill nobleman that Patrick baptized). But several decades later, these centers also caved to Roman pressure.

This dispute over Easter is key to understanding the origin of St. Patrick’s Day.

After Bishop Tómméne of Armagh finally submitted to Roman authority around a.d. 661, Catholic biographers began writing legends and histories asserting that Patrick had founded every church in Ireland. Their motive was partially financial. Since Brehon law granted tithe revenue to the heir of a church’s founder, the O’Neill dynasty wanted all the tithe money in Ireland to flow to Armagh. But this revision of history also had another sinister purpose.

Since the high kings of Ireland had decided to accept Roman Catholic authority, they needed to blot out Ireland’s pre-Catholic history so that their people would follow their lead. They could have focused on Palladius, whose mission was to convert “the Scotti believing in Christ” to Roman Catholicism. But Palladius does not seem to have been very successful in his mission. So the kings of Ireland chose to beatify and mythologize the man who preached against the Druids: Patrick.

Biographies like Vita Sancti Patricii, written centuries after Patrick died, transformed this figure from a concerned Briton sharing his faith with the pagans of Northern Ireland into a Catholic emissary who founded every church in Ireland and baptized 100,000 people. Yet at the time Bishop Tírechán wrote this biography, most Irishmen did not regard it as true. It took centuries for the Irish to forget the truth and start believing the propaganda published by the O’Neill dynasty.

“The earliest of the British saints is Patrick, and he is the only one whose own writings survive,” writes John Morris in The Age of Arthur. “His history has been obscured by his later eminence, which has inspired the most elaborate falsifications in the ecclesiastical history of medieval Europe. In the course of seventh-century controversies, centered upon the proper date for the celebrations of Easter, the adherents of conformity with Rome took Patrick as their patron. Their principal contrivance was to assert that all the churches of their day in Ireland that were not already under control of major monasteries, and many that were, had been founded by Patrick. He was therefore made to consecrate some 450 bishops and a corresponding quantity of priests, establishing himself in Armagh as the primate of Ireland.”

Today, when people familiar with the history think about Ireland becoming Christian, they don’t think about doctrinal disputes over the Sabbath, Passover and original sin. Rather they envision a folk hero who banished Druidism by summoning fire from heaven to consume a graven image of the pagan god Crom Cruach of the Plain of Prostration.

The Catholic Church did not like Ireland’s history, so they rewrote it and created a Catholic feast to cement it. What had happened was the apostles Peter and Paul sent missionaries to the British Isles. There is even good evidence indicating that these two apostles traveled to Britain themselves and made converts there. Over the centuries, however, these converts began to drift from the purity of the Christian faith. As a result, Roman Catholic missionaries like Palladius were able to introduce a different counterfeit form of Christianity, which hijacked Patrick’s identity.

“Yes, the British Isles heard Christ’s gospel!” Herbert W. Armstrong summarized in The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “But they accepted, instead, the idolatry of the Druids, pagan worship, and the counterfeit ‘Christianity’ of the Roman Babylonian mystery religion, and even spawned the devil’s religion of the evolutionary concept.”

The Irish Kings Lists

While Bishop Tírechán and monk Muirchú were writing spurious biographies of St. Patrick in the seventh century, the bards and ollams of Ireland were writing down the history of Ireland. Yet the Catholic Church influenced this process as well.

When Patrick first arrived in Ireland as a missionary, the high king was Lóegaire mac Néill. According to the Irish annals, he was the son of King Niall of the Nine Hostages and the 52nd great-grandson of King Herremon Red-Wrist, who invaded Ireland from Spain in “the age of David son of Isa, by whom the temple of Solomon was projected.”

Patrick lived roughly 1,450 years after King David. Dividing that figure by 54 generations, we get an average generation length of 27 years. Whole genome analysis published in Scientific Advances has found that the average generation length across human history has indeed been 27 years.

The Irish annals further relate that King Herremon Red-Wrist was the 19th great-grandson of Goídel Glas, the eponymous ancestor of the Gaels who lived in Egypt during the days of Moses. Divide the roughly 450 years that elapsed between Moses and King David by 21 generations, and we get an average generation length of about 21 years—another believable figure.

This is where the history starts to get shaky.

Goídel Glas was supposedly the grandson of Fénius Farsaid, a descendant of Noah’s grandson Magog who worked with Nimrod at the tower of Babel. Yet the tower of Babel construction took place at least 800 years before Moses. Medieval annalists tried to explain away this time gap by saying that Fénius was a remarkable man who lived for many centuries. After people stopped believing this lie, however, a group of Irish scholars produced a work called the Annals of the Four Masters, which stretches Irish history out and states that King Herremon Red-Wrist lived around 1700 b.c., long before King David or Moses. But this stretches the reigns of certain kings, such as Sirna the Long-Lived, to as long as 150 years—which is unreasonable. The oldest Gaelic poems say Sirna lived for 150 years but only reigned as a king for “a space of thrice seven free years.” It doesn’t take too many mistakes like that to add 700 years of fake history.

Fortunately, the monks who corrupted the Irish genealogies also included a section in the Irish annals about how they learned that they were descendants of Magog. The Book of Leinster tells us Chief Ollam Senchán Torpéist (a.d. 560–649) exchanged a manuscript of the great Irish epic, the Táin Bó Cúailnge, for a copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies. It was from Etymologies that the Irish learned they were descended from Magog. Before this exchange happened, the Irish Kings List went only as far back at Goídel Glas. Yet since Goidel lived in the time of Moses, this list invited people to believe that the Irish were a lost tribe of ancient Israel. So the same people who wrote false biographies of St. Patrick to blot out Ireland’s link to the original apostles also altered the Irish genealogies to blot out their connection to Israel.

In the Bible, God promised King David that his dynasty would continue unbroken until the Messiah came to rule all nations. Seventeen generations later, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon killed King Zedekiah of Judah, seemingly ending David’s dynasty. Yet the Prophet Jeremiah took one of Zedekiah’s daughters to marry a descendant of Goídel Glas.

You can learn about his history in much more detail in The Psalms of David and the Psalter of Tara, by Gerald Flurry. Most people do not know much about Ireland’s Israelite heritage because of the genealogical corruption of the annals that occurred after Isidore’s Etymologies made its way to Ireland. By grafting Ireland’s pre-Catholic kings lists onto Isidore’s account of the tower of Babel, the Ollams made it look like the Irish were pagan Magogites all the way up until Patrick introduced them to the Christian faith. Yet the truth is that the Irish were Israelites who received the Christian faith from the disciples of Jesus Christ many centuries before Palladius and Laserian began teaching the doctrines of Rome.

Attacking David’s Throne

Why did the Catholic Church put such a high priority on converting Ireland? Because Ireland had David’s royal dynasty!

“Anybody honest and familiar with history knows that St. Patrick was a Christian, and in no sense of the word a Roman Catholic,” Joseph Wild writes in The Ten Lost Tribes. “The fact is, Rome began early to covet Ireland. Once they got possession, it was necessary for them to destroy the influence of Jeremiah. This they did, in part, by substituting the name of St. Patrick in the place of the prophet’s; and more, they then set to work to destroy even the old and famous capital city of Tara. In 565 St. Ruadham, along with a posse of bishops and chiefs of the south of Ireland, cursed the city, so that neither king nor queen might ever rule or reign therein again. They forced the government, monarchy and people to abandon the place. From thence Tara was deserted, and the harp sounded no more through Tara’s halls. The city thus cursed crumbled to ruins and remains to this day buried, awaiting a glorious resurrection.”

Even though St. Ruadham cursed Tara in a.d. 565, most of the Irish refused the Roman Catholic date for Easter until a.d. 630. The Church of Armagh held out until a.d. 661, and the Church of Ionia held out until a.d. 716. This shows that Patrick was not the man to convert Ireland to Catholicism, because Ireland did not become fully Catholic until centuries after Patrick died. Patrick was just the man the Catholics chose to mythologize in their attempts to blot out history. We actually know very little about what Patrick believed because he left behind so few writings. The only thing about him we know for sure is that the seventh-century biographies written about him fall into the category of pious fiction.

Pope Celestine and Pope Honorius both knew that a Davidic monarchy preaching the true Christian faith would always be a threat to Roman authority. So they took decisive action to blot out the truth about David’s throne. They were unable to blot out this throne physically, as it took root in the Scottish Highlands shortly after Patrick arrived. But they were able to blot out the truth about it by altering the history and then distracting everyone with stories about Patrick.

It was not until the 1840s that an English churchman named Frederick Robert Augustus Glover began an in-depth study of the Irish annals and realized that God kept His promise to King David through the Irish royal family.

In England, the Remnant of Judah and the Israel of Ephraim, Glover referenced Jeremiah 1:10, where God told Jeremiah, “I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms,” and explained how the popes desired this power with Simon Magus-level covetousness.

Glover wrote, “The words thus applied by [God] to the office of the Prophet Jeremiah having been those upon which the bishops of Rome established their travesty of almighty power on Earth, over kings, emperors and states: as is clear from the Preamble to the Bull of Pope Pius v, by which that bishop of Rome thought to deprive the Queen of England of her throne and power:-’Pius, bishop, servant of the servants of God. He who reigneth in the highest … hath committed to me, … church … to one alone upon Earth, … the bishop of Rome, to be governed in fullness of power. … Him alone, He made prince over all people, with power to pluck up, destroy, scatter, consume, plant and build.’”

In other words, this religious power wanted to take over King David’s throne! This is the real meaning of St. Patrick’s Day. It is not a celebration of Irish heritage but the celebration of a conspiracy to blot out the truth about David’s throne by substituting the name of St. Patrick for the name of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was the one who temporarily banished pagan religion from Ireland. Jeremiah was the one who planted the throne of David in Ireland. Jeremiah was the one who pointed the Irish to the day when the Messiah would rule all nations. Today is a day neither for drinking green beer nor for going to mass, but rather for understanding the true history of Ireland and how it points us to Jesus Christ’s return!

Request your free copy of The Psalms of David and the Psalter of Tara or start reading online right now for a thorough understanding of the true history St. Patrick’s Day was designed to obscure.