When the saints go marching in they will still be arguing over Columba

St Columba's latest biographer, Ian Bradley of Aberdeen University, believes that Andrew became Scotland's patron saint because of ''a rather sharp bit of public relations work by the Picts of north-east Fife, and when St Andrew becomes the ecclesiastical centre of Scotland, there is a desire to bring in an apostle. The one card with which you can trump Columba is the apostolic card. It's no good trying to promote any of the indigenous British saints, and so you promote Andrew.''

Ron Ferguson, a church historian who was for a time the leader of the Iona Community, points out that Andrew, the disciple, who gets only a handful of references in the Gospels ''is a very shadowy figure. Columba is someone who is much more flesh and blood, whose influence on Scottish church life and Scottish life has been very strong.''

Most modern scholars appear to question the traditional picture of Columba as a great missionary saint. Rather they see him as someone who came to plant churches and monasteries, and if, as a result, people were converted to Christianity, then that was a by-product. As Professor Donald Meek puts it: ''I do not feel that mission was a first priority with Columba. There isn't a strong body of evidence that he came over to Scotland to evangelise.''

There are many broad generalisations which scholars are willing to make about the debt we owe Columba.

They are happy to talk about the legacy of scholarship, the tradition of poetry, the establishment of monasteries, and the place of worship. Father Gilbert Markus, however, is prepared to be slightly more specific. Columba's successor, Adomnan, made the first law protecting non-combatants, and he attributes this to the spirit of Columba a hundred years earlier.

Dr Ian Bradley is willing to describe tensions in Columba's character ''between the proud, fierce, aristocratic warrior, Crimthann sad (''the fox'' as he was nicknamed in Gaelic) who is wily, politically astute, loves consorting with kings and princes . . . and

the gentle, God-fearing man of prayer, very ascetic, very simple in his lifestyle, Columcille (''the dove of the church'') to give him his other nickname. I really do think this double character, this fascinating mix is actually a true facet of Columba's character.

On the other hand, it may be an example of the historian's reluctance to be as specific as later Christians have found it convenient to be about Columba.

For, from almost the day of his death Columba has been manipulated. As Father Gilbert Markus puts it, ''People are always using the past to shape opinions for the present, and religious history is no exception to that rule. Columba of Iona has been hijacked over and over again by different people who rewrote his history for their own purposes. Adomnan, within a hundred years of Columba's death, is rewriting his story as someone who has a special gift of God which enables him to make kings.

But that is Adomnan's own political claim. As ninth Abbot of Iona, he is actually making that claim effectively for himself. As Columba's successor, he inherits his power, just as he has inherited his old bones.''

According to Professor Michael Lynch of Edinburgh University, in the seventeenth century, when the Scottish Church was divided between a Presbyterian faction and an Episcopal one, both sides appealed to Columba for support. ''David Calderwood, a Presbyterian, saw Columba as a presbyterian ten centuries before his time, and his opponent, Archbishop Spottiswoode, an Episcopalian, saw Columba as a bishop 10 centuries before his time.'' And Professor Lynch adds drily: ''Curiously, at the same time, the church in Ireland was discovering that St Patrick was a Jesuit, 10 centuries before his time''!

Professor Donald Meek sees the Free Church of Scotland in the nineteenth century constructing a Columba myth partly to suit its own ends. He quotes a leading minister in the Free Church, and Moderator of its General Assembly, Dr Thomas McLauchlan,directly contrasting Columba and the so-called Celtic missionaries with St Augustine, who landed in England in 597, just at the time Columba died.

He says missionaries from Rome: ''Thus did these men represent the ambitious, grasping spirit of their system, covetous of place and power,'' while the humble missionaries of Iona were concerned only to preach the Gospel.

From the time of the Reformation onwards, Columba provided Protestants with a convenient version of early Christianity, unsullied by, and in many ways antagonistic to, Rome. The modern tendency however, is to play down differences between Columba and the Roman Church, and to question whether there was anything distinctively anti-Roman about what is claimed as ''Celtic Christianity''.

No-one cultivated the myth of Columba and Celtic Christianity more than George MacLeod, the founder of the Iona Community. MacLeod's biographer, Ron Ferguson, says: ''George used to ransack history, and take from it what he wanted. He looked back to Columba and saw so many things in Columba that he admired, and what he didn't see in him, he made up.

''He saw Columba and Columban Christianity as a way of bypassing Rome, to get to something more primitive, because at the time he was setting up the Iona Community it was not at all popular to be close to the Roman Catholic Church.''

So, which Columba is it who has a claim to be Scotland's patron saint? The Columba about whom the historians are prepared to say very little, or the Columba of whom, perhaps, the Christian churches, in an attempt to give themselves legitimacy, have said too much?

As Professor Michael Lynch puts it: People of all traditions have made what they want of Columba as a way of claiming their rights to the past. ''We all have rights to the past. But it has very little to do with history.''

n Columba: The Message, is broadcast by Radio Scotland at noon tomorrow, repeated later at 6.30pm.