Andrew the Apostle

← Encyclopedia

Andrew was one of the twelve apostles of Jesus, a fisherman of Galilee and the brother of Simon Peter. The Gospels give him only a handful of scenes: he is among the first followers Jesus calls from the lakeside of the Sea of Galilee, he brings his brother to the new teacher, and in John’s account he is the one who points out the boy with the loaves before the feeding of the multitude. The Gospel of John adds a detail the others omit — that before he met Jesus he had been a disciple of John the Baptist. Everything else known about him belongs to a later and more uncertain layer.

What the New Testament leaves unsaid, tradition filled in. By the early Christian centuries Andrew had been assigned a mission field: the lands around the Black Sea, Scythia, Asia Minor, and Greece. The fullest of these stories survives in the Acts of Andrew, a second- or third-century apocryphal romance, preserved only in fragments and summaries, in which the apostle preaches, works wonders, and converts the household of a Roman governor before being put to death. Modern scholarship treats these travels as legend rather than record; the Acts belong to a genre of apocryphal apostle-tales prized as much for their teaching as for their history, and the surviving Greek text carries an ascetic, world-renouncing flavor that later orthodoxy found suspect.

Two traditions about him proved especially durable. The Eastern churches call Andrew Prōtoklētos, the First-Called, on the strength of John’s narrative, and hold that he founded the see of Byzantium — the claim by which the Patriarchate of Constantinople answered Rome’s appeal to Peter. The second tradition concerns his death: he is said to have been crucified at Patras in Achaea. The detail for which he is now best known — that the cross was X-shaped, the crux decussata or saltire — is a medieval embellishment, unattested in the early accounts, which say only that he was bound to a cross and preached from it as he died. From that later image come the diagonal white cross of Scotland’s flag and Andrew’s standing as patron of Scotland, Russia, and Greece alike.

The historian can affirm little beyond the Gospel notices: that a disciple of this name existed, that he was Peter’s brother, that he was numbered among the twelve. The rest is the work of communities that needed an apostolic founder and found one in him — each church reading its own beginning back into a fisherman of whom the earliest sources say almost nothing.

→ In the library: Mead — Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: traces of the Gnosis in the uncanonical Acts (1906)

→ Related: Gnosis · Apocalypse