Andrew the Apostle

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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.

The calling of Peter and Andrew, a panel from Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà altarpiece (c. 1308-1311), Siena — Duccio di Buoninsegna, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

His name is the first thing the Greek text hands forward. Andreas is not a Hebrew or Aramaic name at all but a Greek one, formed from the word for man, and its presence among a family of Galilean fishermen marks how thoroughly Greek had soaked into the bilingual lake country of the first century. It is fitting, then — and later readers made much of the fit — that the two scenes in which Andrew acts on his own initiative both turn on bringing someone across a threshold. In the opening chapter of John he is the first to leave the Baptist’s circle, to follow the new teacher to where he was staying, and then to fetch his brother with the announcement that they had found the one they were waiting for. Near the end of the same Gospel, when Greeks who had come up to the festival ask to see Jesus, it is to Andrew that Philip turns, and the two of them carry the request forward together. Andrew appears in the New Testament less as a teacher than as a conductor — the one who points, fetches, introduces, and steps back.

The fuller picture is a composite of small notices. He is named in every list of the twelve, in the three synoptic Gospels and in the opening of the Acts of the Apostles. With Peter, James, and John he sits on the Mount of Olives and asks the question that draws out the long discourse on the end of the age — the single passage that places him inside the inner circle rather than at its edge. And he is twice located: the household at Capernaum that he shared with his brother, and the home town of Bethsaida on the lake’s northern shore. From these scattered verses the historian can reconstruct a Galilean fisherman, religiously serious enough to have attached himself first to the Baptist’s movement, drawn early into the circle around Jesus, and remembered chiefly through his more prominent brother. What grew up around that slender figure over the following centuries is out of all proportion to it.

A single-figure portrait of the apostle, attributed to Gaudenzio Ferrari (early sixteenth century) — Gaudenzio Ferrari, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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 earliest written form of the assignment is sober and brief. Eusebius of Caesarea, compiling his church history in the early fourth century, quotes the third-century scholar Origen for the tradition that when the apostles dispersed, Scythia — the wild country north of the Black Sea — fell to Andrew, as Parthia fell to Thomas and Asia to John. That single sentence is the seed. Around it later writers grew an itinerary that ran along the whole Black Sea coast and inland, in some retellings as far as the Dnieper and the Volga, supplying in time the apostolic charter for the churches of the Slavic north.

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. The critical work of the last century has clarified both its date and its shape. Jean-Marc Prieur, whose edition of the surviving witnesses appeared in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum in 1989, placed the original composition between roughly 150 and 200, nearer the earlier end; Dennis MacDonald, who produced the principal English reconstruction, read it as a deliberate Christian answer to Homer, casting the apostle’s wandering and death in the mold of the Odyssey. The original Greek does not survive whole. The bulk of the narrative reaches us only through a Latin condensation made late in the sixth century by Gregory of Tours, the Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli, whose author admitted he had pruned away his source’s endless philosophical speeches; the martyrdom is preserved in separate Greek passion-texts. 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.

That flavor is worth naming precisely, because it shaped how the book was later received and finally set aside. The Acts of Andrew is an encratite document: its gospel is sexual renunciation. Its central drama is not a battle with authorities but the conversion of Maximilla, wife of the proconsul Aegeates of Patras, who upon hearing the apostle withdraws from her husband’s bed; her refusal, and the conversion of the proconsul’s brother Stratocles, are what bring Andrew to his cross. Salvation here is the soul’s release from the body and from the entanglements of marriage and the world — a theology near in temper to the Acts of Thomas and the other apocryphal apostle-romances, and close enough to the renunciatory currents that fed Gnosticism that the book carried, for some later readers, the scent of forbidden gnosis. It is no accident that the Acts surface in modern discussions of the apocrypha and the lost esoteric Christianities; the nineteenth-century recovery of that literature treated the uncanonical Acts as a quarry of suppressed teaching. The mainstream church drew the opposite lesson. Where the canonical record left Andrew almost silent, the apocryphal record made him too eloquent, and in the wrong key — an apostle of asceticism so radical that it touched the legitimacy of marriage itself — and so the Acts were quietly relegated, kept alive in the orthodox memory only after the heterodox speeches had been epitomized away.

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 strength of this second claim has been weighed carefully. In the form best known, Andrew is said to have preached at Byzantium and ordained there a certain Stachys, named among the seventy disciples, as its first bishop, traditionally in the year 38. Francis Dvornik, whose 1958 study remains the standard treatment, traced the legend’s history and found it conspicuously late: the apostle-and-disciple lists that carry it, attributed to a Dorotheus of Tyre, are themselves a forgery, an anonymous church historian of the seventh century still knew nothing of any Andrean foundation of Byzantium, and the belief began to spread only toward the end of the eighth century. Dvornik also overturned the older charge that the ninth-century patriarch Photius had invented the story to dignify his see; Photius inherited it rather than coined it. The legend’s logic, though, is plain enough, and it is the logic of rival apostolicity. The bishop of Rome rested his precedence on Peter, the rock; the rising capital on the Bosphorus, lacking an apostolic founder of its own, found one in Peter’s elder brother — the apostle called first, before Peter, in the very Gospel both churches read. To make the First-Called the father of the Eastern see was to set a senior apostolic founder against a junior one, and to answer Rome in Rome’s own currency.

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. The diagonal form appears in Western art only late, securely by the fourteenth century — an English missal of around 1320 shows the apostle lashed by wrists and ankles to an X — and earlier images had set him on an upright cross like any other. 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.

Andrew lashed to a diagonal cross, a miniature from the East Anglian Sherbrooke Missal (c. 1310-1320) — National Library of Wales, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

Around the body the same proliferation occurred. The relics, reported buried at Patras, were carried to Constantinople and laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles about the year 357, in the reign of Constantius; after the sack of the city by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 the bones were taken west to Amalfi; the head, saved from the Turkish conquest, came to Rome in the fifteenth century and was kept for centuries in a pier of St Peter’s, until in 1964 Pope Paul VI returned it to Patras as a gesture toward the Orthodox East. The Scottish link runs through its own legend — relics said to have been brought to the eastern coast of Scotland by a monk named Regulus, or Rule — and the cult settled at the town that took the apostle’s name. By the middle of the tenth century Andrew was Scotland’s patron, and when the Scottish barons wrote to the Pope in 1320 in the Declaration of Arbroath, they grounded their nation’s antiquity on its conversion by Andrew, naming him precisely as the first to be called an apostle. The Eastern epithet had become a Scottish title-deed.

The Crucifixion of Saint Andrew by Caravaggio (1607), Cleveland Museum of Art — Caravaggio, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Among minor New Testament figures Andrew thus occupies an unusual position: a man of almost no recorded words who became the patron of nations and the cornerstone of an ecclesiastical claim. The same pattern of a thin Gospel notice carrying a heavy later weight runs through several of the bystanders of the infancy and ministry narratives — the aged prophetess Anna of the Temple, who like Andrew speaks no recorded saying yet is given a fixed place in the tradition’s memory; the night-visitor Nicodemus; the twin-named Thomas, whose own apocryphal Acts share the renunciatory key of Andrew’s. In each case the canonical text supplies a silhouette and the centuries supply the figure.

The textual record

The sources for Andrew fall into three plainly distinct strata, and the scholarship of the last century has been chiefly the work of keeping them apart. The first is the canonical core — the apostle-lists, the call narratives, the few named scenes — which is early and uncontested but says almost nothing. The second is the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, whose recovery is a textual problem in its own right: no continuous original survives, and the modern reconstructions are stitched from Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century Latin epitome, the independent Greek martyrdom-texts, and Coptic and Armenian fragments. The standard critical edition is Jean-Marc Prieur’s Acta Andreae (Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 5-6, Brepols, 1989); the principal English reconstruction and translation is Dennis R. MacDonald’s, first in his 1990 The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals and later in his 2005 study-edition, with his argument for Homeric and Platonic models set out in Christianizing Homer (1994). The cataloguing project e-Clavis surveys the manuscript witnesses and the state of the question for the Acts of Andrew and for Gregory’s epitome.

The third stratum is the medieval and Byzantine legend — the Protokletos title, the foundation of Byzantium, the saltire, the relic-translations — and here the indispensable study is Francis Dvornik’s The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Dumbarton Oaks, 1958), which dated the Byzantine claim to the late eighth century and absolved Photius of having invented it. Behind all three strata stands the single early documentary witness to the mission, Origen as quoted by Eusebius in Historia Ecclesiastica III.1, where Scythia is assigned to Andrew in a sentence that the later itineraries would elaborate beyond recognition. The recurring temptation in writing about Andrew is to read the second and third strata back into the first; the discipline the scholarship enforces is to let the silence of the canonical record stand as silence.

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 · John The Baptist · New Testament · Thomas The Apostle · Gnosticism · Apocrypha · Gospel · Christianity · Asceticism · Anna