Philip the Apostle

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Philip the Apostle is one of the twelve disciples of Jesus named in the Gospels — a Galilean from Bethsaida who appears in every canonical list of the Twelve, yet whose life is known almost entirely through a few scenes and a great deal of later legend. He stands at the seam where a sparse historical record meets a dense devotional afterlife, and almost every difficulty in recovering him comes from that join: a name carried by more than one early Christian, a Gospel that gives him lines no other Gospel records, and a body of legend that built him into a wonder-worker the Twelve’s roster never describes.

Apostle St Philip, from El Greco’s series of the Twelve at the El Greco Museum, Toledo (c. 1610–1614) — El Greco, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The name in the lists

The earliest layer is textual, and it is bare. The three Synoptic Gospels each set Philip among the Twelve and add nothing — fifth in the roster, paired with Bartholomew, in Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, and Luke 6:14 — and the Book of Acts names him again in the same position when the eleven gather after the Ascension (Acts 1:13). In all four lists he is a name in a fixed sequence, no act, no word, no kinship. The pairing with Bartholomew is itself a small clue: because the Synoptics never mention a Nathanael and the Gospel attributed to John never mentions a Bartholomew, an old reading identifies the two, which would make the man Philip brings to Jesus in John the same man set beside him in the Synoptic catalog. The identification is inference, not statement; the lists themselves say only that Philip belonged to the inner Twelve, and that is the whole of the consensus historical record about him outside one Gospel.

The four scenes in John

It is the Fourth Gospel that gives Philip a face. He appears there in four scenes, and across them a single temperament shows: a man who reckons in concrete quantities, who fetches others rather than holding the moment to himself, and who presses the plain question without dressing it.

The first is his call. Jesus, going into Galilee, finds Philip and tells him to follow, and Philip immediately goes to find Nathanael with the announcement that the one Moses and the prophets wrote of has been found — Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth. Nathanael’s skepticism (can anything good come from Nazareth?) Philip does not argue down; he answers, come and see (John 1:43–46). The pattern that recurs is set here at once: Philip’s instinct is to bring someone in.

The second is the feeding of the multitude. Faced with the crowd, Jesus turns to Philip and asks where bread might be bought to feed them — a question the Gospel marks explicitly as a test, since Jesus already knew what he would do. Philip answers in arithmetic: two hundred denarii of bread would not be enough for each to get a little (John 6:5–7). It is a practical, almost accountant’s reply, and it throws the sign that follows into relief — the disciple who totals the cost against the act that overruns it.

The third is the approach of the Greeks. When certain Greeks who had come up to worship at the feast want to see Jesus, it is Philip they approach; and Philip, rather than acting alone, tells Andrew, and the two of them together bring word to Jesus (John 12:20–22). The detail is slight and telling: again Philip is a conduit, the one outsiders find approachable, who passes the request along the chain.

The fourth is at the Last Supper, and it is the one for which he is most remembered. Into the discourse on the way to the Father, Philip cuts the plain demand: Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us. The answer turns the request back on him — have I been so long with you, and you have not known me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father (John 14:8–9). The exchange has carried weight in Christian thought out of all proportion to its brevity, because the reply states the unity of the seen Son and the unseen Father as directly as the Gospel ever does, and it is Philip’s blunt question that draws it out.

These four scenes, with the names in the lists, are the whole of what the canonical New Testament reports of him. From them the tradition built a character — practical, recruiting, direct — but the character is an extrapolation from four exchanges, and the Gospels supply no genealogy beyond Bethsaida, no death, no later career.

The first confusion: the apostle and the evangelist

Two distinct men named Philip move through the earliest Christian record, and keeping them apart is the first and oldest problem the figure presents. The second is Philip the Evangelist, one of the seven appointed in Acts to serve the Greek-speaking widows of the Jerusalem community. This Philip carries the message out of Jerusalem after the death of Stephen: he preaches in Samaria, and on the Gaza road he overtakes the chariot of an Ethiopian court official, expounds the scripture the man is reading, and baptizes him (Acts 8). Later in Acts he is settled at Caesarea with four unmarried daughters who prophesy (Acts 21:8–9). He is a deacon and missionary, not one of the Twelve — a different office, a different career, the same name.

The collapse of the two is ancient, and it can be traced to a particular detail: the daughters. The prophesying daughters belong to the evangelist of Acts, yet by the late second century they had migrated onto the apostle. Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, writing around AD 190 in a letter that survives because Eusebius of Caesarea quoted it, names among the great lights of Asia Philip of the twelve apostles, who sleeps at Hierapolis with two daughters who grew old as virgins, and a third daughter who lived in the Holy Spirit and rests at Ephesus — fusing the apostle of the lists with the father of the prophesying daughters of Acts in a single sentence. Papias, the early second-century bishop of Hierapolis, reports receiving traditions from the daughters of Philip who had lived in his city — again the evangelist’s family, attached to a Philip whom the chain of report increasingly takes for the apostle. Eusebius transmits both notices without untangling them. Modern study generally judges that either Papias meant the evangelist and used the title apostle loosely, or that the conflation was already under way in his time; by Polycrates it is complete. The consequence is large, because it is precisely this fused Philip — apostle by title, father of prophet-daughters by borrowed biography, resident and buried at Hierapolis — who anchors the later cult. The historical apostle and the historical deacon both stand behind the figure venerated in Phrygia, and the sources cannot always be cleanly pulled apart.

The second confusion: the Gospel of Philip

The other thing that bears his name is a book, and it has even less to do with him. The Gospel of Philip is a text recovered in 1945 among the Nag Hammadi codices, the cache of Coptic manuscripts unearthed in Upper Egypt that reorganized the modern study of early Christian thought around primary documents rather than the reports of their opponents. The work is a third-century compilation in the Valentinian current — not a narrative gospel but a florilegium of meditations on sacrament, image, and the bridal chamber, gathering sayings and reflections without a connecting story. The apostle’s name appears in it once, attached to a single saying, which is almost certainly the reason later hands titled the whole collection for him; the attribution is honorific, a routine practice in this literature, by which a teaching claims apostolic warrant through a revered name. It bears on the history of gnosis and the Valentinian reading of Christian mystery, and stands beside the other named-apostle texts of the find such as the Gospel of Thomas; it does not bear on Philip of Bethsaida as a person. Current scholarship reads the work as evidence for the thought of the communities that produced and prized it, not as a witness to the apostle whose name it carries.

The mission, the Acts of Philip, and the serpent city

Beyond the canon, tradition supplied the biography the Gospels withheld. From the second century, Christians in Asia Minor held that Philip had carried the message into Phrygia and died at Hierapolis — the same city where Papias was bishop and where the fused Philip was said to lie. Around that conviction grew an apocryphal Acts of Philip, composed most likely in the fourth century in an Asia Minor milieu and surviving in a remarkable text: a collection of fifteen separate Acts followed by a Martyrdom, narrating travels, conversions, and contests in the elaborate and frankly fabulous manner of the apocryphal apostle-romances.

For most of its history the work was known only in fragments. Its near-whole shape was recovered in 1974, when François Bovon and Bertrand Bouvier identified manuscript Xenophontos 32 in the library of the Xenophontos monastery on Mount Athos — a fourteenth-century copy of a far older text, preserving substantially more of the Acts than any witness scholars had worked from before. In the recovered narrative Philip travels with the apostle Bartholomew and with a woman named Mariamne, his sister, the three of them accompanied at one stretch by a talking leopard and a talking kid goat the apostles have converted; their destination is a city the text calls Ophiorymos, the serpent street — Hierapolis cast as a city in thrall to a viper-cult, where the apostles confront the serpent-power and contend against it. The Martyrdom has Philip put to death by being hung head-downward, suspended by the heels. The book also preserves traditions of women exercising apostolic and baptismal roles, one reason the recovered text drew wide attention beyond specialists. How much of any of this preserves genuine memory of the man cannot be settled, and responsible study leaves it where the evidence leaves it: as a fourth-century imaginative deposit grown around a real local cult, valuable as a window onto the Christianity that produced it rather than as a record of the first century.

The Martyrdom of Saint Philip (1639) by Jusepe de Ribera, Museo del Prado, Madrid — Jusepe de Ribera, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

A real cult, if not the stories

The cult, at least, is not legend. Hierapolis built and maintained a martyrium of Philip — an octagonal monumental structure raised on the hill above the city early in the fifth century, eight chapels and four courtyards ranged around a central hall, a building whose plan places it among the major surviving Christian sites of Asia Minor. For a century and more the octagon was taken to mark his grave, but the grave was not in it. In 2011 the archaeologist Francesco D’Andria, long director of the Hierapolis excavations, announced that a separate church, newly uncovered some forty meters from the octagon, held at its center a first-century Roman tomb — the focus, the excavators argued, of the veneration the octagon monumentalized. Whatever name the bones once bore, the find establishes what the legends cannot: that by late antiquity a real, locally rooted cult of Philip stood at Hierapolis, with a tomb, a pilgrimage church, and a great octagon built to honor it. It establishes the devotion; it does not establish the wonder-tales the Acts told to feed it.

Remains of the fifth-century martyrium of Philip on the hill above Hierapolis (Pamukkale), Turkey — Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The veneration spread west as well. Philip’s relics, with those of James the Less, were translated to Rome and laid in the basilica that became Santi Apostoli, and the two apostles came to share a feast — kept on 3 May in the Roman calendar, where it has stood since the calendar reform of 1969 — while the Eastern churches honor Philip on 14 November, the day that opens the forty-day Nativity Fast still called Philip’s Fast in his memory.

The textual record and its scholarship

The recovery of Philip is a study in three uneven sources, and the scholarship divides along them. The canonical record is fixed and small: the four apostle lists and the four Johannine scenes, with the long-standing critical question of how far the speaking Philip of John reflects historical memory and how far he is the Fourth Gospel’s literary creation, a recurring foil whose practical questions set up the discourse’s answers. Richard Bauckham’s work on the Gospels as bearers of named eyewitness tradition is one influential argument that the specificity of John’s minor named figures, Philip among them, tells against pure invention; it is a position argued, not assumed, and engaged from several sides.

For the conflation of apostle and evangelist, the primary witnesses are patristic and accessible: the letter of Polycrates of Ephesus and the notice of Papias both reach us through the third book of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, available in the standard public-domain English of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, where the daughters and the Hierapolis burial can be read in the very words that fused the two men. The apocryphal afterlife now rests on a modern critical foundation: the Acta Philippi edited by François Bovon, Bertrand Bouvier, and Frédéric Amsler in the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum (volume 11, Textus; volume 12, Commentarius, both Brepols, 1999), built on the Xenophontos manuscript, with a full English rendering in Bovon and Christopher Matthews, The Acts of Philip: A New Translation (Baylor University Press, 2012). The reading of the Gospel of Philip belongs to the larger reorientation of Gnostic studies after 1945; for the manuscript and its Valentinian setting the standard route is through the Nag Hammadi corpus and its scholarship rather than through anything about the apostle himself, and the Coptic text in Wesley Isenberg’s English is cataloged and hosted with the rest of the find by the field’s reference projects. The excavated cult is documented in the Hierapolis excavation reports of the Italian mission under D’Andria, which set the octagonal martyrium and the adjacent tomb-church in the topography of the late-antique pilgrimage city.

What survives, then, is a figure held in three keys at once: a name in the oldest lists, a handful of vivid exchanges in one Gospel, and a vast apocryphal afterlife in which the apostle becomes a wonder-worker and a martyr. The documented man is small and exact. The remembered one is large.

→ Related: Gnosis · Apostolic Fathers · New Testament · Jesus Christ · Acts Of The Apostles · Nag Hammadi Library · Valentinus · Gospel Of Thomas · Andrew The Apostle · Thomas The Apostle · Paul The Apostle · Phrygia · Baptism Of Jesus · Nicodemus · St Matthew