Chapter 4 - Andrew the Martyr

One of the agreed facts about Andrew is that he was both saint and martyr. The terms were often interchangeable in the early Christian era, but what did they originally mean? The word 'martyr' is Greek and literally means 'witness'. The first Christian martyr was Stephen, stoned to death after 'witnessing' to his faith in Acts, chapter 7. He is referred to by Paul as a 'martyr' of Christ (Acts 22:20). In Christianity the word 'martyr' took on a new and heroic meaning as more and more Christians died for their faith in the imperial persecutions, and those who died in this way came, in later years, to be honoured with a cult.

'Saint' is a precise term today, and there is a particular list of requirements which must be fulfilled before a saint can be canonised by the Pope, including well-attested miracles associated with the cult of the person. In the New Testament it was used much less precisely. The ordinary Greek word for holy is hieros but in Christian contexts the word hagios is employed. It was used in the Greek version of the Old Testament for the holiness of God but also to describe holy things and the holy people, Israel. Paul uses it (for example, in Philippians 1:1 or Ephesians 5:3) to describe the whole Christian community much in the same way that the Mormons refer to their faithful as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The title of 'saint' began as a widely used term and only later took on the precise definition of an exceptional person. In the early Church the practice of referring to someone as hagios or sanctus (the Latin equivalent) was a mark of respect which went with their title or office. The same might be said of the use of the word 'blessed' (beatus in Latin), which meant originally 'rich', then 'dead', because happy and beyond troubles, but in a Christian context came to mean 'rich in blessing' because salvation had been attained in death. By any standard Andrew qualifies for the title of saint as first-called disciple, apostle, evangelist and martyr.

Those who were both saints and martyrs attracted a following - a cult - after their death. As Ursula Hall puts it:

The triumphant death of the martyr was a vindication and a strengthening of Christian faith; an experience which bridged man's sense of separateness from God, the gap between heaven and earth. The physical relics of the martyr were the continuing evidence that this marvellous link had been made and that it could continue to be of spiritual and even practical benefit to the faithful. In the case of St Andrew, Gregory of Tours writes: 'From the tomb comes manna like flour and oil... the amount shows the barrenness or fertility of the coming season.' (p. 23)

Judging by the flood of pilgrims to the sites of modern manifestations such as Knock or Medjugorje, the willingness to venerate people and places that seem to provide a gateway to heaven is undiminished.

Andrew would inevitably have acquired a cult following both as a saint and as a martyr, and relics of his body would have been the focus of this. Before we deal with the matter of what happened to his bones, we must ask the hard question -did he really die a martyr's death at Patras? The evidence is not at all supportive of the idea that he did. The oldest literature (long before the Acts of Andrew recounted in the previous chapter) that mentions Andrew is attributed to Origen and supports the idea of a mission to Scythia but has nothing to say about Achaea. His silence carries weight in that he had been in close contact with that country in AD 230 and 240. Had he been acquainted with Andrew's mission in Achaea or his death at Patras, he would surely have mentioned these in his account of the apostle's activities. The conclusion is hard to avoid - that the story of the martyrdom at Patras did not exist in Origen's era.

Further doubts arise when the names of the proconsuls in the story (Lesbius and Aegeates) are scrutinised. They are Greek names, not Latin, as one would expect for Roman officials. F. Dvornik, in his book The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, argues this point strongly, adding that even if it is allowed that Achaea was governed between AD 44 and 67 by proconsuls, under a mandate of the Roman Senate, it is most unlikely that they resided in Patras. Corinth was more likely to be the residence of a Roman governor, as the first colony in Achaea and the most important trading centre.

The stories about Andrew preaching in the region also conflict with other more reliable reports on the development of the Christian community there. St Paul was the key figure in planting churches there. He founded the community at Corinth and his exploits feature in the earliest available accounts of the growth of the Christian Church written by Paul's aide, St Luke the Evangelist. According to an old prologue to St Luke's Gospel (which features in some texts), it was written 'in the regions of Achaea'. Although it is possible that Andrew visited Achaea and died at Patras, it would be extremely strange if Luke had omitted this significant fact. The conclusion drawn by Dvornik is that Andrew did not visit there at all.

A further piece of circumstantial evidence is provided by Dvornik in the shape of a document written outside Greece in the fourth century. It is the Syriac 'Teaching of the Apostles', whose sources, it claims, are the apostles: 'What James had written from Jerusalem, and Simon from the city of Rome, and John from Ephesus, and Mark from great Alexandria, and Andrew from Phrygia, and Luke from Macedonia, and Judas Thomas from India'. The author goes on to review the missionary activity of the apostles:

Ephesus and Thessalonica and all Asia and all the country of the Corinthians and all Achaea and its environs received the apostle's hand of priesthood from JOHN the Evangelist, who had leaned on the bosom of our Lord and who built a church there and ministered there in his office of guide.

Nicaea and Nicomedia and all the country of Bithynia and of Gothia, and of the regions around it, received the apostle's hand of priesthood from ANDREW, the brother of Simon Cephas who was guide and ruler in the church he built there and was priest and ministered there.

Byzantium and all the country of Thrace and its environs even to the great river, the border which separates the barbarians, received the apostle's hand from LUKE the Apostle who built a church there and was priest and ministered there in his office of ruler and guide.

A quick look at the map on p. 26 shows that this puts Luke where he always was, John where other reliable traditions put him and Andrew back into the Black Sea area. How then did he end up as a martyr in Patras?

One possible explanation is that the Achaioi, a tribe in the Caucasus along the Black Sea coast from Scythia, were confused with the Achaeans. The Caucasian tribe were well known in the classical period, sometimes identified as refugees from Troy (by the Greek historian Strabo).

On the other hand, perhaps the confusion was deliberate. Dvornik suggests that the author of the Acts of Andrew, familiar with the tradition putting Andrew in Scythia, used the name of this tribe to link Andrew with Patras to provide him with a climax to the apostle's life story, especially one that paralleled the heroic martyrdom of his brother Peter. Ending their days in obscurity was not the stuff of which apostles were made. A glorious martyrdom was far more appropriate and, Dvornik suggests, such a cult may have already been started around a local saint in Patras. Borrowing the details of one saint and ascribing them to another seems unscrupulous, but it was not uncommon (as we shall see when we come to the legend of St Regulus and his part in the life of St Andrew).

Dvornik's conclusion is that the Acts of Andrew, whose climax is the Achaean visit and Patras martyrdom, is an elaborate myth constructed for several purposes - one of which was to provide its hero with a suitable martyrdom. The work could not have been composed in the second century but only after Origen, at the end of the third.

The legend then went through various stages in which it was edited and added to by various hands in East and West, using it to promote their idea of Andrew and in turn Andrew to promote their ideas.

It is a saga of art creating history and of history imitating art. Disentangling the fact and the fiction has given rise to a scholarly jigsaw puzzle. I have never been very good at jigsaws, but conventional wisdom says you start at the corners. In the case of texts in the early Church there were four corners of language: Syriac, Greek, Latin, Coptic. These represented different geographic and cultural aspects of the developing faith, Middle Eastern, Hellenistic, Roman, Egyptian, centred on the important cities for early Christianity - Antioch, Ephesus, Rome, Alexandria. Then there was Jerusalem - the starting point for a faith that began as Jewish but rapidly became 'Gentilised' and dispersed throughout the world around the Mediterranean. Next tip for jigsaw solving is to assemble the pieces with the same colour. Looking at the ideas that coloured thinking in this epoch, there are at least three that are reflected in the Acts of Andrew.

First is the anti-Semitism that identifies Jews who did not become Christians as the people who killed Jesus; second is the Gnosticism that is reflected in miracle stories portraying Christ (and his apostles) as scarcely human or bound by natural laws; third is the ascetic thinking that arose in the monastic movement of the third century and is seen in the Acts of Andrew stories in which celibacy and chastity are seen as superior to monogamy.

There are some pieces which do not fit so easily into the jigsaw. The installation of Stachys as Bishop of Byzantium (see the summary from the Narratio on p. 27) does not appear in the omnibus edition of the miracles of Andrew made by Gregory of Tours (c. AD 591-2). Eusebius, the father of church history (AD 265-339), was not aware of it either, apparently. For centuries after the Acts of Andrew first appeared churchmen in East and West seem to have behaved as if this important incident had not occurred. The conclusion is that the episode involving the consecration of Stachys is a forgery.

Continuing in our role as literary detectives, we need first to seek a motive for inserting such a forgery into the Acts of Andrew. We find our motive by looking at the history of rivalry between Roman and Byzantium (the New Rome), renamed Constantinople in honour of its founder, Emperor Constantine, who made the key decision to adopt Christianity as the official religion of the empire in AD 312. The once-persecuted Jewish sect was now the established faith. By the fifth century the minority status of the past was long forgotten and popes Leo the Great and Gelasius had hammered home the supremacy of Rome, first among sees, arbiter of orthodoxy, the legatee of Peter, etc. New Rome, despite having been the creation of the emperor, lacked ecclesiastical clout to go with this role. It was necessary to create an anti-Peter, a counterweight to the supremacy of Rome. Such a candidate would possess an authority handed down directly from the original group of disciples - what is known as apostolic succession. Andrew was ripe for the role, but not before a few centuries had yellowed his bones. At first there seems to have been apathy about Andrew in the Eastern Church, then a period in which he was promoted more in the West before the forger got to work.

Constantinople could not boast the tomb of St Peter, keeper of the keys, but it had the Church of the Holy Apostles, burial place of the emperors, which housed the bones of Luke and Paul's disciple Timothy. According to Jerome, they were put there, along with Andrew's bones, in 356-7 by Constantine's son, Constantius. In 370 Constantine's remains were transferred to the Church of the Holy Apostles and the emperors became 'doorkeepers to the fishermen'. However, the early years of this process were not ones in which Andrew became a focus of pretension. St John Chrysostom, Bishop of Constantinople 398-404, does not make direct reference to the relics and states that the only apostles whose burial places were known during his lifetime were Peter, Paul, John and Timothy. This suggests that the bones of Andrew may have arrived at a later date. His predecessor, Gregory of Nazianos (bishop 378-81) refers only briefly to Andrew and his mission in Greece.

Even during the Acacian schism between Rome and Constantinople (485-519) there was no sign of Andrew being a source of rivalry. Indeed, the cult of Andrew was growing apace in the Western (Latin) Church. In Rome an oratory on the Via Labicana and a basilica on the Esquiline, both dedicated to Andrew, appeared during this period. Relics of Andrew begin to appear in Italy. In 394 Bishop Ambrose of Milan dedicated relics of St Andrew, St John and St Thomas in the Church of the Holy Apostles in Milan, which already contained relics of St Peter and St Paul. They were a gift from his ally Pope Damasus and survive to this day in a silver casket known as the St Nazaro reliquary. When opened in 1579 it apparently contained cloth, not bones. These may be brandea, curiously described as 'second-class' relics - pieces of cloth which were wrapped around the originals and were supposed to acquire some of their spiritual qualities.

It is probable that Ambrose was instrumental in placing other relics in Italy as a kind of holy antique dealer. Among these were Andrean relics, and by the early fifth century Brescia, Aquileia, Nola and Fundi claimed to have relics of the apostle, paulinus, a government official and poet from Gaul, who became a Christian and was bishop at Nola in southern Italy from 409, gives an insight into the way in which relics were regarded at this time. He writes of Constantine's plan to defend the walls of his new city with the body of Andrew (Poem 19) and in Poem 27: 'Whenever there is part of a saint's body, there too his power emerges.' He refers to sacred ashes being scattered like seeds of life in many places. The implication is that relics could be quite small, even particles, and that we should not be thinking of actual parts of the body being involved.

Andrew's beard turned up a century later in Ravenna as a result of the pretensions of Theodoric the Great, king of the Ostrogoths, who had in common with Andrew the fact that they both sought Christian converts in Scythia. One suspects that the warrior king's style of persuasion differed slightly from Andrew's and owed more to the Attila the Hun school of evangelism. Theodoric built the church of St Andrew of the Goths in Ravenna, and the beard was acquired by Bishop Maximian from Constantinople.

As we shall see in chapter 6, the cult of Andrew in the West was given another boost by Gregory the Great (Pope 590-604). Up to this point there seems to have been no attempt to challenge the supremacy of Rome and to use Andrew as the first-called apostle in order to do it. The idea of claiming Andrew back for the East was a bold and clever move.

Dorotheus was a bishop of Tyre living at the time of Constantine, but around 800 a text appeared under his name which purported to be a list of bishops of Byzantium. It began from the time at which Andrew apparently ordained Stachys and continued up to the first hitherto recorded bishop (Metrophanes, who features in the Chronicon Paschale as the first bishop in 313). Since it defies credibility that such a list would have been ignored by all and sundry for 500 years if it genuinely existed at the time of Constantinople's foundation as the New Rome, the document is known as Pseudo-Dorotheus.

His partner in crime, Pseudo-Epiphanius (named after the original monk of Callistratos, in Constantinople, who died in 402), apparently compiled a life of St Andrew, which became known in a more polished form as the Laudatio. It contains the Stachys legend. His praise for Andrew is balanced by respect for Peter, and the impression is given that the world was divided between them. This has led some scholars to put on the document the date of 880, which marked the end of the Photian schism between the rival Rome and Constantinople Churches, the reason being that Patriarch Photios was anxious to make a deal and re-establish relations between the two centres.

Two facts emerge strongly from all of this. Andrew was conspicuous by his absence for several centuries from the Greek area of influence, which was later to claim him as its own over against Rome. He was, if anything, more actively revered in the West until the eighth and ninth centuries. The works whose authenticity is in question appeared around then in the Eastern Church and became the accepted version of Andrew's life. In i the West the Gregory (of Tours) version continued to be enjoyed, but no mention of the 'pseudo-apostolic' line surfaces until 1586 (when Stachys is credited in a Vatican martyrology), long after the rivals finally and irrevocably split from one another in 1054.

Meanwhile the Orthodox Church was ensuring the durability of the Andrew legends. Among these were the Synaxaria (eleventh century); the Menologion of Basil (tenth century); and an anonymous work that identified the church of St Irene at Galata as the building in which Andrew ordained Stachys. From the tenth century on, Byzantium accepted the Pseudo-Dorotheus and -Epiphanius legends as the only true tradition. At this point the Georgians became acquainted with the legends and adopted them. In 988, when Russia embraced the Orthodox faith, it swallowed the legends whole and even managed to add a few of its own, as we shall see in the next chapter.

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