Andrew the Apostle

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrew the Apostle was one of the Twelve chosen by Jesus, yet his most visible legacy is a pattern of color. The white diagonal cross on a blue field that flies over Scotland carries his name. The same cross sits inside the Union Flag, on the flag of Tenerife and on the Russian Navy ensign. Few figures described so sparingly in the gospels have travelled so far on cloth. Several nations also name him as their patron, among them Romania, Russia, Ukraine and Barbados. This documentary follows Andrew from a Galilean shoreline to shrines in Greece, Italy, Scotland and Cyprus. It asks why his Greek name matters. It asks how an X-shaped cross came to be attached to him, and why his bones turned up in so many places. And it asks why so many peoples insist that he once walked through their land.

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• 2. The First Called

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  Bethsaida, in Galilee, is where Andrew was born into a Jewish family, possibly between 5 and 10 AD. The New Testament names him as the brother of Simon Peter and, like Peter, a son of Jonah. His name means manly or brave, and it comes from the Greek word andreia. Greek names of this kind had been common among Jews and other Hellenised peoples since the second or third century BC. No Hebrew or Aramaic name for him is recorded.

  One commentator reads that Greek name as a sign of cultural openness in his family, since Greek language and culture were quite present in Galilee. According to Mark 1:29, the brothers shared a house at Capernaum when Jesus began his public life. Both worked as fishermen.

  On the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Matthew and Mark say, Jesus saw Simon and Andrew fishing and called them to be disciples. He promised to make them fishers of men, which gave their trade a second meaning. Luke tells it differently. In his account Jesus preaches from a boat described only as Simon's, then produces a huge catch after a fruitless night. Andrew is not named there, and Simon's brother does not appear until the next chapter. Most readers still assume Andrew was in the boat. Matthew Poole wrote of Luke's version: "Luke denies not that Andrew was there".

  John's gospel gives Andrew a very different entrance. He begins as a disciple of John the Baptist. On the Baptist's testimony, Andrew and an unnamed companion, traditionally believed to be John the Apostle, followed Jesus and spent the day with him. That made them the first two disciples called. Andrew recognised Jesus as the Messiah and hurried off to introduce his brother Simon Peter. For this reason the Eastern Orthodox Church honors him as Protokletos, meaning the first called. Before the final call to the apostolate, the brothers were drawn into a closer companionship, and then they left everything to follow Jesus.

  At the feeding of the crowd with loaves and fishes, it was Andrew who told Jesus about the boy with the food. When certain Greeks wanted to see Jesus, they approached Philip, and Philip turned to Andrew. Andrew was at the Last Supper. He was also one of four disciples who came to Jesus on the Mount of Olives to ask about the signs of his return at the end of the age. What Andrew did after the Ascension depends on which ancient writer is believed.

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• 3. Roads Beyond Galilee

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  Eusebius, in book 3 of his Church History, quoted Origen from around 185 as saying that Andrew preached in Scythia. The 12th-century Primary Chronicle draws a longer route. In that account Andrew visited Scythia and the Greek colonies along the northern Black Sea coast, then reached Chersonesus in Crimea.

  According to a legend attributed to Nestor the Chronicler, Andrew continued to the future site of the capital of Kievan Rus'. There he foretold a great Christian city with many churches. Next, the chronicle says, he came to the land of the Slovenians where Novgorod now stands, observed the locals, and finally arrived in Rome. Historical evidence for this journey is lacking. Even so, modern church historians in Russia have often worked the tale into their studies.

  Hippolytus of Rome placed Andrew in Thrace, and the apocryphal Acts of Andrew mentions him in Byzantium. Tradition holds that he founded the see of Byzantium, later Constantinople, in 38 AD and installed Stachys as its bishop. Under Anatolius, in 451, that diocese became the seat of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Andrew and Stachys are both recognised as its patron saints. Basil of Seleucia, writing in the 5th century, also knew of missions in Thrace, Scythia and Achaea. According to Eastern Orthodox tradition, Andrew's apostolic successor is the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. Achaea matters most, because tradition says it is where his journeys ended.

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• 4. The Saltire Cross

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  Patras, a city in Achaea, is where Andrew is said to have been martyred by crucifixion in AD 60. Early texts describe him bound rather than nailed to a Latin cross, the type on which Jesus is said to have died. The Acts of Andrew, known to Gregory of Tours in the 6th century, is one of them. Later a different tradition took hold. It placed Andrew on a crux decussata, an X-shaped cross, now commonly called a Saint Andrew's Cross. He supposedly asked for that shape himself, because he thought himself unworthy to die on the same kind of cross as Jesus. Artists did not settle on images of him bound to an X-shaped cross until the later Middle Ages.

  The Acts of Andrew is itself a contested document. It recounts his supposed travels, the miracles he performed along the way and finally his martyrdom. Eusebius and Epiphanius of Salamis, among others, mention it. Tradition credited it to Leucius Charinus, though it shows several signs of a mid-2nd-century origin. Eusebius knew the work and dismissed it as the product of a heretic and as absurd. The Decretum Gelasianum, connected with the name of Pope Gelasius I, lists both the Acts and a Gospel of St Andrew among rejected books. Dennis MacDonald has argued that the Acts retells Homer's Odyssey in Christian form.

  Whatever the truth of the Acts, what remained of Andrew after Patras did not stay put.

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• 5. The Journey of the Bones

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  Around 357, the Roman emperor Constantius II ordered most of Andrew's relics moved from Patras to Constantinople. They were placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles. One legend adds a monk at Patras named Regulus, also called Rule, who was warned in a dream to hide some of the bones. In a second dream an angel told him to carry them to the ends of the earth and build a shrine wherever he was shipwrecked. He sailed west with a kneecap, an upper arm bone, three fingers and a tooth. He was wrecked on the coast of Fife, in Scotland.

  The more sober account is that the relics probably reached Britain in 597, with the Augustine Mission. They then reached Fife in 732, brought by Bishop Acca of Hexham, a well-known collector of relics. The only historical Regulus on record was an Irish monk expelled from Ireland with Columba, and his dates are around 573-600.

  Back in Constantinople, the skull was held until the Byzantine emperor Basil I, who ruled from 867 to 886, returned it to Patras. In 1208, after the sack of Constantinople, Cardinal Peter of Capua the Elder took the remaining relics of Andrew and Peter to Amalfi, his hometown. Most of them, including an occipital bone, are still enshrined in the crypt of the cathedral there.

  In 1461 the Ottomans crossed the Strait of Corinth, and Thomas Palaiologos fled Patras for Italy. He was the youngest surviving son of the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and ruled the province of Morea. With him he carried what was purported to be Andrew's skull. He gave it to Pope Pius II, who had it enshrined in one of the four central piers of St. Peter's Basilica and then in Pienza.

  In September 1964, Pope Paul VI ordered the one relic of Andrew held in Vatican City sent back to Patras, as a gesture of goodwill toward the Greek Orthodox Church. Cardinal Augustin Bea led a delegation that presented the skull to Bishop Constantine of Patras on the 24th of September 1964. The cross itself had been taken from Greece during the Crusades by the Duke of Burgundy. It was kept in the church of St Victor in Marseille until it returned to Patras on the 19th of January 1980. Cardinal Roger Etchegaray led the Catholic delegation that presented it to Bishop Nicodemus of Patras.

  Today the Church of St. Andrew at Patras keeps the small finger, part of the top of the skull and the cross in a special shrine. A ceremony honors them every the 30th of November. Other places claim relics too, including Sarzana Cathedral, St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh and a church in Warsaw. In 2006 Cardinal Etchegaray again gave the Greek Orthodox Church another relic of the saint.

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• 6. Banners and Battles

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  Athelstaneford, in East Lothian, is the place a 16th-century retelling sets a battle in AD 832. In that account the Pictish and Scottish king Óengus II faced the Angles, led by Æthelstan of East Anglia, and was heavily outnumbered. On the eve of battle he prayed and vowed to make Andrew the patron saint of Scotland if he won. The next morning, white clouds in the shape of an X reportedly appeared in the sky. Óengus took it as the cross on which Andrew was believed to have died. His army, though smaller, won, and he kept his promise. The white saltire on celestial blue is said to have become Scotland's flag because of this. Yet there is evidence that Andrew was venerated in Scotland before this date.

  Andrew's Scottish standing may also owe something to church politics after the Synod of Whitby. The Celtic Church felt that Columba had been outranked by Peter, so Peter's brother would make a higher-ranking patron. In 1320 the Declaration of Arbroath cited Scotland's conversion by Andrew, "the first to be an Apostle". Many parish churches in Scotland bear his name. The former national church of the Scottish people in Rome, Sant'Andrea degli Scozzesi, was dedicated to him. On the 30th of November his feast is a bank holiday in Scotland, with week-long celebrations in the town of St Andrews and in some other Scottish cities.

  Burgundy gave the saltire a second military career. Andrew was patron saint of the Dukes of Burgundy, and a form of his cross, the Cross de Bourgogne, served as the duchy's flag. After Spain acquired the duchy, the Spanish Crown used it. It later flew as a Spanish naval flag and as an army battle flag until 1843. It still appears in various Spanish military insignia and in the coat of arms of the king of Spain.

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• 7. Contested Missions

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  Georgia, according to its church tradition, received Christianity from Andrew himself, making him the founder of the Georgian church. The tradition draws on Byzantine sources, especially Niketas David Paphlagon, who died around 890. He asserted that "Andrew preached to the Iberians, Sauromatians, Taurians, and Scythians and to every region and city, on the Black Sea, both north and south." Georgian churchmen of the 10th and 11th centuries adopted the version, added details, and inserted it into the Georgian Chronicles.

  The story gave the Georgian church an apostolic origin. George the Hagiorite used it as a defense against the encroachments of Antiochian church authorities on Georgian autocephaly. The monk Ephraim the Minor then reconciled it with the earlier 4th-century conversion of Georgians by Nino. He explained why a second Christening by Nino was needed, and a Georgian church council made his thesis canonical in 1103. Georgia marks two feast days for Andrew, on the 12th of May and the 13th of December. The first, which honors his arrival, is a public holiday.

  Romania also claims him as its patron saint. The Romanian Orthodox Church holds that Andrew preached in Dobruja, also called Scythia Minor, and converted its people. That view was not widely acknowledged until the 20th century, though it finds support in Eusebius. Some modern Romanian scholars call a pre-Edict of Milan Christianisation unsustainable. They link the idea to Dacianism, an ideology they say was exploited for propaganda in the communist era. Historian Ioan-Aurel Pop disagrees and argues for conversion before the third century. Mircea Eliade suggested structural links between Zamolxism and Christianity. If Andrew preached in Dobruja rather than in Crimea, as the Russian Orthodox Church holds, Romanian Christianity would be of apostolic origin.

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• 8. Pilgrims and Painters

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  The Karpass Peninsula, at the north-eastern tip of Cyprus, holds the Apostolos Andreas Monastery. Cypriot tradition says a ship carrying Andrew went off course and ran aground. He struck the rocks with his staff, and a spring of healing water gushed out. It restored the sight of the ship's captain, who had been blind in one eye. A fortified monastery stood there in the 12th century, and Isaac Comnenus of Cyprus negotiated his surrender to Richard the Lionheart from it. A small chapel was built close to the shore in the 15th century, and the main monastery of the current church dates to the 18th.

  The monastery was once called the Lourdes of Cyprus. It was served not by an organized community of monks but by a changing group of volunteer priests and laymen. Both Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot communities regard it as holy. One more recent story concerns Maria Georgiou, whose son was kidnapped in 1895. Seventeen years later Andrew appeared to her in a dream and told her to pray for his return at the monastery. On the crowded boat to Cyprus she told her story, and a young Dervish priest asked whether her son had distinguishing marks. He stripped off his clothes to show the same marks, and mother and son were reunited.

  In Luqa, Malta, where many fishermen once lived, Andrew is patron saint. That may be the main reason for the choice. The first reference to a chapel there dates to 1497. Giuseppe Scolaro carved the wooden statue of Andrew in 1779, and Mattia Preti painted the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew on the main altar in 1687.

  Painters usually give Andrew a long forked beard, a cross and a book. Masaccio's 1426 panel, once part of the Pisa Altarpiece, is now at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Carlo Crivelli painted him in the San Domenico Altarpiece of 1476, now in the National Gallery in London. Around 1519 Hans Holbein the Younger drew him in pen and ink as a design for a stained glass window, and it hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Muslim exegesis, though the Qur'an gives no names, generally agrees that the disciples of Jesus included Andrew.

  In northern England and Scotland, one superstition puts the saltire on a fireplace post or lintel to keep witches from flying down the chimney.

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