Andrew the Apostle

Andrew, called the First-Called (Protokletos) in Eastern Christian tradition, was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus and the brother of Simon Peter. The Gospel of John identifies Bethsaida in Galilee as the city of Andrew and Peter; both men worked as fishermen on the Sea of Galilee. Before attaching himself to Jesus, Andrew had been a disciple of John the Baptist. John’s Gospel relates that Andrew heard the Baptist identify Jesus as the Lamb of God, followed Jesus, and then brought his brother Simon to him with the words that they had found the Messiah. The Synoptic Gospels describe a calling by the lakeshore in which Jesus summoned Andrew and Peter from their nets and promised to make them fishers of men. Andrew is named in all New Testament lists of the Twelve. In the Fourth Gospel he appears at the feeding of the five thousand, bringing forward the boy with the barley loaves and fish, and, with Philip, he presents certain Greeks who wished to see Jesus. The New Testament otherwise says little of his individual activity and is silent on whether he had a wife or children; Peter’s mother-in-law is mentioned, but no corresponding family detail is given for Andrew.

Information about Andrew’s career after the events narrated in the Gospels depends on later Christian tradition rather than on contemporary historical record. Eusebius of Caesarea, drawing on Origen, assigned to Andrew a mission in Scythia, the region north of the Black Sea. Other strands of tradition associate him with preaching in Asia Minor, Thrace, Macedonia, and Greece. The apocryphal Acts of Andrew, generally dated to the second or third century and not treated by historians as a reliable narrative of events, describes extensive travels and a confrontation with the Roman governor at Patras in Achaea. From that work and from subsequent hagiography developed the standard legend of Andrew’s martyrdom: that he was bound, not nailed, to an X-shaped cross (the crux decussata, later known as Saint Andrew’s Cross) at his own request, considering himself unworthy to die on a cross of the same form as Christ’s. The traditional place of death is Patras in the Roman province of Achaea, in present-day Greece. No year of death is established by early, independent evidence; later writers often place the martyrdom in the reign of Nero or in the following decade, but those dates remain conjectural.

Eastern tradition came to hold that Andrew had founded the Christian community at Byzantium and had ordained Stachys as its bishop, a claim that later underpinned the apostolic succession asserted by the Patriarchate of Constantinople. That succession list is a product of ecclesiastical historiography of later centuries, not of first-century documentation, and Andrew did not hold the later office of patriarch. Relics associated with the apostle were said to have been translated from Patras to Constantinople in the fourth century. After the Fourth Crusade, a substantial portion of the remains was taken in 1208 to Amalfi in Italy, where they are still housed in the Cathedral of Saint Andrew. The skull was returned from Rome to Patras in 1964 as an ecumenical gesture and is kept in the Cathedral of Saint Andrew there. A separate medieval tradition, of great importance in the British Isles, held that relics of Andrew reached Fife in Scotland, giving rise to the see of St Andrews and to Andrew’s status as patron saint of Scotland; the saltire of Saint Andrew became the national flag.

Andrew has been commemorated on 30 November in both East and West from an early date. He is widely invoked as patron of Scotland, Russia, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, Barbados, Patras, Amalfi, and Luqa in Malta, and of fishermen, fishmongers, sailors, rope-makers, textile workers, singers, miners, butchers, farm workers, pregnant women, and those suffering from gout or sore throats. In the Orthodox churches he is especially honoured as Protokletos and as apostolic founder of the Church of Constantinople. Veneration of Andrew as apostle and martyr is attested from the early centuries of the Church; he was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type. No reliable ancient source records a spouse or children, and claims about his family life beyond his kinship with Peter and their shared trade remain unverified.