Apostle Andrew

Andrew, known in the Christian East as the Protokletos ("First-Called"), was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ and the brother of Simon Peter. According to the Gospel of John he came from Bethsaida, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, and had been a disciple of John the Baptist before he followed Jesus and brought his brother to him. The Synoptic Gospels present Andrew and Peter as fishermen called by Jesus to become "fishers of men." In the New Testament Andrew is named among the Twelve; in John's Gospel he draws attention to the boy with five barley loaves and two fish at the feeding of the five thousand, and with Philip he introduces a group of Greeks who wished to see Jesus. The canonical writings do not describe his later missionary work or his death, and they give no year of birth.

From the second and third centuries, Christian tradition associated Andrew with missions around the Black Sea and in Greece. Eusebius of Caesarea, relying on Origen, assigned him a field of labor in Scythia. The apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a second- or third-century work surviving only in fragments and later recensions, recounts wide travels and a martyrdom at Patras in the Roman province of Achaia. Later Byzantine tradition, which is not found in the earliest sources and which many historians treat as a subsequent development, made Andrew the founder of the church of Byzantium, later Constantinople. The Ecumenical Patriarchate has long claimed apostolic foundation through him, although early episcopal lists name Stachys as the first bishop of that see rather than Andrew himself as an office-holding patriarch. Medieval traditions in the Slavic and Romanian lands further attributed to Andrew preaching in the regions of present-day Ukraine, Romania, and southern Russia.

Hagiographical accounts, drawing on the Acts of Andrew, state that he was crucified at Patras, in many versions on an X-shaped cross later called Saint Andrew's Cross, and that he preached to the bystanders until he died. No contemporary source records the year of his death; later writers have proposed dates in the range of the mid to late first century, but these remain conjectural. Relics believed to be his were said to have been moved from Patras to Constantinople in the fourth century and placed in the Church of the Holy Apostles. After the Fourth Crusade, in 1208, a large part of the body was taken to Amalfi in southern Italy, where it remains in the cathedral. The skull, kept at Patras and later brought to Rome, was returned to Patras by Pope Paul VI in 1964 as an ecumenical gesture. A medieval Scottish tradition holds that relics of Andrew were brought to Fife, originating the church and burgh of St Andrews; Andrew became patron of Scotland, and the saltire—the X-shaped cross—was adopted as the national flag.

Andrew is commemorated on 30 November in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and other Christian calendars. He is venerated as patron of Scotland, Russia, Greece, Romania, Ukraine, and Barbados, of the cities of Patras and Amalfi, and of fishermen, fishmongers, and sailors, and he is invoked against gout and sore throats. In Christian art he typically appears as a bearded apostle holding a book or scroll and the transverse cross. Because he belongs to the apostolic age, his cult is of immemorial standing in East and West; there was no later papal process of beatification or canonization.