Apostle Bartholomew

Bartholomew is numbered among the Twelve Apostles of Jesus in the New Testament lists given by the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and by the Acts of the Apostles. The name is a patronymic from the Aramaic bar-Tolmai, meaning son of Tolmai or Talmai. In those lists he is consistently paired with the Apostle Philip. The canonical writings record no separate words or deeds under the name Bartholomew. From an early date many Christians have identified him with Nathanael, the man of Cana in Galilee whom Philip brought to Jesus in the Gospel of John, and of whom Jesus said that he was an Israelite in whom there is no deceit. The identification rests chiefly on the pairing with Philip and on Nathanael's later appearance among the disciples after the Resurrection; it is widely received in liturgy and art but is not demonstrated by the biblical text itself. Nothing historically verifiable is known of Bartholomew's date or place of birth, parentage, or life before his call.

After the New Testament period, accounts of his missionary labors multiply and do not agree with one another. Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the early fourth century, relates that Pantaenus of Alexandria, traveling in India toward the end of the second century, found local Christians who used a Hebrew Gospel of Matthew said to have been left by Bartholomew. Jerome repeats the same notice. Other strands of tradition send the apostle into Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, and the regions about the Black Sea. The Armenian Apostolic Church venerates Bartholomew, together with Jude Thaddeus, as one of its two founding Illuminators and places his preaching in Armenia and in neighboring Caucasian Albania. Apocryphal Acts and later medieval compilations, notably the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, combine these journeys into a continuous career ending in martyrdom under a local king.

The place and manner of his death are known only from later hagiography and remain historically uncertain. The dominant Western and Armenian tradition holds that he was flayed alive and then beheaded or crucified at Albanopolis, a city associated in the sources sometimes with Armenia and sometimes with Caucasian Albania, by order of a ruler named in various texts Astyages or Polymius. The flaying became his chief attribute in Christian iconography; Michelangelo depicted him in the Last Judgment holding his own skin. A rival stream of legend locates his martyrdom in India. No contemporary or near-contemporary witness confirms any of these stories. Relics attributed to the apostle were said to have rested at Albanopolis and later to have been translated to the island of Lipari, then to Benevento, and in the late tenth century to Rome, where they are venerated in the Basilica of San Bartolomeo all'Isola on the Tiber Island. An arm relic has long been claimed at Frankfurt am Main.

In the Roman Rite the principal feast of Bartholomew is 24 August. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on 11 June, together with Barnabas, and also observes a feast of the translation of his relics. Because of the flaying legend he became patron of tanners, leather workers, butchers, bookbinders, cobblers, and related crafts, and he is invoked against skin diseases and neurological disorders. He is likewise honored as a patron of Armenia. His cult is ancient and universal among churches that keep the apostolic calendar; like the other apostles he was never the object of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval or modern type.