Holy Apostle Andrew the First-Called

Era

First century

Region

Galilee, Judea, and — by tradition — the shores of the Black Sea and Achaea

Category

Apostle and martyr

Principal feast for this profile

November 30

About 5 minutes to read Sources listed at the end

Jump to The One Who Brought His Brother A Man Who Kept Bringing People Where the Record Comes From Why the Church Remembers Him What His Life Asks of Us

The One Who Brought His Brother

Andrew was a fisherman from Bethsaida, and before he was a disciple of Christ he was a disciple of John the Baptist. That is where the Fourth Gospel begins with him: standing beside the Forerunner when John pointed at Jesus and said Behold, the Lamb of God. Andrew and another disciple followed. They asked where He was staying, and He said, Come and see, and they stayed with Him that day.

The first thing Andrew did afterwards was find his brother Simon. We have found the Messiah. He brought him to Jesus, and Jesus looked at Simon and gave him a new name.

That is the whole basis of the title Protokletos — the First-Called. It is worth being exact: it comes from John’s Gospel. Matthew and Mark tell the call differently, with Jesus walking by the sea and calling the two brothers together, no priority marked between them. Luke’s version of the scene does not name Andrew at all. The First-Called is a legitimate reading of one Gospel, not a summary of all four, and saying so takes nothing away from it.

A Man Who Kept Bringing People

The pattern holds. At the feeding of the five thousand, it is Andrew who notices the boy with five barley loaves and two fish — and says so, with the honest admission that it is nothing among so many. When Greeks came up to the feast and asked Philip if they could see Jesus, Philip went to Andrew, and Andrew went to Christ.

He is one of four — with Peter, James and John — who ask privately about the destruction of the temple and the signs of the end. Then, in Acts, he is named in the upper room after the Ascension, and Scripture says nothing further about him. No mission, no martyrdom, no last words. The New Testament simply stops.

Where the Record Comes From

What Scripture says. John 1:35–42, the call. Mark 1:16–20 and Matthew 4:18–20, the Synoptic version. Mark 13:3, the private question. John 6:8–9, the loaves. John 12:20–22, the Greeks. Acts 1:13, the upper room. That is all of it.

The earliest thing anyone says about where he went. One sentence. Eusebius, writing his Ecclesiastical History in the early fourth century, lists where the apostles were said to have gone — Thomas to Parthia, Andrew to Scythia, John to Asia — and then adds that he has this from Origen’s Commentary on Genesis. Origen died around 253; his commentary does not survive except where quoted. So the oldest surviving claim about Andrew’s mission field is a single line, written some two centuries after his death, preserved only because a later historian quoted it, and reported even then as tradition. Scythia meant the country north of the Black Sea. It is not a claim about Byzantium, or Kyiv, or Patras.

What the apocryphal Acts of Andrew adds. A great deal — and none of it is history. Written in the second or third century, surviving only in fragments and in a sixth-century summary by Gregory of Tours (who says openly that he cut out the parts he found troubling), it has Andrew travelling through Achaea working extravagant miracles, and centres on his persuading Maximilla, wife of the proconsul at Patras, to leave off marital relations with her husband. That is its real interest: it belongs to the Encratite strand of early Christianity, which treated sexual renunciation as a condition of salvation — a position the Church rejected. Eusebius himself dismissed the book as a heretical fabrication. It is the source of the martyrdom at Patras and of the detail that he was bound to the cross rather than nailed, so that he lived and preached for days. Read it as a window into second-century enthusiasm, not as a record of the apostle.

The X-shaped cross. This one is worth stating bluntly, because it is everywhere. The Acts of Andrew does not describe a diagonal cross. Nothing ancient does. Depictions of Andrew on an X-shaped cross begin to appear around the tenth century, do not become standard until the later Middle Ages, and only settle into the fixed image from roughly the seventeenth century on. The saltire’s link with Scotland is likewise late medieval — the earliest documented Scottish official use of a white saltire as a soldiers’ badge is a parliamentary ordinance of 1385. It is a beautiful and by now inseparable image. It is also a medieval one.

The Kyiv legend. The Primary Chronicle, compiled at Kyiv in the early twelfth century, has Andrew travel north from the Black Sea, stop at the hills where Kyiv would later stand, plant a cross and prophesy that a great city with many churches would rise there. Scholars generally read this passage as an insertion made in the mid-twelfth century during a dispute over the standing of the Kyivan church. Whatever its origin, it has done enormous work since: it is the basis on which the churches of the Rus’ claim apostolic rather than merely Byzantine foundation, and it is still invoked in jurisdictional arguments today.

Constantinople. Orthodox tradition holds that Andrew founded the church at Byzantium and consecrated Stachys as its first bishop. Historians are sceptical: the developed form of the claim is traceable to roughly the eighth century, and appears to have been pressed by the Patriarchate during the iconoclast controversy, when apostolic foundation was a useful thing to have. Earlier Constantinopolitan churchmen — John Chrysostom among them — show no awareness of it.

The relics. Patras, then Constantinople under Constantius II, then, after the sack of 1204, Amalfi. The head remained in or returned to Patras, was carried to Rome in 1462 ahead of the Ottoman advance, and stayed in St Peter’s for five centuries. On 26 September 1964, Pope Paul VI sent it back. It was received at Patras and is there now. That last event is not tradition; it happened, in living memory, and it meant something.

Why the Church Remembers Him

Strip away everything that cannot be proved and what is left is still worth a feast. A man heard a preacher say Behold the Lamb of God, followed, spent one day with Christ, and went straight out to fetch his brother — the brother who would end up leading the apostles. Andrew’s whole recorded ministry is bringing people to someone else: his brother, a boy with a lunch, a group of curious Greeks.

The Church in the East calls him First-Called and means something by it. Not first in rank — he is never that — but first through the door, and the sort of man whose instinct on going through a door is to hold it open.

What His Life Asks of Us

Andrew’s contribution was almost entirely introductions. He is not recorded preaching a sermon. He brought people to Christ and let what happened next happen without him.

Most of us will do more good that way than any other way, and most of us would rather not. Bringing someone else forward means they may well go further than you did — Peter certainly did — and the record will remember them and not you. Andrew seems not to have minded.

Holy Apostle Andrew, First-Called, pray to Christ our God that we may bring others to Him without needing the credit.

A note. These lives are written to introduce, not to direct. Ascetic feats described here belong to particular people under obedience, not to a method anyone should take up alone. Anything touching your own rule of prayer or fasting belongs with your priest or spiritual father.

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