06 — The Acts of Andrew
The apocryphal Acts of Andrew (Acta Andreae), a second- or third-century narrative that lies behind much of the later legend of the apostle, including the martyrdom at Patras. These files describe the text and its derivatives and assess it as the Church has — as a work bearing encratite and heterodox features, valuable as a witness to early devotion and to the geography of the legend, but reported, not endorsed.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)
Most of what later tradition “knew” about Andrew’s travels and death descends, directly or indirectly, from the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, one of the major apocryphal acts of apostles. The original is largely lost and must be reconstructed from later epitomes and derivatives — the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, the Martyrdom of Andrew, and Gregory of Tours’ Latin Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli. Scholars date the core to roughly the late second or third century and find in it the encratite tendencies (a radical rejection of marriage and the body) characteristic of several apocryphal acts. The Church never received the work as Scripture and treated it with suspicion; yet certain narrative data it carried — above all the crucifixion at Patras — passed into the accepted tradition. These files report the text honestly and weigh it under METHODOLOGY §3.5.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Acts of Andrew | What the Acta Andreae is: its date (2nd–3rd c.), its lost original and the sources from which it is reconstructed, its derivatives (Acts of Andrew and Matthias, Martyrdom of Andrew, Gregory of Tours’ epitome), and the contents — the missionary wonders culminating in the crucifixion at Patras. |
| Assessing the Apocrypha | The encratite and heterodox features of the text; its condemnation and exclusion from the canon (the Gelasian Decree; Eusebius and the apostolic apocrypha); how an Orthodox reader holds a text that is rejected as Scripture yet preserves an early form of the martyrdom tradition. |
See Also
- The Cross of Patras — the martyrdom tradition the Acts carries
- The Sources for the Mission — the Acts among the witnesses to the journeys
- What Can Be Known — the Acts weighed in the inventory of the evidence
- Holy Tradition — the discernment by which the Church receives or rejects such texts
References
- Prieur, Jean-Marc, ed. Acta Andreae. Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum 5–6. Turnhout: Brepols, 1989.
- MacDonald, Dennis R. The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990.
- Elliott, J. K. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.