Assessing the Apocrypha

The Acts of Andrew was never received by the Church as Scripture, and its theology — an ascetic dualism that makes radical continence the very substance of salvation — is foreign to the Orthodox mind. Yet the same rejected text is the earliest carrier of a narrative datum the Church did accept on other grounds: the crucifixion of the apostle at Patras. This file assesses the apocryphon honestly, reporting its heterodox features and the Church’s verdict, and it sets out the careful discernment by which an Orthodox reader holds such a book.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Encratite Core

The governing idea of the Acts of Andrew is enkrateia — sexual continence — elevated from one ascetic discipline among many into the axis of salvation itself. The plot turns on it. At Patras the apostle converts Maximilla, the wife of the proconsul Aegeates, and the content of her conversion is her permanent refusal of marital relations with her husband. Her withdrawal from the marriage-bed, not any political or doctrinal offense, is what provokes Aegeates’ rage, drives the persecution, and brings Andrew to the cross. The martyrdom is thus generated by, and is the climax of, an argument for continence (Prieur, Acta Andreae, CCSA 5–6, 1989; MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew, 1990, pp. 47–69, 323–411; Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 1993, pp. 231–245).

This is not incidental moralizing but a worldview. In the long speeches the Martyrdom recensions place on Andrew’s lips, the body and its generative life are devalued; embodied existence is a captivity from which the soul, recalled to its true and kindred nature, must be released. Maximilla is praised for refusing to “consummate” the lower nature, and continence functions as the soul’s recovery of itself. Prieur, whose critical edition is the standard reference, reads the work as the product of an encratite milieu and detects in its discourses a theology with Platonizing, even Neoplatonic, contours — a metaphysics of the soul’s flight from the body that sits uneasily with the goodness of creation (Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989, introduction). MacDonald likewise identifies pervasive encratism as the text’s defining tendency and treats the continence-motif as structurally central rather than ornamental (MacDonald, 1990, pp. 3–9, 47–69). The result is a piety in which marriage is not a lesser good but very nearly a snare, and salvation is cast as separation from the flesh.

These are exactly the features that align the Acts of Andrew with the broader world of the apocryphal Acts — a literature repeatedly charged in antiquity with encratite and quasi-Gnostic coloring — and that set it apart from the catholic faith, which holds the body to be God’s good creature and marriage to be honorable (cf. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 101–118). The point to be held steadily is that the encratism is not a stray excess inside an otherwise sound book; it is the book’s theological center of gravity. To accept the Acts of Andrew as a teaching authority would be to accept that center.

The Church’s Judgment

The Church’s verdict on this literature was rendered early and repeatedly, and it was negative. Eusebius of Caesarea, surveying the writings of the apostolic age, sorts them into the acknowledged (homologoumena), the disputed, and the spurious or rejected. The apostolic “Acts” of this apocryphal type fall outside the acknowledged books; Eusebius places such works, circulated under apostles’ names but not received by the Church, among the writings to be set aside as the productions of heretics rather than Scripture (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.25, NPNF II/1). The Acts of Andrew is not among the homologoumena; it is on the far side of the line Eusebius draws.

The Latin West rendered the same judgment formally. The so-called Gelasian Decree (Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis), a sixth-century list of books “to be received and not to be received,” names among the apocrypha “to be rejected” the Acts under the name of the apostle Andrew — singling the work out by name as a writing the Church does not receive and warns against (Decretum Gelasianum, ed. E. von Dobschütz; discussed in Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–235). The decree’s authority and authorship are debated, but its testimony to the settled mind of the Church on these Acts is not in doubt: the Acts of Andrew is listed among the rejected.

The most pointed Eastern witness is Photius of Constantinople. In his Bibliotheca, codex 114, the patriarch describes a corpus of apocryphal Acts — the “Circuits of the Apostles” attributed to one Leucius Charinus, comprising Acts of Peter, John, Andrew, Thomas, and Paul — and condemns it in plain terms. Photius judges the book full of foolishness and self-contradiction, riddled with impiety, and tainted by a dualism that posits two principles and disparages the God of the Old Testament and the material order; he calls it a wellspring and mother of heresy (Photius, Bibliotheca, cod. 114). His report confirms from the Byzantine side both the heterodox theology already visible in the surviving fragments and the Church’s firm refusal of the whole collection. Between Eusebius, the Gelasian Decree, and Photius, the conclusion is uniform across the centuries and across East and West: these Acts are not Scripture, and their theology is suspect.

How an Orthodox Reader Holds It

The honest Orthodox stance follows the discernment proper to Holy Tradition, which is not a flat acceptance or a flat rejection of texts but a sifting (cf. the methodology of received and rejected writings, Holy Tradition). Two things must be held together without collapsing into each other.

First, the rejection is real and is to be honored. The Acts of Andrew is excluded from the canon of Holy Scripture; the Church does not read it as the word of God, does not derive doctrine from it, and is rightly wary of its theology. The encratite devaluation of marriage and the body, and the dualist metaphysics that Photius and modern editors alike detect in its discourses, are not to be endorsed, softened, or smuggled back in under cover of the apostle’s name. On the question of what is to be believed, the verdict of Eusebius, the Gelasian Decree, and Photius stands.

Second — and this is the discernment that must be made carefully — the Church’s refusal of a book’s theology and canonical status is not the same as a refusal of every datum the book happens to transmit. Above all, the Acts of Andrew preserves the earliest form of the tradition that the apostle was martyred by crucifixion at Patras in Achaea under the proconsul Aegeates. That narrative datum passed out of the apocryphon and into the received tradition of the Church: into the Byzantine Lives, encomia, and synaxaria, and into the liturgical commemoration of the First-Called on November 30 (Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989; MacDonald, 1990, pp. 1–9, 47–69; Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–245). The Church did not accept the crucifixion because the apocryphon taught it; the Church accepted it on the strength of its own continuous tradition of veneration, for which the Acts is the earliest, but not the authorizing, witness. The cross of Patras is held on Tradition’s grounds, not on the apocryphon’s (see The Cross of Patras).

The reader therefore holds the Acts of Andrew as exactly what it is: a rejected, theologically suspect text that nonetheless carries, embedded in its heterodox romance, the oldest form of a martyrdom tradition the Church receives independently. One does not endorse the encratism in order to keep the crucifixion, and one does not discard the crucifixion because it travels in compromised company. This is the ordinary work of discernment with apocryphal sources, where evidentiary value and doctrinal authority are weighed apart (see What Can Be Known for the place of the apocrypha in the inventory of evidence).

Two Traditions, Not One

It is essential, finally, to distinguish the heterodox apocryphon from the orthodox liturgical and hagiographic tradition of Andrew that grew up alongside and largely independent of it. The apocryphal Acts is a second- or third-century encratite composition with its own suspect theology. The Church’s veneration of the First-Called — his hymnography, his iconography, his feast, and the network of churches and relics that honor him — is a separate stream, formed by the worshiping community and answerable to the rule of faith, even where it drew certain narrative furniture (the journeys, the Patras martyrdom) from the older text. The two must not be conflated. The Church’s Andrew is not the apocryphon’s Andrew dressed in liturgical robes; he is the apostle confessed by the catholic faith, whose memory the rejected book partly preserved and largely distorted. The discernment commended here keeps the line clear: receive the apostle and his martyrdom from the Church; refuse the encratite gospel the Acts preached in his name.

See Also

• The Acts of Andrew — what the text is
• The Cross of Patras — the martyrdom datum the Church accepted
• What Can Be Known — the apocrypha in the inventory of evidence
• Holy Tradition — the discernment of received and rejected texts
• Holy Scripture — the canon from which the Acts is excluded

References

• Jean-Marc Prieur, Acta Andreae, Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 5–6 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1989).
• Dennis R. MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990).
• Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.25, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1.
• Photius of Constantinople, Bibliotheca, codex 114.
• Decretum Gelasianum de libris recipiendis et non recipiendis (the Gelasian Decree), ed. E. von Dobschütz; as discussed in J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 231–235.
• Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), pp. 101–118.