The Acts of Andrew

The Acts of Andrew (Acta Andreae) is the lost apocryphal romance that stands behind almost everything the later Church came to narrate about the apostle’s missions and death. Composed in the late second or third century, its original Greek text has not survived intact; it must be reconstructed from epitomes, martyrdom-texts, and a cluster of derivative works. This file reports what the text is, when it was written, and what it contained — the question of its orthodoxy is treated separately.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

What the Text Is

The Acts of Andrew belongs to a recognizable genre: it is one of the five major apocryphal Acts of apostles, conventionally grouped with the Acts of John, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Peter, and the Acts of Thomas (Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament, 1993, pp. 231–233; Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 101–118). These are not chronicles but edifying narrative romances, each tracing a single apostle through a sequence of travels, wonders, sermons, and a culminating martyrdom. They circulated widely in late antiquity, were prized in some circles and condemned in others, and they are the principal reservoir from which the medieval apostolic legends were drawn. The Acts of Andrew is the member of this family that concerns the First-Called.

The work was originally a substantial Greek text — a continuous narrative of considerable length, on the scale of its sister-Acts. Jean-Marc Prieur, whose critical edition is the standard reference, treats it as a single original composition whose contours can still be recovered, and dates it to the later second or the third century (Prieur, Acta Andreae, CCSA 5–6, 1989). Dennis R. MacDonald, working from the surviving witnesses, places the composition in the same broad window — roughly the late second to mid-third century — and argues that the original was a unified and coherent work rather than a loose anthology (MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals, 1990, pp. 3–9, 47–55). The precise decade cannot be fixed, but the second-to-third-century horizon is the scholarly consensus, and it places the Acts of Andrew among the earliest of the apocryphal Acts (Schneemelcher, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 101–102).

The Lost Original and Its Witnesses

The central difficulty is that the full original Greek Acta Andreae is largely lost. What survives is a body of fragments, paraphrases, and reworkings from which the original must be reconstructed — a situation that makes every statement about the “contents” of the text a statement about its witnesses (Prieur, CCSA 5, 1989, introduction; Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–235). Four principal witnesses carry the tradition.

The first is the Latin epitome of Gregory of Tours, the Liber de miraculis beati Andreae apostoli (“Book of the Miracles of the Blessed Apostle Andrew”), composed in the sixth century. Gregory explicitly says that he abridged a longer and, in his judgment, verbose account, retaining the miracles and trimming what he found excessive; his Liber is therefore the single most important continuous summary of the narrative arc of the lost original, even though it is a condensation filtered through a Western bishop’s sensibilities (Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989; Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–235, 245–283; MacDonald, 1990, pp. 13–19). Much of what can be said about the journeys and wonders of the original depends on Gregory’s epitome.

The second is the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (the Mermedonia or “city of the man-eaters” story), in which Andrew rescues Matthias from a cannibal city and works a series of marvels. This is a related text whose precise relationship to the original Acts of Andrew is debated: MacDonald argued that it derives from, or originally belonged with, the same composition, while many scholars (including Prieur) treat it as a separate, secondary work only loosely connected to the Acta Andreae proper. The matter is unresolved, and the file flags it as disputed rather than settled (MacDonald, 1990, pp. 9–13, 70–169; Prieur, CCSA 5, 1989; Elliott, 1993, pp. 283–299).

The third witness is the Martyrdom of Andrew (the Passio or Martyrium), the account of the apostle’s arrest and death, which survives in several Greek recensions and in Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and other versions. Because the martyrdom was the most copied and liturgically useful portion of the narrative, it is preserved in fuller and more independent form than the journey-material, and it is the part of the original that can be reconstructed with the greatest confidence (Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989; Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–245; Schneemelcher, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 118–151).

The fourth is the Acts of Peter and Andrew, a short later text in which the two brother-apostles appear together; it is a secondary, derivative composition that draws on the same legendary world but is not a direct witness to the original Acta Andreae (Elliott, 1993, pp. 299–302). Around these four cluster further fragments, Coptic remains, and Byzantine paraphrases; together they form the mosaic from which the lost whole is pieced.

The Narrative Arc

When the witnesses are laid side by side, a consistent arc emerges. The Acts of Andrew follows the apostle through a series of missionary journeys set in a legendary, often vague geography, in which the historical and the fabulous are not distinguished. Along the way Andrew performs a long sequence of wonders: he heals the sick, casts out demons, raises the dead, calms storms and beasts, and converts crowds and notables by the combined force of miracle and preaching (Gregory of Tours, Liber de miraculis, in Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989; Elliott, 1993, pp. 245–283; MacDonald, 1990, pp. 19–46). The wonders are the connective tissue of the romance, and Gregory’s epitome preserves them in abundance precisely because he chose to keep them.

The narrative culminates at Patras in Achaea (the Peloponnese), under the Roman proconsul Aegeates. There Andrew converts Maximilla, the wife of Aegeates, to a life of sexual continence; she withdraws from her husband’s bed at the apostle’s urging. This conversion is the hinge of the plot: it is Maximilla’s continence, and Aegeates’ rage at it, that provokes the persecution. Aegeates arrests Andrew, and the apostle is condemned and crucified — the martyrdom that the later Church received and that the cross of Patras commemorates (Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989; Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–245; MacDonald, 1990, pp. 47–69, 323–411; Schneemelcher, vol. 2, 1992, pp. 118–151). The Martyrdom recensions preserve the long speeches Andrew is made to deliver from the cross, which give the text its distinctive theological coloring. That coloring — the prominence of continence and the cast of the apostle’s teaching — is the matter assessed in the companion file; the present file reports the narrative without endorsing it.

The Critical Editions

Modern study of the text rests on three works in particular. The critical edition is Jean-Marc Prieur, Acta Andreae, published in two volumes as numbers 5 and 6 of the Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum (Brepols, 1989); it gathers the Greek, Latin, and versional witnesses and reconstructs the text with full apparatus, and it is the indispensable scholarly foundation. Dennis R. MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (Scholars Press, 1990), offers a reconstruction, translation, and the major argument for the unity of the original and for the contested place of the Mermedonia story. For English readers, J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Clarendon Press, 1993, pp. 231–302), provides accessible translations of the principal witnesses with introductions, and Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, rev. ed. (Westminster John Knox, 1992, pp. 101–151), supplies the standard handbook treatment.

Why It Matters Here

The importance of the Acts of Andrew for the Orthodox tradition of the First-Called is that it is the narrative source behind most of the later legend. The journeys, the wonders, and above all the crucifixion at Patras under Aegeates passed from this apocryphal romance into the Byzantine Lives, encomia, and synaxaria, and the Patras martyrdom in particular was received and venerated by the Church even as the work as a whole was viewed with suspicion. To read the later Andrew tradition is, in large part, to read the downstream channels of this text (Prieur, CCSA 5–6, 1989; MacDonald, 1990, pp. 1–9; Elliott, 1993, pp. 231–235).

This file reports the text: what it is, when it was written, how it survives, and what it narrates. It does not pass judgment on the work’s theology or canonical standing. The encratite features of the narrative — the strong emphasis on continence that drives the Patras episode — and the Church’s discriminating reception of the text are assessed in the companion file, Assessing the Apocrypha, to which the reader is directed for the evaluation.

See Also

• Assessing the Apocrypha — the encratite features and the Church’s judgment
• The Cross of Patras — the martyrdom narrative the Acts carries
• The Sources for the Mission — the Acts among the mission sources
• Holy Tradition — how the Church receives or rejects such texts

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).
• J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 231–302.
• Wilhelm Schneemelcher, ed., New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 2, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1992), pp. 101–151.