Reception and Legacy

The historical Andrew is known only in outline, and it was precisely the thinness of the record that made him so useful. An apostle of the Twelve, the brother of Peter, the first to be called, and yet unfixed by any dense early biography, Andrew the First-Called could be claimed as founder and patron by Church after Church that felt an apostolic dignity wanting. This entry traces that reception — in Byzantium, Russia, Romania, Georgia, and the West — and sets beside it the modern critical scholarship, which weighs the legends as late while the Churches go on venerating the saint.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

An Adaptable Patron

The reception history of Andrew is in large part a study in what an apostle of few fixed facts can be made to carry. The earliest secure datum is meager: Origen, as quoted by Eusebius, assigns Andrew the mission field of “Scythia” (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, NPNF II/1), a vast and vague northern designation rather than a documented itinerary. Around that opening the later tradition grew. Because Andrew belonged to the Twelve, his patronage conferred genuine apostolic standing; because he was the brother of Peter (John 1:40) and the Prōtoklētos, the first-called who brought Peter to Christ (John 1:41–42), his patronage carried a peculiar weight in any contest with Rome; and because so little of his later life was fixed by early sources, a Church in need of an apostolic founder could plausibly draw his missionary line through its own territory. The result is that the same apostle grounds the apostolic self-understanding of several distinct Churches, each reading the sparse record toward its own foundation.

Byzantium and Constantinople

The most consequential reception was Byzantine. Constantinople’s canonical precedence in fact rested on the “New Rome” rationale of the Second Ecumenical Council (Constantinople 381, canon 3, NPNF II/14) and the Council of Chalcedon (451, canon 28, NPNF II/14) — a conciliar and imperial ground, not an apostolic one. Against Rome’s Petrine foundation this looked exposed, and the tradition that Andrew had founded the see of Byzantium and ordained its first bishop, Stachys, supplied an apostolic pedigree calibrated against Peter’s: if Rome had Peter, Constantinople had the brother who had called him. The classic critical account of this development is Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Harvard, 1958), who argued that the developed foundation-legend is a Byzantine medieval construction, elaborated most vigorously from the eighth and ninth centuries and above all in the age of Photius, when the rivalry with Rome was sharpest (Dvornik 1958; see St. Photius the Great). The full ecclesiological argument is set out at The Apostolic Throne of Constantinople.

Whatever the legend’s date, the title became permanent. The Ecumenical Patriarchate venerates Andrew as its founder, styles itself the “Apostolic Throne,” and keeps November 30 as its patronal feast at the Phanar (see The Church of Constantinople). In the twentieth century this self-understanding acquired a new ecumenical resonance. As part of the rapprochement that followed the lifting of the mutual anathemas of 1054 by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras in 1965, the two sees began an exchange of delegations on their respective patronal feasts: a Roman delegation travels to the Phanar for the feast of Andrew on November 30, and a delegation of the Ecumenical Patriarchate travels to Rome for the feast of Peter and Paul on June 29 (F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed., OUP, 2005, s.v. “Andrew, St.”). The “brother of Peter,” once an instrument of rivalry, had become a sign of the two apostles’ kinship and the two Churches’ search for unity.

Russia

The Kievan reception gave the Rus’ an apostolic root of their own. The Primary Chronicle carries the legend that Andrew, journeying up the Dnieper, blessed the hills where Kiev would stand and prophesied a great Christian city there, then continued north to the site of Novgorod — a tradition that allowed Rus’ to claim that its land had been visited and blessed by an apostle of the Twelve, rather than evangelized only at second hand from Byzantium. The critical scholarship treats this Kievan episode as a later legendary extension of the Andrew tradition rather than historical memory (Dvornik 1958). Veneration, however, ran deep, and Andrew came to be regarded as a patron of Russia. Peter the Great gave the patronage its imperial form by founding the Imperial Order of St. Andrew the First-Called in 1698 as the senior order of the Russian Empire, and by adopting the diagonal blue cross of Andrew — the saltire — as the device of the Russian naval ensign, the St. Andrew’s flag still flown by the Russian navy.

Romania

In Romania, Andrew is honored as a national patron, and the basis offered is the old assignment of the apostle to Scythia, read as Scythia Minor — the region of the Dobruja, on the Black Sea coast between the lower Danube and the sea, within modern Romanian territory. On this reading the apostle who preached in Scythia preached on Romanian soil, giving the Romanian Church an apostolic origin. The Romanian Orthodox Church keeps November 30 as the feast of Saint Andrew, and the day is observed as a national holiday in Romania. As with the Kievan claim, the modern source-criticism notes that the specific localization rests on the elastic ancient term “Scythia” rather than on early documentation of the apostle in that exact region (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, NPNF II/1; Dvornik 1958), even as the veneration is firmly established.

Georgia and the Caucasus

The Georgian Church likewise counts Andrew among the first apostles to reach its land, and the tradition forms part of a broader Georgian apostolic self-understanding that runs alongside the foundational mission of St. Nina, the Equal-to-the-Apostles who is venerated as the enlightener of Georgia in the fourth century. The Andrew tradition supplies the earlier, apostolic-age stratum of that self-understanding, the claim that the country was visited by one of the Twelve before its later conversion. The Georgian reception and its sources are treated in full at Andrew in Georgia and the Caucasus.

Scotland and the West

Andrew’s reach extends well beyond the Orthodox world. He is the patron saint of Scotland, where his emblem, the diagonal white cross on a blue field — the saltire of Andrew, who by a Western tradition was crucified on an X-shaped cross — became the national flag, and where the town and university of St Andrews preserve in their name the medieval cult centered on relics said to have been brought there. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes the breadth of his patronage, which in the West includes Scotland among other places and causes, and records that he is widely held to have been martyred on the crux decussata, the cross in the form of an X with which his iconography is associated (Cross and Livingstone 2005, s.v. “Andrew, St.”). The same apostle thus stands as patron over a span reaching from the Phanar to Edinburgh.

The Modern Scholarship

The modern critical study of Andrew rests on three works of the twentieth century. The foundational study is Dvornik’s The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Harvard, 1958), which traced the apostolic-foundation tradition through all its sources and argued for its medieval Byzantine formation. In the same year Peter M. Peterson published Andrew, Brother of Simon Peter: His History and His Legends (Brill, 1958), a survey of the textual and legendary tradition. The apocryphal Acts that supply much of the later biography were given a critical edition by Jean-Marc Prieur, Acta Andreae, CCSA 5–6 (Brepols, 1989), and were studied by Dennis R. MacDonald in The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (Scholars Press, 1990); both situate the Acts of Andrew in the second–third centuries as a work of apocryphal literature, not as historical witness to the apostle’s career. The cumulative force of this scholarship is to show the lateness of the legends that fixed Andrew’s missions and foundations. Yet in the Orthodox mind the source-criticism and the veneration coexist without contradiction: the saint is honored, and the legends are weighed. In the method of this collection (METHODOLOGY §4), the apostle is venerated while no legend is endorsed as history, and traditions are transmitted pinned to their earliest attestation rather than asserted as fact.

The First-Called in Orthodox Memory Today

What remains, when the legends have been weighed, is an apostle venerated pan-Orthodoxly and across the wider Christian world. Andrew is held in memory as one of the Twelve, the brother of Peter, and the first-called — Prōtoklētos — and these titles, rather than any disputed itinerary, carry his standing. His feast on November 30 is kept throughout the Orthodox Church and is the patronal feast of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the national feast of Romania, and a day of veneration in Russia, Georgia, Greece, and beyond. His iconography shows an elderly apostle, often with the X-shaped cross of his martyrdom. Above all, the figure of “the brother of Peter” has become in modern times a sign of apostolic unity rather than division: as Constantinople’s apostle facing Rome’s, Andrew now presides over the annual exchange of feast-day delegations between the two sees, so that the First-Called, who in the Gospel found his brother and brought him to Christ (John 1:41–42), serves in Orthodox memory as a witness to the apostolic foundation of the Church and to the unity its apostles were called to embody.

See Also

References

  • Francis Dvornik, The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958).
  • Peter M. Peterson, Andrew, Brother of Simon Peter: His History and His Legends (Leiden: Brill, 1958).
  • 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).
  • F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), s.v. “Andrew, St.”
  • Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.1, NPNF II/1.