Patristic Reception

Bartholomew left no writing, and the Fathers say little of him directly; what they preserve is chiefly the missionary and martyrdom traditions and his place in the apostle-lists. This file gathers the patristic notices — Eusebius and Jerome on the mission, the reading of the apostle-lists in Chrysostom and others, the absence of any genuine writing, and the hymnographic reception in the Byzantine office.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

An Apostle Without a Writing

Among the Twelve, some left writings or had writings ascribed to them in the canon — Matthew the Gospel that bears his name, Peter and John their epistles. Bartholomew left none. He is, in the patristic record, an apostle known by name and by tradition rather than by any word of his own; the apocryphal “Gospel of Bartholomew” was rejected by the Fathers as outside the canon (see The Bartholomew Apocrypha). This silence shaped the patristic reception: the Fathers received him as one of the Twelve and as a missionary-martyr, and reflected on his place in the apostolic college, but had no corpus of his teaching to expound.

Eusebius and Jerome on the Mission

The principal patristic notice of Bartholomew is the missionary report in Eusebius of Caesarea. In the Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius records the dispersal of the apostles to the nations (HE 3.1, citing Origen) and, more particularly, the tradition that the missionary Pantaenus found in “India” a Hebrew copy of the Gospel of Matthew left there by the Apostle Bartholomew, who had preached to the people before him (HE 5.10; trans. NPNF II/1). This is the earliest concrete patristic attestation of a Bartholomew mission, and it became the seed of the whole “India” tradition (see The Missions).

Jerome repeats and confirms the notice in his On Illustrious Men, in the entry on Pantaenus: Pantaenus was sent to India and found that Bartholomew, one of the Twelve, had preached the coming of the Lord Jesus there according to the Gospel of Matthew, which he had left written in Hebrew letters (Jerome, On Illustrious Men 36; trans. NPNF II/3). Jerome elsewhere knows of the rejected apocryphal “Gospel of Bartholomew” (Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, prologue), which he lists among the gospels the Church does not receive. The patristic mission-notice, then, is essentially this single Eusebian tradition, transmitted and amplified by Jerome.

The Apostle-Lists in the Fathers

The Fathers who commented on the Gospels naturally treated the apostle-lists in which Bartholomew appears. St. John Chrysostom, preaching on Matthew and on John, dwells more on Nathanael — the guileless Israelite of John 1 — than on the bare name Bartholomew, and his homilies on John 20–21 are among the richest patristic meditations on the calling and confession of the apostle under that name (Chrysostom, Homilies on John 20–21; trans. NPNF I/14; see Under the Fig Tree and The Call and the Confession). That the patristic reflection on this apostle is largely reflection on Nathanael is itself a sign of how thoroughly the identification was received: the Fathers found their material in the Johannine episodes, since the Synoptic Bartholomew gave them only a name.

The Hymnographic Reception

The fullest reception of the apostle in the Christian East is liturgical rather than expository. The Byzantine hymnographers gave Bartholomew his place in the office of the Twelve and in his proper office on June 11 (see The Feasts), celebrating him as one of the apostles who “drew the nations into the net of the Gospel,” as the guileless confessor of Christ, and as a martyr. The hymnography weaves together the strands of his tradition — the Johannine guilelessness, the apostolic mission, the martyr’s death — into the Church’s prayer, so that the apostle is known to the Orthodox faithful chiefly through the texts sung on his feast. In this the liturgical reception completes the patristic: where the Fathers’ direct notices are few, the Church’s hymns supply a sustained and devotional commemoration.

The Dionysian Tribute

One patristic text stands apart for giving Bartholomew not a notice but a thought. The author writing as Dionysius the Areopagite, in The Mystical Theology, invokes “the divine Bartholomew” for a saying about the nature of theology — that it is at once ample and minute, vast and yet contracted to a point (Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology 1.3). This is the single most influential patristic mention of the apostle, and it gave Bartholomew a permanent place in the history of Christian mystical theology; it is treated in full in the companion file (see Dionysius on Bartholomew).

Summary of the Patristic Witness

The patristic reception of Bartholomew may be summed up as follows: a missionary tradition resting essentially on Eusebius and Jerome (the “India” mission and the Hebrew Matthew); a rich reflection on the apostle as Nathanael in Chrysostom and the Johannine commentators; the rejection of the apocryphal “Gospel of Bartholomew” by Jerome and the Gelasian Decree; a single luminous saying ascribed to him by Pseudo-Dionysius; and a sustained hymnographic veneration in the Byzantine office. The Fathers, in short, received Bartholomew as a genuine apostle of the Lord, honored his mission and martyrdom, and read his spiritual portrait in the guileless Nathanael — while keeping the apocryphal literature that bore his name firmly outside the canon.

See Also

References

  • Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History (3.1; 5.10). Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890.
  • Jerome. On Illustrious Men 36; Commentary on Matthew, prologue. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 3 (for On Illustrious Men).
  • John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of St. John 20–21. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 14.
  • Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. The Mystical Theology 1.3. Trans. Luibheid and Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. New York: Paulist Press, 1987.