Reception and Legacy

The veneration of the Apostle Bartholomew East and West; his patronages and dedications; the later and entirely unrelated use of his name for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre (1572); and a final honest summary of what the sources allow us to know of the apostle. This file is the summing-up of the collection, gathering the secure, the traditional, and the legendary into one candid account.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Veneration of the Apostle, East and West

Bartholomew is venerated across the whole Christian world. In the Eastern Orthodox Church he is honored among the Twelve, with his feast on June 11, the feast of his relics on August 25, and his place in the Synaxis of the Twelve on June 30 (see The Feasts). In the Armenian Apostolic Church he is a First Illuminator and apostolic founder (see The Armenian Apostolic Tradition). In the Roman Catholic and Western Churches he is venerated with a feast on August 24, his cult fed by the relic-translations to Lipari, Benevento, Rome, and Canterbury (see The Relics and Their Journeys). The apostle thus belongs to the common patrimony of Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Western Christians alike — a unity of veneration that predates and outlasts the divisions of the communions that honor him.

Patronages and Dedications

The apostle’s patronages reflect the strands of his tradition. From the flaying-martyrdom (see The Martyrdom) he became the patron of those who work with skins and hides — tanners, leatherworkers, and curriers — and, by the same grim association, of bookbinders, glovers, and butchers; he is also invoked in connection with diseases of the skin. From the legend of his healing the king’s daughter and overthrowing the demon, he gathered associations with healing, fittingly enshrined on the ancient healing-island of the Tiber at San Bartolomeo all’Isola, the former site of a temple of Asclepius. Churches, hospitals, and institutions bear his name across Christendom — among the best known, the Hospital of St. Bartholomew (“Barts”) in London, founded in 1123 and one of the oldest hospitals in continuous use in the world, and the priory church of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, both in the City of London. The island of Lipari, his first Western shrine, keeps him as patron to this day.

A Necessary Distinction: St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (1572)

Candor requires noting a use of the apostle’s name that has nothing to do with the apostle himself. The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre was the slaughter of French Protestants (Huguenots) that began in Paris on the night of 23–24 August 1572 — the eve and feast of St. Bartholomew in the Western calendar — and spread through France in the following weeks, killing many thousands. The event takes its name only from the calendar-date on which it began; it is a tragedy of the French Wars of Religion, bearing on the apostle nothing beyond the accident of the day. It is mentioned here solely to forestall confusion: the massacre is a notorious episode of sixteenth-century history and has no connection to the life, mission, or veneration of the Apostle Bartholomew, which this collection treats. The apostle’s name was attached to it by the calendar, not by any deed of his.

What the Sources Allow Us to Know

The fitting close of the collection is a candid inventory of the evidence, sorted by security:

  • Secure (canonical): Bartholomew is one of the Twelve Apostles, named in all three Synoptic lists and in Acts, always near Philip (Matt. 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13). On the traditional and probable identification, he is Nathanael of Cana, the guileless Israelite of the Fourth Gospel, who confessed Christ “the Son of God… the King of Israel” (John 1:49) and stood among the resurrection witnesses (John 21:2) — though this identification is an inference, not a statement of Scripture (see The Identification Debate).

  • Early tradition: Eusebius and Jerome attest a mission of Bartholomew to “India,” where Pantaenus is said to have found a Hebrew Matthew the apostle had left (HE 5.10; On Illustrious Men 36) — a real early attestation of a tradition, with “India” loosely meaning the distant south or east.

  • Later and legendary tradition: the missions to Armenia and Phrygia; the confrontation with the idol and the conversion of King Polymius; the flaying-martyrdom at Albanopolis; and the apocryphal Questions and Martyrdom of Bartholomew — all of varying and largely low historical security, derived from apocryphal acta, synaxaria, and the Armenian historiographical tradition (see Assessing the Tradition).

  • Institutional and devotional history (well-attested as such): the relic-translations to Lipari, Benevento (838), Rome, and Canterbury; the cult, feasts, patronages, and iconography (the knife and the carried skin, culminating in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment); and the Dionysian tribute to “the divine Bartholomew” on theology as vast and minute (Mystical Theology 1.3) — these are securely attested as facts of the Church’s veneration, whatever the historicity of the underlying events.

The Final Word

The honest conclusion is that the historical Bartholomew is known to us almost entirely by name and by tradition: a member of the Twelve whom the Lord called and sent, whom tradition identifies with the guileless Nathanael, whose mission and death survive in the elaborations of later and largely legendary sources, and whose veneration — universal, ancient, and undimmed — rests not on the certainty of the legends but on his apostleship and on his Lord’s own word over him. That word remains the surest thing the sources give us, and the fitting last word of the collection: “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile” (John 1:47).

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, King James Version. (Matt. 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13; John 1:47, 49; 21:2.)
  • Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 5.10; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 36. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vols. 1 and 3.
  • Farmer, David Hugh. The Oxford Dictionary of Saints. 5th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. (Entry “Bartholomew”; patronages, dedications, relics.)
  • Diefendorf, Barbara B. Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (The St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572.)