The Mission

The oldest thing the Church remembered about the Apostle Philip after Pentecost is that he ended his days at Hierapolis in Phrygia — a tradition running back to the second century, preserved by Polycrates of Ephesus and (for the married apostles) Clement of Alexandria, both quoted by Eusebius. This file sets out that early notice, the geography of Phrygia and the Lycus valley, and the careful grading the tradition requires, since the very witnesses who place Philip at Hierapolis are also the source of the confusion with Philip the Evangelist.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Earliest Notice: A Philip at Hierapolis

The New Testament says nothing of Philip’s labors after Pentecost. The earliest surviving notice of his end comes from Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, in a letter to Victor of Rome written about 190 in the course of the Quartodeciman controversy over the date of Pascha. Listing the great lights of Asia who “fell asleep” there, Polycrates names “Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis, and his two aged virgin daughters, and his other daughter, who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests at Ephesus” (Polycrates, in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.31.3, repeated at 5.24.2; trans. NPNF II/1). This is the foundational text for the Hierapolis tradition. It places “Philip, one of the twelve apostles” — the title is explicit — at Hierapolis in Phrygia, asleep there with two of his daughters, a third resting at Ephesus.

Eusebius himself, gathering his notices on the apostles, writes that “Philip the apostle dwelt at Hierapolis with his daughters” (Eusebius, HE 3.39.9; NPNF II/1), and reports that Papias of Hierapolis — bishop of that very city in the early second century — had received traditions from “the daughters of Philip,” including a wonder told in the city (Papias, in Eusebius, HE 3.39.9; see Patristic Reception). That a strong local memory of “Philip and his daughters” was current at Hierapolis already in Papias’s day, within living reach of the apostolic age, is one of the firmest things in the whole tradition.

Clement of Alexandria, again preserved by Eusebius, adds a notice of a different kind: listing apostles who married, he says “Peter and Philip begat children, and Philip also gave his daughters in marriage” (Clement, in Eusebius, HE 3.30.1; NPNF II/1). Clement plainly counts Philip among the apostles and assigns him children.

The Tangle in the Witnesses

The strength of the Hierapolis tradition is matched by a real difficulty, and honesty requires stating it here rather than tucking it away. The witnesses who place Philip at Hierapolis place him there with daughters — and daughters are, in the canonical record, the distinctive mark of Philip the Evangelist, one of the Seven, “which had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy” (Acts 21:9; KJV), not of Philip the Apostle, to whom Scripture assigns none. [Disputed: whether the "Philip" of the Hierapolis tradition is the Apostle Philip (so Polycrates' title "one of the twelve apostles"), Philip the Evangelist of Acts 21 mistaken for an apostle (so the daughters; J. B. Lightfoot, *Colossians and Philemon*, 1875, and many moderns), or a figure in whom the two were already fused by the late second century (R. Bauckham, *Jesus and the Eyewitnesses*, 2006), is genuinely contested; the early sources do not resolve it, and Eusebius reproduces both data without reconciling them.] This conflation is the collection’s central source-critical problem and is handled in full elsewhere (see The Two Philips and The Conflation Problems). For the present file the point is methodological: the Hierapolis tradition is early and strong, but the identity of “its” Philip is not free of doubt, and the tradition must be reported as graded, not asserted as plain fact.

The liturgical tradition of the Church resolves the matter for worship by venerating the Apostle Philip at Hierapolis on November 14, while commemorating Philip the Deacon separately among the Seven (see The Feast and the Fast). The present collection follows that liturgical identification while keeping the historical tangle visible.

The Geography: Phrygia and the Lycus Valley

Hierapolis (“the sacred city”) lay in inland Phrygia, in the province of Asia, on a terrace above the Lycus valley in the southwest of Asia Minor. It sat across the valley from Laodicea and near Colossae — the three cities of the Lycus named together in Paul’s letters (Col 2:1; 4:13, “Laodicea . . . Hierapolis”). The city was famous in antiquity for its hot mineral springs and its travertine terraces — the dazzling white calcite cascades now called Pamukkale (“cotton castle”) — and for the Plutonion, a sanctuary over a vent of toxic volcanic gas sacred to the underworld gods, around which the city’s pagan religion centered. This setting matters: it is the religious landscape — the chthonic cults, the dragon-and-serpent symbolism of the underworld sanctuary — that the later apocryphal Acts of Philip would transform into the apostle’s struggle against a serpent-cult in a city it calls “Ophiorhyme” (see The Acts of Philip). That the Christian memory of Philip at Hierapolis is set against precisely this pagan backdrop is historically apt, whatever the apocrypha made of it (Huttner, Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley, 2013).

That Hierapolis had a Christian community from the apostolic age is independently certain: it is named in Colossians (Col 4:13), and it produced both Papias and, later, the bishop Apolinarius. Into this real and early church the tradition of the apostle’s labor and rest naturally fits.

What Can Be Said

Stripped to its securest core, the tradition affirms: that there was a strong, early, and local memory at Hierapolis of an apostle Philip and his daughters, attested within a century of the apostolic age (Papias, then Polycrates, then Clement, all before Eusebius gathered them); that the Church has venerated the Apostle Philip as the evangelizer and martyr of Hierapolis; and that the city’s real history — an early Christian community in a center of pagan underworld religion — is a fitting frame for that memory. What cannot be said with the same confidence is that the “Philip” of the daughters was certainly the apostle rather than the evangelist, or a blend of both; that uncertainty is part of the record. The fuller narrative of the mission — the companions Bartholomew and Mariamne, the struggle with the dragon-cult, the manner of the death — comes from later and graded sources, chiefly the Acts of Philip, and is taken up in the next files (see The Companions and Section 05).

See Also

References

  • Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.30, 3.31, 3.39, 5.24. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Clement on the married apostles; Polycrates on Philip at Hierapolis; Papias and the daughters of Philip.)
  • The Holy Bible, Authorized (King James) Version. (Col 2:1; 4:13; Acts 21:9.)
  • Lightfoot, J. B. Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon. London: Macmillan, 1875. (Hierapolis, the Lycus valley, and the two Philips.)
  • Huttner, Ulrich. Early Christianity in the Lycus Valley. Leiden: Brill, 2013. (Hierapolis, the Plutonion, Papias, and the Philip tradition.)
  • Bauckham, Richard. Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006. (Papias, Polycrates, and the daughters of Philip.)