Patristic Reception

Philip’s place in patristic theology rests less on his deeds than on his questions — above all “Lord, show us the Father” (John 14:8), which became one of the standard occasions for the Fathers to expound the vision of the Father in the Son. This file gathers the patristic reception: the exegesis of John 14:8–9 in Chrysostom, Augustine, Hilary, and Cyril; the use of the text in Trinitarian and Christological argument; the early notices of Philip’s family and end (Clement, Papias); and the way the Fathers read his testing at the feeding.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostle)

The Charter Text: John 14:8–9

The single most important locus of Philip’s patristic reception is the Supper-exchange. Because “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9) joins, in one sentence, the distinction of the Father and the Son and the truth that to see the one is to see the other, the verse became a charter text for orthodox Trinitarian and Christological theology, worked by Father after Father (the exegesis is set out in full in Show Us the Father; here the reception is gathered).

John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on John, treats Philip’s request with sympathy: Philip longed to behold the Father with the eyes, “perhaps having heard the prophets” who beheld God, and the Lord’s gentle reproof — “hast thou not known me, Philip?” — leads him from a fleshly hope of vision to the spiritual truth that in the Son the Father is truly seen, without division and without confusion of Persons (Chrysostom, Homilies on John 74–75; NPNF I/14). For Chrysostom the verse establishes the consubstantial equality of the Son: only one equal to the Father could be His seeing.

Augustine of Hippo, in Tractate 70 on John, presses the verse against both errors at once. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” shows the equality of Son and Father — “they are not two Gods, but one God” — while “I am in the Father, and the Father in me” preserves their distinction as Persons; Father and Son are “one substance,” not one Person, and Philip is led to see that the Son’s equality with the Father is the very ground on which seeing the Son is seeing the Father (Augustine, Tractates on John 70; NPNF I/7).

Hilary of Poitiers, in On the Trinity, makes John 14:9 a recurring weapon against subordinationism: a creature could not be the vision of the Creator, so the Son in whom the Father is seen must be of the Father’s own nature, true God of true God (Hilary, On the Trinity; NPNF II/9). Cyril of Alexandria, in his Commentary on John, reads the exchange as teaching that the Son is the natural and exact image of the Father, so that the knowledge and vision of the Son is the knowledge and vision of the Father — a text central to Cyril’s Christology of the one incarnate Son (Cyril, Commentary on John, on 14:8–11). Across these Fathers, then, Philip’s question is the occasion of one of the Church’s clearest confessions: the Son is fully God, the visible image of the invisible Father, distinct from Him in Person and one with Him in essence (see Christology and The Holy Trinity).

The Testing at the Feeding

The Fathers also read Philip’s scene at the feeding of the five thousand (John 6:5–7) with care. The Evangelist’s own note that the Lord asked “to prove him: for he himself knew what he would do” (John 6:6) directed the patristic reading: the question was pedagogical, meant to bring Philip to a clearer faith by making him conscious of the impossibility, so that the miracle would teach him the power of God (Chrysostom, Homilies on John 42; NPNF I/14; see Come and See). Philip’s honest arithmetic — “two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient” — is read not as failure but as the realism that the miracle transfigures, the same pattern by which his longing in John 14 became the occasion of the highest Christology.

The Early Notices of Philip’s Family and End

Beyond the Gospel exegesis, the Fathers preserve the earliest historical notices of Philip — the very texts that anchor the Hierapolis tradition and its conflation-problem (see The Mission and The Conflation Problems).

Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Eusebius, names Philip among the apostles who married: “Peter and Philip begat children, and Philip also gave his daughters in marriage” (Clement, in Eusebius, HE 3.30.1; NPNF II/1) — a notice Clement uses to show that some apostles lived in marriage, and that lawful marriage is no bar to the apostolic life. Papias of Hierapolis, the early-second-century bishop, is reported by Eusebius to have received traditions “from the daughters of Philip,” including a wonder told at Hierapolis (a raising of the dead, and Justus Barsabas surviving poison) (Papias, in Eusebius, HE 3.39.9; NPNF II/1). Polycrates of Ephesus names “Philip, one of the twelve apostles,” asleep at Hierapolis with his daughters (Polycrates, in Eusebius, HE 3.31, 5.24). These notices are the patristic bedrock of the Philip tradition — early, local, and (as the conflation-problem shows) not without their tangle.

The Shape of the Reception

The patristic reception of Philip thus has two faces. In theology, Philip is honored above all as the apostle whose question drew out the Lord’s self-disclosure as the image of the Father — a debt the Church acknowledges every time she cites John 14:9 to confess the divinity of the Son and the unity-in-distinction of the Trinity. In history, the Fathers (Clement, Papias, Polycrates, gathered by Eusebius) preserve the earliest memory of Philip’s family and his end at Hierapolis, the seedbed of the whole later tradition. The later hymnography and iconography would draw on both faces — the apostle of the great question and the apostle-martyr of Hierapolis — to shape the Church’s veneration of Philip (see Iconography and Cult).

See Also

• Show Us the Father — the exegesis of John 14:8–9 in detail
• Come and See — the testing at the feeding the Fathers read
• Iconography and Cult — how the reception shaped image and hymn
• The Conflation Problems — the tangle in the early notices
• The Church Fathers — the patristic tradition that received Philip
• Christology — the doctrine the John 14 exegesis serves

References

• John Chrysostom. Homilies on the Gospel of St. John 42, 74–75. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 14. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1889.
• Augustine of Hippo. Tractates on the Gospel of John 70. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 7. 1888.
• Hilary of Poitiers. On the Trinity. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 9. 1899.
• Cyril of Alexandria. Commentary on the Gospel of John. Trans. P. E. Pusey / T. Randell. London, 1874–85. (On John 14:8–11.)
• Eusebius of Caesarea. The Ecclesiastical History 3.30, 3.31, 3.39, 5.24. Trans. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Clement, Papias, Polycrates on Philip.)