St. Andrew, apostle (November 30th)

There are a relatively small number of saints on the Liturgical Calender this week.  They include:

Nov. 25th -- Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr

Nov. 30th -- Saint Andrew, Apostle

Given that Saint Andrew is remembered in the Gospels as being St. Peter’s brother, I’ve chosen to write about St. Andrew this week.

St. Peter, is remembered as having a special place among the Jesus’ apostles.  (1) He was among the first apostles to be called by Jesus, (2) he  is remembered as having been specially blessed by Jesus after answering Jesus’ question: “Who do you think that I am” (Jesus promises to build his Church upon him); finally, (3) St. Peter is remembered as having been martyred in Rome.  He along with St. Paul thus became the Patron Saints of the Church of Rome, which then was also the Capital of the Roman Empire, and to the Early Church, the Center of the World.

St. Andrew, despite being St. Peter’s brother – in the Synoptic Gospels remembered as being with the future St. Peter when the two along with the future Saints James and John were called by Jesus, and in John’s Gospel presented as the one who as already a disciple of John the Baptist, actually presented Jesus to the future St. Peter – fades in importance in the Gospels by their end:  

While the Gospels recall Jesus taking the future Saints Peter,  James and John (the sons of Zebedee) with him on various special trips: the future St. Andrew was curiously missing, for most of them.  Why?  Honestly, nobody knows.  However, from an experiential point of view, we know that brothers while related are generally “not the same;” that they have different interests and personalities.  It would seem that the future St. Andrew was “less outgoing” / “more of an introvert” than the future Saints Peter,  James and John, preferring to “stay at home” with the other disciples when Jesus took the other three with him on special tasks.

Yet St. Andrew gained a new importance in the 300s, after the Emperor Constantine, already a Christian since 318 AD, first divided the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern halves and then made the city of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, the Capital of the Eastern Half.  

Constantinople as “the second Rome” or Rome’s “brother city” as it were, needed a worthy Patron Saint.  Remember St. Peter (along with St. Paul), came to be Rome’s patron Saint.  So … St. Andrew was “dusted off” and he became the Patron Saint of Constantinople, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Eastern Churches as a whole (the individual Eastern Churches had their own patrons, but St. Andrew became the Patron Saint of the whole Eastern half of Christiandom).  

Indeed, St. Andrew came to be remembered as “the founder” of the Church in Byzantium, installing a disciple of his (St. Stachys) as its Bishop.

How much of this was true, or more to the point, predating Constantine?  

Well in his Third Commentary on the Book of Genesis, the Christian scholar Origen (c. 185-c. 253) places St. Andrew in Scythia, which would be the northern coast of the Black Sea – today’s Romania and Ukraine :

3:24 When the holy apostles and disciples of our Savior were scattered throughout the whole world, Thomas therefore, as we have received tradition from the elders, was allotted Parthia: Andrew, on the other hand, Scythia. John came to Asia, who, having spent a great deal of time in it, died one day at Ephesus. But Peter is supposed to have preached through Pontus, Galatia, Bithynia, Cappadocia, and Asia to the Jews who were in dispersion. When he came to the end of Rome, he was crucified with his head bowed down: for he had prayed that he might be placed on the cross. Now what is there to be said of Paul, who fulfilled the task of preaching the gospel from Jerusalem to Illyria, and was finally martyred in Rome under Nero? (translated from the Latin, from C. Vicentii Dularue, ed, Origenis, Opera Omnia (Paris: J.P. Migne 1862) p. 91 (img. 51))

And the apocryphal Acts of Andrew attributed to a 2nd Century (perhaps) well meaning if certainly inventive Christian writer named Leucius Charinus places the future St. Andrew in Byzantium, later renamed Constantinople:

8 Embarking in a ship he sailed into the Hellespont, on the way to Byzantium. There was a great storm.  Andrew prayed and there was calm. They reached Byzantium. (text from M.R. James-trans. and notes, “The Acts of Andrew,” The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pg 3).

Both Origen and Leucius Charinus predated Constantine by many years.  So there is a pre-Constantinian basis to linking St. Andrew to the region around the future Constantinople.  

And then all sort of other legends about St. Andrew were born.

Later, Russian hagiographers had him travelling up the Dnieper River, preaching by where Kyiv (Ukraine’s capital) exists today and even up to Novgorod (the 9th century capital of an early incarnation of what became Russia).  

Even if  St. Andrew’s “slavic adventures” were true (and it’s doubtful), then they were certainly unsuccessful as the first successful Evangelizing mission to the Slavs was that of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the 9th Century some 800 years after St. Andrew walked this earth.  The Cyrillic alphabet which the East Slavic and many of the South Slavic nations use to this day, was attributed to St. Cyril and the mission of Sts. Cyril and Methodius.

And yet the attention given to St. Andrew by Eastern Orthodox writers in later centuries testifies to the importance that he came to have for Eastern Christendom.

Finally, there’s also the pious tradition regarding St. Andrew’s martyrdom. By ancient if pious tradition St. Peter, chose to be crucified upside down so as “not to die in exactly the same manner as Jesus did.”  There is an analogous tradition that St. Andrew chose to be crucified on a diagonal cross for the same reason.  St. Andrew’s diagonal cross came to be important in both Russia and … Scotland which apparently received a number of relics of St. Andrew from Constantinople during the Middle Ages.

So St. Andrew, who seemed to have had a relatively quiet life as an Apostle in the Gospels after his initial call, came to have a far greater importance in the centuries that followed.

In our own lives and our families' stories this is true as well: People and events that did not hold a particularly great importance at the time that they were happening, sometimes come to have a renewed and even far greater importance years or even generations later.  St. Andrew appears to have been or become such a saint.