Andrew

Andrew is named in all four Gospel lists of the twelve and in the Acts of the Apostles, always as the brother of Simon Peter and, like him, a fisherman of Bethsaida and Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. Beyond the lists, the Synoptic Gospels say almost nothing of him. It is the Gospel of John that gives him a character.

There he is a disciple of John the Baptist who, hearing his teacher point to Jesus, follows and then fetches his brother, we have found the Messiah, so that in the Johannine account it is Andrew who brings Peter to Jesus, not the reverse. The Greek tradition that calls him Protokletos, the first-called, rests on this passage. John also places him at the feeding of the five thousand, as the disciple who notices the boy with the loaves, and has certain Greeks approach Jesus through him.

The name Andreas is itself Greek, meaning manly, which is unremarkable for a Galilean Jew of the period and tells us only that Greek names circulated in the region. Nothing in the New Testament reports where he went or how he died. Everything on those questions is later tradition, and the traditions do not agree.

The earliest surviving assignment of a mission field to Andrew comes from Origen, quoted by Eusebius, who sends him to Scythia, the lands north of the Black Sea. On that thread a vast later structure was built. Medieval tradition made him the founder of the see of Byzantium, and the Church of Constantinople claimed him as its apostle in conscious parallel to Rome's claim on Peter, a claim with obvious weight in the rivalry between the two churches. From it descends his standing as patron of the Greek and the Russian churches.

His martyrdom belongs to the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, a work of perhaps the later second century, which has him crucified at Patras in Achaea. The detail that his cross was X-shaped, the crux decussata now called the saltire or Saint Andrew's cross, is not in that text. It is a Western elaboration of the Middle Ages, and the diagonal cross became his emblem only then.

Relics said to be his travelled to Constantinople, then to Amalfi and to Scotland, whose national flag carries his saltire and whose patron he is, alongside Greece, Ukraine, Russia, Romania and Cyprus. The historical man behind all of this remains the fisherman of the Gospel lists; the rest is the work the churches did with a name.