Bartholomew

Bartholomew is the clearest case in the twelve of a name that may not belong to a separate person, and the identification is old enough to have hardened into a fact.

He appears in the three synoptic Gospels and in Acts only in the lists of the twelve, always as a bare name, always paired with or adjacent to Philip. Nothing else is recorded of him: no saying, no scene, no action. The name itself is a patronymic rather than a given name, Bar-Tolmai, son of Tolmai, which means the lists are giving us a man identified by his father, and his own name is missing.

John never mentions a Bartholomew. Instead John has Nathanael, brought to Jesus by Philip, who asks whether anything good can come out of Nazareth and is told that Jesus saw him under the fig tree. Nathanael appears again in the closing chapter among a group of disciples fishing, in company otherwise made up of named members of the twelve.

The standard harmonisation, current since at least the ninth century in the West and widely accepted, is that Nathanael is Bartholomew: the synoptics give the patronymic, John gives the personal name, and Philip introduces him in both. It is a reasonable inference. It is not stated anywhere in the texts, no first-millennium writer of the first few centuries makes it, and it rests entirely on the Philip association plus the absence of either name from the other tradition. Some scholars accept it, others treat Nathanael as an unrelated figure or as a representative rather than historical character. Filing them as one person is a decision, and it should be visible as one.

The most striking thing about Bartholomew in Western art is that he is usually holding his own skin. Michelangelo painted him that way in the Sistine Chapel, and the flayed hide, with a face said to be the artist's own, is one of the best-known details in the fresco. Milan cathedral has a sixteenth-century statue of him carrying his skin over his shoulder like a garment.

None of this is in any early source. The flaying enters through late apocryphal acts and the medieval compilations that drew on them, above all the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine in the thirteenth century, which gathered the martyrdom traditions into the form that fixed them for European art. Even there the accounts do not agree: some have him flayed and then beheaded, some crucified, some beaten. The Armenian tradition, which claims him as a founding apostle alongside Thaddaeus, places the death at Albanopolis in Greater Armenia.

The mission fields are similarly various and mutually exclusive. Eusebius, in the early fourth century, reports that the philosopher Pantaenus found in India a Hebrew copy of Matthew said to have been left by Bartholomew, which is the earliest surviving claim about his travels and is itself a report of a report. Other traditions send him to Mesopotamia, Persia, Ethiopia or Lycaonia. These are not variants of one memory; they are separate local claims, each attaching an apostle to a church that wanted one.

The honest position is that nothing is known about what he did or where he died, and that the skin is iconography.