Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles

  On June 30, the day after the great feast of the Chief Apostles, the Church keeps the Synaxis of the Holy, Glorious and All-praised Twelve Apostles — the common assembly of that company which the Lord "ordained twelve, that they should be with him, and that he might send them forth to preach" (Mark 3:14). Each of the Twelve has his own day somewhere in the year, and several have two or three; but the tradition, unwilling that any one of them should seem to be honoured above his brethren, gathered them all into a single festival and set it immediately after the feast of Peter and Paul, so that the day which crowns the Apostles' Fast opens at once upon the whole apostolic choir. The feast is ancient — the ordinances behind it are traced to the fourth century, and it is bound up with the great Church of the Holy Apostles raised by Constantine at his new capital and rebuilt by Justinian, where the emperors were buried among cenotaphs of the Twelve. The roll of this day is the roll of the Gospel lists: Peter and Andrew, the two sons of Zebedee, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew, James of Alphaeus, Jude Thaddaeus and Simon the Zealot — with Matthias, chosen by lot into the place "from which Judas by transgression fell" (Acts 1:25), and with Paul, who was not of the Twelve and is yet never separated from them.

• Andrew the First-Called

  Andrew the First-Called (first century) was a fisherman of Bethsaida, the brother of Simon Peter, and — as a disciple of John the Baptist who heard him name Christ "the Lamb of God" — the first of the apostles to follow the Lord, whence his ancient title Prōtoklētos, "the First-Called." Having found the Messiah, he at once brought his brother Peter to Christ. After Pentecost the tradition sends him to preach around the Black Sea — through Asia Minor, Thrace, Scythia, and the lands of the Rus', where he is said to have blessed the hills of Kiev — and above all to Byzantium, where he ordained Stachys its first bishop, so that the Church of Constantinople venerates him as its founder. He was crucified on an X-shaped cross at Patras in Achaia and is commemorated on November 30, and among the Twelve on June 30.

• Bartholomew the Apostle

  Bartholomew is one of the Twelve, named in every apostolic list of the New Testament and in every one of them beside Philip, and yet given no word and no deed in the Gospels — his whole scriptural biography is a patronymic, bar-Tolmai, "son of Tolmai." What the tradition supplies is one of the widest missions ascribed to any apostle: with Philip and his sister Mariamne in Asia Minor and at Hierapolis in Phrygia; then in India, where Eusebius and Jerome report that a copy of the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew letters was found still surviving in the second century, left there by Bartholomew; and finally in Greater Armenia, where he and Jude Thaddaeus are honoured as the first enlighteners of the nation. At Albanopolis he was, by the Byzantine account, flayed alive, crucified head-downward and beheaded. His relics travelled further than he did — Dara in Mesopotamia, the island of Lipari, Benevento, and the church on the Tiber island at Rome — and his second feast on August 25 keeps their return. Whether he is the same man as Nathanael of the Fourth Gospel the liturgical books of the Orthodox Church do not agree, and this entry does not settle it.

• Dinar of Hereti

  Dinar (Dinara) was the tenth-century queen of Hereti, the principality of south-eastern Georgia on the Alazani between Kakheti and the Caucasian Albanian lands, who with her son Ishkhanik brought her people out of the Monophysite confession that had spread through the eastern Transcaucasus and into communion with the Chalcedonian Orthodox Church of Georgia. That is the substance of her sanctity, and it is recorded in the Georgian chronicle Kartlis Tskhovreba, "the Life of Kartli." Her name travelled far beyond Georgia: a Russian Tale of Queen Dinara, current from the fifteenth century, made her the heroine of a war against a Persian shah, and her figure — a queen on a white horse, victorious — was painted in the throne-hall of the Moscow Kremlin, where it may still be seen. Because the Russian tale is romance rather than chronicle, her identity was long disputed in the Russian Church, many taking her for Tamar the Great; the Georgian sources settle it on the queen of Hereti. She is commemorated on June 30.

• Gelasius of Rimet

  Gelasius of Rimet (Râmeț) is the fourteenth-century abbot and hierarch whose name is cut into the wall of a small stone church in the Trascău mountains of Transylvania — an inscription of 2 July 1377 which names "the archbishop Ghelasie" and the painter Mihul of the Alb Criş, and which is among the oldest dated records of an Orthodox hierarchy in Transylvania. Around him, in the gorge of the Rimet stream in what is now Alba county, lived a colony of hermits to whom he was spiritual father, visiting them in the Fasts; he ate only on Saturdays and Sundays, kept the nights in prayer, healed the sick and cast out demons, and, tradition says, a spring of water rose at his prayer. His skull is kept for veneration in the church of Rimet monastery. The Romanian Orthodox Church glorified him on 20 June 1992 and proclaimed his sanctity at Rimet on 30 June of that year, which is his feast.

• James son of Alphaeus

  James the son of Alphaeus is one of the Twelve Apostles, named in all four New Testament lists of the Twelve and otherwise nowhere singled out in the Gospels — a disciple whose whole biography is his apostleship. The tradition of the Church makes him a brother of the Evangelist Matthew, a preacher of the Gospel with Andrew the First-called in Judea and the cities of the southern coasts and of Syria, and a martyr — most accounts say by crucifixion, the Menologion of Basil II by beating. He is to be distinguished from James the son of Zebedee (April 30) and from James the Brother of the Lord (October 23), with both of whom the naming traditions of East and West have long entangled him. His feast is October 9.

• James the Son of Zebedee

  James the son of Zebedee is one of the Twelve, the elder brother of John the Theologian, and — with his brother and with Peter — one of the three disciples whom the Lord took apart with Him to the raising of the daughter of Jairus, to the Transfiguration on the mountain, and to the agony in Gethsemane. Christ named the two brothers Boanerges, "sons of thunder," and told them they would drink His cup; James drank it first. About the year 44, at Jerusalem, Herod Agrippa I "killed James the brother of John with the sword" (Acts 12:2) — the first of the apostles to be martyred, and the only one whose death the New Testament records. In the Latin West he became Santiago, patron of Spain, whose reputed relics at Compostela made the greatest pilgrimage of medieval Europe; the Eastern synaxaria keep his memory on April 30 on the plain ground of the Acts of the Apostles.

• John the Theologian

  John the Theologian (died at Ephesus early in the second century) is the apostle and evangelist whom the Gospel calls "the disciple whom Jesus loved": son of Zebedee and Salome, one of the Twelve and of the innermost three, the disciple who leaned on the Lord's breast at the Supper, stood alone among the apostles at the Cross, and received the Mother of God as his own mother. He wrote the fourth Gospel, three epistles, and — by the tradition of the Church — the Revelation, composed in exile on Patmos. Alone among the apostles he did not die a violent death; his grave outside Ephesus was found empty, and the Church keeps September 26 as the feast of his "metastasis" — his translation rather than his death. Of all the saints only he, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Symeon the New Theologian bear the title "the Theologian."

• Jude the Apostle

  Jude — called also Thaddaeus and Lebbaeus, and in the Gospel lists simply "Jude of James" — is one of the Twelve, and in the Eastern tradition one of the "brethren of the Lord," a son of Joseph the Betrothed. He speaks once in the Gospels, at the Mystical Supper, where the Evangelist takes care to identify him as "Judas, not Iscariot" (John 14:22); he is the author of the short catholic Epistle of Jude, in which he calls himself not the Lord's brother but "the servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James." After Pentecost he preached in Judea, Samaria, Idumea, Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia, and came at length to Armenia, where about the year 80 he was crucified and shot through with arrows near Mount Ararat. He is not to be confused with Thaddaeus of the Seventy (August 21), the apostle of Edessa, with whom the tradition has conflated him since antiquity.

• Matthew the Evangelist

  Matthew the Evangelist — called Levi in two of the Gospels — was the tax-collector of Capernaum whom Christ summoned from the toll-booth with the single word "Follow me," and who rose, left his money-table, and became one of the Twelve Apostles. He is the author of the first of the four Gospels, the "Jewish" Gospel written for Hebrew Christians, which opens with the genealogy of Christ "the son of David, the son of Abraham," threads the whole story on citations of the prophets fulfilled, and gathers the Lord's teaching into five great discourses beginning with the Sermon on the Mount. In the symbolism of the four living creatures he is the man — the winged man or angel — for his Gospel begins with Christ's human descent. The tradition sends him to preach in Syria, Persia, Parthia, and above all Ethiopia, where the legend of King Fulvian and the fire that would not burn him is told of his martyrdom; other strands record a peaceful repose. His relics rest at Salerno in Italy. His feast is November 16, and he is honoured again with his fellows in the Synaxis of the Twelve on June 30. He is not to be confused with Matthias, the apostle chosen by lot to replace Judas (August 9).

• Matthias the Apostle

  Matthias is the one member of the Twelve who was not called by the Lord in Galilee but chosen by lot in the ten days between the Ascension and Pentecost, when Peter stood up among the hundred and twenty and proposed that the place forfeited by Judas be filled (Acts 1:15–26). Already a disciple who had followed Christ "from the baptism of John" and numbered among the Seventy, he was set beside Joseph Barsabbas called Justus; the lot fell on him, "and he was numbered with the eleven apostles." The tradition sends him to preach in Judaea and then in Ethiopia — which the synaxaria locate on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, in Colchis — where he endured great hardship and was at last put to death, about the year 63. He is commemorated on August 9, and again with the whole college on the Synaxis of the Twelve, June 30.

• Peter the Apostle

  Peter — Simon bar Jonah, the fisherman of Bethsaida whom Christ renamed Cephas, "rock" — is the first-named of the Twelve, the prōtokoryphaios or "chief" of the apostolic choir, the confessor of Caesarea Philippi and the shepherd of the Lord's sheep. His life holds together the two poles of Christian experience with unusual frankness: the man who walked on water and sank, who confessed the Christ and was called Satan in the same chapter, who swore he would die with his Master and denied him three times before a servant girl, and who was restored beside the same charcoal fire by a threefold "Lovest thou me?" After Pentecost he preached the first Christian sermon, opened the door of the Church to the Gentiles in the house of Cornelius, was by ancient tradition the first to sit in the see of Antioch, and ended at Rome under Nero, crucified — at his own asking, so the tradition runs — with his head downward, about the year 67. The Church keeps his memory on June 29 together with Paul, and his witness is confessed daily in the Creed's "one holy, catholic and apostolic Church."

• Peter, Tsarevich of the Horde

  Peter of Rostov was a prince of the Golden Horde, nephew of Berke Khan (Bergai), who came to Christ through the preaching of Bishop Cyril of Rostov in the years when the Russian principalities lay under Tatar tribute, left the Horde for Rostov, was baptised there, and lived out a long life on the shore of Lake Nero as a landholder, a husband and father, and at the last a monk. The account of his conversion turns on two events: the healing of Berke's son at Bishop Cyril's prayers, and a vision of the Apostles Peter and Paul, who directed him to buy land beside the lake and build a church in their name — the monastery that bore his name for six centuries afterwards. He reposed in 1290, having received the monastic tonsure shortly before, and is a rare and pointed figure in the Russian calendar: a saint drawn out of the conquering horde itself, and venerated by the conquered.

• Philip the Apostle

  Philip, of the city of Bethsaida in Galilee, is one of the Twelve Apostles — the third called by Christ, who found him the day after Andrew and Peter and said to him simply, "Follow me" (John 1:43). It was Philip who then found Nathanael and answered his doubt with the words that have become the watchword of Christian enquiry, "Come and see." The Fourth Gospel gives him three further scenes found nowhere else: the feeding of the five thousand, where Christ tests him; the Greeks at the Passover who tell him, "Sir, we would see Jesus"; and the request at the Mystical Supper, "Lord, show us the Father," which drew from Christ the revelation, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." After Pentecost the tradition sends him to preach through Asia Minor — in Phrygia, at Hierapolis, with the Apostle Bartholomew and his own sister Mariamne — where he was martyred by crucifixion, hung head downward. He is commemorated on November 14, the eve of the Nativity Fast, and again with the Twelve on June 30. He is to be distinguished from Philip the Deacon, of the Seventy (October 11).

• Simon the Zealot

  Simon the Zealot is the eleventh name in every apostolic list of the New Testament and one of the Twelve of whom the Gospels record nothing but the name. Matthew and Mark call him Σίμων ὁ Καναναῖος, the Cananaean; Luke and Acts call him Σίμων ὁ ζηλωτής, the Zealot — the same epithet, once in Aramaic and once in Greek. Byzantine tradition, reading "Cananaean" as "of Cana in Galilee," made him the bridegroom of the wedding at Cana who, seeing the water made wine, left his own marriage-feast to follow Christ, and derived his surname from the burning zeal with which he afterwards preached. The Greek synaxaria send him through Egypt, Cyrene, Libya and Mauretania and at last to Britain, where idolaters crucified him; the Latin books martyr him in Persia with Jude, sawn asunder; and the Abkhazians keep his grave on the Black Sea coast at Nikopsia. His feast is May 10, and he is numbered again in the Synaxis of the Twelve on June 30.

• Sophronius of Irkutsk

  Sophronius, Bishop of Irkutsk and Nerchinsk — in the liturgical style "of Irkutsk and all Siberia" — was one of the great missionary hierarchs of the eighteenth-century Russian Church, a Ukrainian monk of the Poltava country who was sent in 1753 to a diocese the size of a continent and governed it for seventeen years, founding its seminary, ordaining and disciplining a scattered and half-trained clergy, and travelling to Nerchinsk, Kirensk and Yakutsk. He reposed on 30 March 1771, in Bright Week; and because the Holy Synod took six months to decide where he should be buried, his body lay unburied through a Siberian summer and was found undecayed — the beginning of a veneration that examinations in 1833, 1854, 1870 and 1909 did nothing to check. A fire in the Theophany Cathedral at Irkutsk on 18 April 1917 consumed the shrine and left only his bones; a year later the Local Council of the Russian Church glorified him, and the glorification was solemnly completed on 30 June 1918, which is the day this collection keeps as the second of his feasts.

• Thomas the Apostle

  Thomas the Apostle, called Didymus, "the Twin," is the apostle of the great doubt and the greater confession: absent when the risen Lord first appeared to the Twelve, he refused to believe without touching the wounds, and eight days later, invited to do so, uttered the highest confession of Christ in all the Gospels — "My Lord and my God." The tradition of the Church sends him east after Pentecost, to Parthia and India, where he preached, founded churches, and was slain with spears at Mylapore about the year 72; the Christians of the Malabar coast bear his name — "St Thomas Christians" — to this day. His chief feast is October 6, he is commemorated with his brethren on June 30, and the whole Church relives his doubt and confession each year on Thomas Sunday, the first Sunday after Pascha.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Eurgain, foundress of Cor-Eurgain in Wales, later called Llantwit (6th C)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings