Bartholomew the Apostle

The name, and the silence of the Gospels

Bartholomew stands in all four apostolic catalogues — Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:14 and Acts 1:13 — and in three of the four he is coupled directly with Philip; in Acts, where the pairing is broken, he still follows immediately after Thomas and Philip in the same block of names. Nowhere does he speak. No miracle, no question, no rebuke, no confession is recorded of him. He is present at the Ascension and in the upper room with the eleven, "continuing with one accord in prayer and supplication" (Acts 1:13–14), and so he received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost with the rest; and with that the New Testament has finished with him.

Even the name he is called by is not a personal name. Βαρθολομαῖος is the Greek for the Aramaic בַּר־תַּלְמַי, bar-Tolmai — "son of Tolmai" or "son of Talmai," a patronymic of exactly the same form as bar-Jonah (Peter) and bar-Timaeus (the blind man of Jericho). Talmai is a name known from the Old Testament, borne by the king of Geshur whose daughter Maacah bore Absalom to David (2 Samuel 3:3). A man designated by his father's name in the apostolic lists will very probably have had a given name of his own; and it is that grammatical fact, more than anything else, which has kept the identification with Nathanael alive for a thousand years (see Disputed questions).

With Philip in Syria and Asia Minor: Hierapolis

The Byzantine synaxaria begin his history where Scripture leaves off. After Pentecost, when the apostles divided the world among them by lot, Syria and the parts of Asia fell to Bartholomew together with Philip, and the two set out in company with Philip's sister, the virgin Mariamne, who travelled with them and shared their labours. The account is candid about what the mission cost: they were driven from city to city, stoned, and more than once shut up in prison.

At Hierapolis in Phrygia — the city of the hot springs, where a great serpent was kept and worshipped as a god in its temple — the apostles' prayers killed the beast and emptied the sanctuary. Healings followed in numbers, and among them the most consequential: a blind man named Stachys, forty years sightless, received his sight, was baptised, and opened his house to the apostles, from which the preaching spread through the whole city. The prefect, urged on by the pagan priests, arrested all three.

Then came the passion of Philip. Both apostles were condemned; Philip was crucified head downward, and Bartholomew was fixed to the wall of the temple. As the sentence was carried out an earthquake opened the ground and swallowed the prefect and the priests of the serpent, and the terrified people ran to take the apostles down. Bartholomew was released alive; Philip died upon his cross, and it is at Hierapolis that his tomb was shown. Before leaving, Bartholomew ordained Stachys bishop of the city, and went on with Mariamne — who afterwards preached in Lycaonia and reposed there — into the further east. Philip's own entry, and Mariamne's, are kept at their own feasts: see Philip the Apostle (November 14) and Mariamne (February 17).

India and the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew

From Asia Minor the tradition sends Bartholomew to India — and here, uniquely among the extra-scriptural traditions of the Twelve, there is a witness of the second century. Eusebius of Caesarea relates (Ecclesiastical History V.10) that Pantaenus, the head of the catechetical school of Alexandria and the teacher of Clement, went as a missionary "to the Indians" and found there Christians already, who possessed the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew letters, left with them by Bartholomew, one of the apostles, and preserved to that day; Pantaenus is said to have brought the book back to Alexandria. Jerome repeats the story in De viris illustribus. Whatever "India" meant to an Alexandrian of the second century — and Greek geographers used the word loosely, sometimes of Ethiopia, sometimes of southern Arabia (Arabia Felix), and sometimes of India proper — the notice is early, is not hagiographical in form, and attaches to Bartholomew a specific and unglamorous fact: that he carried a written Gospel with him and left it behind. Later Indian tradition localises the mission on the Konkan coast, at the ancient port of Kalyan; the identification is late and unverifiable.

The synaxaria add that in India Bartholomew translated the Gospel of Matthew into the language of the country and left it with the converts — the same tradition seen from the other side.

Greater Armenia

The last and longest stage is Greater Armenia, where Bartholomew's name is not a legend but a foundation. The Armenian Apostolic Church calls itself apostolic precisely because it traces its origin to two of the Twelve: Bartholomew and Jude Thaddaeus, the "first illuminators" of the nation, whose preaching in the first century is the ground of Armenian ecclesiastical independence exactly as Barnabas's is the ground of Cyprus's. Armenian tradition even counts Bartholomew as the second in the succession of its catholicoi-patriarchs.

The Byzantine passion tells the story in the form of a royal conversion. In the city of the Armenian king Polymios (Πολύμιος; in some books Polymius or Poliminos) Bartholomew cast out a demon from the king's daughter, who had been kept bound; the king, his wife, his daughter and his household were baptised, and after them, the account says, ten cities of the region. The idol of the god Astaroth, which had spoken oracles, was silenced and broken. But the pagan priests went to the king's brother Astyages (Ἀστυάγης) and persuaded him that the family religion had been overthrown; and Astyages seized the apostle.

Martyrdom at Albanopolis

The place of the martyrdom is given as Albanopolis — Ἀλβανόπολις, in some manuscripts Ourbanopolis or Albanos — a city of Greater Armenia whose location the sources do not agree upon. Later Byzantine and Russian writers identified it with Albanum on the western shore of the Caspian, that is with the region of Baku and Derbend in Caucasian Albania; Armenian tradition places it at Albac in the province of Vaspurakan, in the mountains south of Lake Van near modern Başkale, where the great monastery of Surb Bartoghimeos — St Bartholomew — stood over the reputed tomb until it was destroyed in the calamities of 1915.

The manner of his death is transmitted in a compound form which the Church's books repeat without harmonising: he was crucified head downward, flayed alive — the skin stripped from his living body — and beheaded. The Greek synaxarion's verses for the day fix on the cross ("on the eleventh they crucified stout-hearted Bartholomew"), the Latin passions and the whole of Western art on the flaying, and both together are recited in the Byzantine notice. Western scholarship long ago observed that the three modes are more probably three traditions than three stages of one execution, and that a further and quite separate strand has him beaten, put in a sack and drowned. What is common to all of them is a death by the sentence of a king's brother in a country far from Jerusalem.

Relics and translations

No apostle's relics have travelled so publicly or been claimed by so many churches.

The Christians of Albanopolis buried the body, and it lay in the East until — according to the Byzantine notice — the Emperor Anastasius I transferred it, about the year 507, to the newly founded frontier-fortress of Dara in Mesopotamia, which he was building as a bulwark against Persia. When Dara fell to the Persians under Chosroes in 574 the faithful, the account says, cast the leaden coffin into the sea rather than let it be profaned, and it was borne — with the coffins of four other martyrs — to the volcanic island of Lipari off the north coast of Sicily, where the bishop Agathon received it. Lipari became a place of pilgrimage, and the annual return of the relic, ἡ ἐπάνοδος τοῦ λειψάνου, is what the Byzantine calendar keeps on August 25.

In 838 the Saracens sacked Lipari, and Sicard, prince of Benevento, carried the relics away to his own city, where the basilica of San Bartolomeo was raised for them; Benevento has claimed the body ever since. In 983 the Emperor Otto obtained relics from Benevento for Rome, and enshrined them in the church built on the Tiber island, San Bartolomeo all'Isola, which claims the body likewise; the rival claims of Benevento and Rome have never been reconciled, and the Liparitan tradition holds that a portion was left behind on the island. An arm was given by Queen Emma to Canterbury in the eleventh century, and a relic of the skull is venerated at the cathedral of Frankfurt, which bears the apostle's name. The Armenians venerate his relics in their own churches, and Constantinople in the middle Byzantine period possessed relics of him among the apostolic treasures of the imperial city.

Veneration and later cultus

Bartholomew's veneration is universal and very old, but it has two distinct centres of gravity. In the East he is one of the Twelve, honoured on June 11 with Barnabas and again in the Synaxis of the Twelve on June 30, and in Armenia he is a national founder. In the West, where his feast is August 24, the flaying made him the patron of every trade that works in skins — tanners, leatherworkers, glovers, bookbinders, and by a grim extension butchers and surgeons — and gave rise to a devotional literature of its own. That Western concentration on the flaying also produced the single most famous image of him, Michelangelo's in the Sistine Last Judgement, where the apostle holds up his own flayed skin.

Among the churches dedicated to him, the Tiber-island basilica at Rome and the Benevento basilica are the chief Western shrines; in the East, the Armenian monastery of Albac was the principal one until 1915, and Cyprus, Greece and Georgia have numerous parish dedications.

Hymnographic and literary legacy

Two apocryphal works travel under his name. The Questions of Bartholomew (also called the Gospel of Bartholomew), surviving in Greek, Latin and Slavonic, is a revelation dialogue in which the risen Christ answers the apostle's questions about the descent into Hades, the creation of Adam, and the fall of the angels; it is a text of the third to fifth century and was known to Jerome and condemned in the Decretum Gelasianum. A separate and later Martyrdom of Bartholomew supplies the Armenian narrative of Polymios and Astyages in its developed form. Neither is scriptural, and the Church has never read them; but the Questions is a significant witness to early Christian imagination, and the Martyrdom is the immediate source of the synaxarion account.

For the liturgical texts of his own day, the Byzantine books gave him something rarer than a common: a proper kontakion with its oikos, quoted below, which names him alone even though the day is shared with Barnabas — one small sign of the rank he holds as one of the Twelve.