Nathanael the Apostle

Nathanael is commemorated on April 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 5), the day of the remembrance of his calling. The commemoration is a bare synaxarion notice with its two verses: the day belongs liturgically to Theodore the Sykeote, who has the full office, and Nathanael has neither proper stichera nor kontakion.

The Slavonic and Russian books keep him on this day in company with two apostles of the Seventy — "Nathanael, Luke and Clement" — that is, with Lucius and Clement, whose joint feast with Apelles falls on September 10; and the Latin Roman Martyrology, interestingly, keeps the same apostolic pair on April 22 without Nathanael, commemorating "at Smyrna, the holy Apostles Apelles and Lucius." Where the Slavic gloss identifies Nathanael with Bartholomew, some editions of the Russian calendar consequently list him on this day as Bartholomew (Nathanael).

Beyond his own day, the scene of his calling is read every year in the hearing of the whole Church: John 1:43–51, the pericope of Philip and Nathanael, is the Gospel of the First Sunday of Great Lent, the Sunday of Orthodoxy — where the promise "thou shalt see greater things" and the opened heaven are applied to the restoration of the holy icons — and it is read again on the feast of the Apostle Philip (November 14).

Nathanael has no independent iconographic type, and that absence is itself a witness to the identity question: the painters knew him either as Bartholomew among the Twelve — a dark-haired, curly-bearded apostle of middle age holding a scroll or the Gospel, standing in the apostle tier of an iconostasis and in the Deesis — or as Simon the Zealot, an elder apostle with a high forehead and a long grey beard. Where he is named Nathanael in his own right it is almost always in a narrative scene: the calling under the fig tree, in illustrated Gospel books and in the Lenten cycle of the Sunday of Orthodoxy, where Christ stands with Philip while Nathanael comes from beneath the tree; or among the seven disciples in the scene of the draught of fishes at the Sea of Tiberias, with the fire and the fish on the shore.

No pre-1900 image inscribed Nathanael has been identified for this collection. An icon of Bartholomew or of Simon the Zealot would be available, but storing one here would silently settle the identity question that the entry deliberately leaves open, and so none is stored.

The identity of Nathanael is one of the oldest open questions of apostolic history, and the liturgical books of the Orthodox Church do not answer it with one voice.

• Nathanael = Bartholomew. This is the majority view of Western tradition and of modern commentary. Its grounds are that "Bartholomew" is a patronymic and not a personal name — bar-Tolmai, "son of Tolmai" — so that the man could well be called Nathanael bar-Tolmai; that the Synoptic lists always pair Philip and Bartholomew together, exactly as John pairs Philip and Nathanael; and that the Synoptics never mention Nathanael while John never mentions Bartholomew. Against it stands the lateness of the identification: the earliest known witness anywhere is the East Syrian commentator Ishodad of Merv (c. 850), and the earliest in the West is Rupert of Deutz (d. 1129). The Slavonic and Russian calendars follow it, printing the April 22 entry as "the Apostles of the Seventy Bartholomew (Nathanael), Luke and Clement."
• Nathanael = Simon the Zealot. This is what the Greek Menaion actually says: "the memory of the holy Apostle Nathanael, who is Simon the Zealot — that is, the remembrance of his coming to know Christ" (Ναθαναήλ, ὃς ἐστι Σίμων ὁ Ζηλωτής). The Greek synaxaristes accordingly cross-reference his principal feast to May 10, the day of Simon the Zealot, and give him Simon's missionary geography. The connection of Cana with Simon "the Canaanite" — a name which in fact renders the Aramaic for zealot, not the place — helped the identification along.
• Nathanael as none of the Twelve. Augustine suspected that Nathanael was not of the Twelve at all, precisely because he was so learned in the Law that the Lord would not have chosen him among the unlettered; the second-century Epistula Apostolorum is the earliest text to place him among the Twelve, and there he stands in the position of, or in place of, James the son of Alphaeus.
• What is kept on April 22. The Byzantine notice is unusually explicit that this day is not a death-day: it is the ἀνάμνησις τῆς πρὸς τὸν Χριστὸν αὐτοῦ γνωρίσεως, the remembrance of his being made known to Christ. That is why the day carries no passion, no relics, and no propers, and why it can stand in the calendar without prejudice to whatever feast the same apostle keeps under his other name.
• Forward dedup obligation. Simon the Zealot (May 10) now has his own entry in this collection, which cross-references this one and likewise leaves the identification open in both directions; neither file adopts the Menaion's equation and neither rejects it. Bartholomew the Apostle (June 11; August 25, translation of relics) has now been authored and likewise cross-references this entry and leaves the identification open: his file sets out the case for Bartholomew = Nathanael in its own Disputed questions, does not enter April 22 among his feasts, and states that no merge should be made silently. The three entries — Nathanael here, Bartholomew at June 11, Simon at May 10 — therefore stand separately, each noting the others, which is the deliberate reflection of the Church's own divided books. If a future editor judges the Bartholomew identification certain, the two files should be merged under Bartholomew with April 22 added as a feast of the calling; if the question is left open — as it is left open here — the separate entries stand. No merge should be made silently in either direction.