Today is November 30, and at least since the tenth century, according to the Menologion and the Typikon of the Great Church of Constantinople, this was the day of the celebration and the remembrance of St. Andrew, the First-called of the Apostles, the brother of the Apostle Peter. And this St. Andrew day is celebrated very solemnly in the Orthodox Church, and it’s very known on this day that you have, for the first time in the pre-Nativity season, the songs sung at vespers and matins calling the people to prepare for the birth of Christ, that the Christ is coming to be born. So liturgically on this day, besides singing about the Apostle Andrew, you have also this call to the faithful to begin to be prepared, to adorn themselves, to celebrate the coming of God in the flesh, the Nativity of Christ, and then his Epiphany on the Jordan.

So St. Andrew is a very important day, and Andrew is a very important saint in the Christian Tradition. And because of a lot of legends and traditions that we’ll see, Andrew is connected with different places. He’s connected with Achaea, which is in Greece, where his martyrdom took place. He’s often connected with Byzantium, and we’ll get into that today. And he’s connected even with Kiev and even the three-barred Slavic cross that’s used by Slavic Orthodox and Greek Catholic Christians. It’s called the cross of St. Andrew, the three-barred cross with the bent footrest; it’s called Andrew’s, we’ll, see because he was crucified on an X-shaped cross, according to tradition. And then in the West even, like Scotland and other places, they have a very strong relationship with the Apostle Andrew. In some sense, he’s a little bit like St. Nicholas, who is known all over the place in the Christian world.

But what we want to see today is—we want to reflect today a little bit more about this St. Andrew, and particularly because of certain developments that took place in Church history, connecting Andrew to the foundation of the patriarchate of Constantinople, because you may know nowadays that in the ecumenical relations between the pope of Rome and the patriarchate of Constantinople, it’s often presented as the Church of St. Peter and then the Church of St. Andrew. Even there’s icons, like when Pope Paul VI met with Patriarch Athenagoras in the 1960s in Jerusalem, for the first time they met over hundreds of years, an icon was painted showing Andrew and Peter embracing each other as the Church of Rome and the Church of Constantinople. So there are some things to reflect about today, to speak about today, to understand better, as well as we can, what happened historically and how St. Andrew got connected to the patriarchate of Constantinople.

But we also want to see his Life, because it’s a very great Life, and I like to do this personally; this is just something I like to do myself, because I personally think that the Life of St. Andrew, especially the account of his martyrdom, is one of the most beautiful hagiographical writings that we have. It’s a very meaningful story of how Andrew dialogues with this proconsul, Roman proconsul—I think you pronounce his name Aegeates or something like that—about Jesus and about the crucifixion. And I’m going to read it to you. I think it’s just a nice thing to read on St. Andrew’s day. So it’s a wonderful Life, but it’s also complicated by further developments by Andrew relative to the patriarchate of Constantinople and even relative to the Church in Kiev and the Slavic Church, so we want to just talk about those things today.

First of all, we want to see in the Gospel, particularly in the gospel of St. John—that’s where you find Andrew coming to Jesus. It’s written in the gospel of St. John, the first chapter, that John the Baptist, who was baptizing in the Jordan, and he saw Jesus Christ coming, and he said about Jesus—well, about the Christ, who will be the Christ—he saw Jesus coming, and he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! Is this he of whom I said: After me comes a man who ranks before me, for he was before me? I myself did not know him,” John the Baptist says, “but for this I came baptizing with water, that he might be revealed to Israel,” there might be an epiphany—that verb, “reveal,” is “epiphany,” and we’re going to see that the epiphany of God in Christ is at his baptism on the Jordan.

So it says that John bore witness: “I saw the Spirit descend as a dove from heaven. It remained on him. I myself did not know him.” It’s the second time John the Baptist says this. “But he who sent me to baptize with water said to me: He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain, this is he who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I have seen and have borne witness, that this is the Son of God.” Then it says, “The next day, John was standing with the two of his disciples, and he looked at Jesus as he was walking and he said, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this and they followed Jesus.” So when John the Baptist points to Jesus and says, “Behold the Lamb of God,” and earlier he will add, “who takes away the sins of the world,” these two disciples who were with John, disciples of John—disciple means a student; John was their teacher—they start following after Jesus.

Jesus turns and he saw them following, and he said to them, “What do you seek?” And they said to him, “Rabbi (which means teacher), where are you staying?” He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day, for it was about the tenth hour. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother.

Then it’s written: “He first found his brother Simon (Simon Peter), and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah!’ which means the Christ,” the Anointed One. “And he,” that is, Andrew, “brought him,” that is, Peter, “to Jesus.” He brought him to Jesus. “Jesus looked at him and he says, ‘You are Simon, the son of John.” Sometimes it’s “the son of Jonah”; it depends: bar John or bar John Jonah. “Then Jesus says to him, ‘You shall be called Cephas (or Kephas), which means Peter.’ ” And of course, in Aramaic means the rock, and petros in Latin means the rock. And then the next day it continues that Jesus decided to go to Galilee; he found Philip from Bethsaida. That’s the very same city as Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel, and so you have this story of the disciples being assembled according to St. John’s gospel.

Now here, of course, the important thing for us is that Andrew is one of the first two to come and he brings Peter, Peter who will become the koriphaeos, Peter who will become the prince, the leader, the head of the apostolic band, is the brother of Andrew. Sometimes it’s said that Andrew is his older brother, sometimes in the hagiographies is called his older brother; I don’t think the gospel says whether he was older or younger. It seems to kind of indicate that he was older, because he went and called the brother. And then you see Andrew throughout the gospels. There’s various places, for example, when they’re feeding the 5,000, it was Andrew who found the boy with the bread. When some Greeks, Hellenists, came, and wanted to see Jesus, they asked Andrew about it.

So we see Andrew, but he’s sometimes considered in the hagiography to be one of the leaders of the Twelve, with Peter, and the other two main ones being James and John. So you have Andrew and Peter, James and John: the two sets of brothers. However, it’s pretty clear in the gospel that the three who were closest to Jesus were Peter and James and John, without Andrew. For example, at the Transfiguration mountain, it is Peter, James, and John who were there. When Jesus raises up Jairus’ daughter, it’s Peter, James, and John who are there; Andrew is not there. But still, he is one of the prominent ones of the apostles and then becomes known, of course, very much by being the one who called Peter, the brother of the foremost apostle and leader of the Twelve, Peter.

Now, after Christ was crucified, raised, and glorified, and the twelve apostles—you had Matthias replacing Judas—become the foundation stones of the new covenanted Church, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, built on the prophets and the apostles, you have an addition to the Twelve: other apostles. And then the Tradition came that there were 70 of them, because in the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke—Jesus chooses 70 or 72, and then sends them out also to preach and to announce the Gospel of the kingdom. I’ll speak a bit later right now about these 70.

But what we want to see from the beginning is that the traditions developed—oral traditions, legends: legends means legenda, which were readings in churches that grew up to edify the faithful, to kind of tell stories about what happened—and these legenda—legends or traditional tellings and stories, acts, sometimes they’re called, Lives they’re called—they’re not historical in any technical sense of the term. Of course, the Scripture itself is not historical in that sense; it’s not written to be history in the modern sense. However, what we have to see especially about these legenda is a lot of them appeared and came out of apocryphal circles. They came out of Christian communities that were really not within the tradition of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church; they were kind of sectarian groups. And there were loads of these kinds of writings. I always point out that if you take the writings about Jesus and the apostles that were written in the first couple of centuries in the Christian era, those that were false and spurious or artificial or made up for various reasons—sometimes the reasons were good, sometimes the reasons were not so good, sometimes the good reasons were just to be edifying and to entertain the faithful and to inspire them with theological and doctrinal and moral and spiritual teachings, sometimes they were just to defend heresies: so it’s a very ambiguous literature—but I always point out that there were a lot more of these writings than ultimately came to be canonized in the New Testament in the 27 writings that now comprise the New Testament: the four gospels, the book of Acts, the letters attributed to [Paul and] Peter, James, John, and Jude, and then of course the book of Revelation.

So we have a lot of these writings, and a lot of them have to do with the apostles. Some of them are pretty bizarre writings, actually. Among the most bizarre are like the Life of Thekla with Paul and so on, and these writings are making a come-back now. People are taking them seriously and trying to see that they’re a true spiritual Christianity as opposed to the classical Christianity that centers in the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Christ, that affirms the Old Testament. They’re mostly from Gnostic circles, and it’s kind of sad. I mean, even recently one young Orthodox fellow, a graduate student, wrote a paper about gender and about ordination of women, practically based on the apocryphal Life of Thekla, which in my opinion is absolutely unacceptable. [Laughter] It’s even just—it should not be done, such a thing; it’s not serious.

But people are doing that, and of course as the old Latin saying goes, translated into Russian: Bumaga vsyo sterpit, they say in Russian, which comes from Latin: Paper suffers anything. People can write any kinds of things. So there are a lot of these stories made up about apostles, and through the centuries there were various reasons why different kinds of stories came. So stories developed about the twelve apostles, like where they went, what they did, where they taught. Sometimes they were considered to be first bishops of certain churches, and then it became pretty traditionally held within the Christian Church, of East and West, that Peter and Paul were connected with Rome; Mark was also there, but Mark was connected with Egypt. Then you had Matthew with Ethiopia, Thomas with India, Thaddeus with Armenia, Bartholomew… In different places they were connected with different people. And Andrew eventually came to be connected with Byzantium and then with Constantinople and then even with the Slavic lands. So the question is how true this is historically. What was the point of it? Is it really factual? Was it made up for some purposes? And that’s what we want to reflect on a little bit today.

Now what we want to see today is that, in the Lives of the Apostle Andrew that we have now—and there are many of them: you have the Western Lives like the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Varagine, and then you have other Lives like of Simeon Metaphrastes in the East. Then there were earlier Lives coming out of the Gnostic traditions, like a collection of writings attributed to Dositheos of Tyre, the pseudo-Dosithean writings, and then there were all other kinds of writings that developed through the centuries for various reasons. So by the time you get to today, it’s pretty much after the 10th, 11th centuries and certainly down to today, St. Andrew is pretty much connected with Greece, with Achaea, where his martyrdom takes place, but then he came to be connected especially with Constantinople and Byzantium and then with the Slavic lands. And even in the Russian Life of Andrew, that written by Dimitry Rostov, the claim was that he was in Kiev and he saw the Kievan area, and he predicted that a great church would arise there and so on. It seems to me that this is fanciful; it’s highly unlikely that that actually happened. And in the original, more affirmed Lives, you have all this material connected together, and so you do have these kind of things being told.

However, if you just take the main Western writing, and then the main Eastern writing, there is this act of the martyrdom of Andrew which is, in my opinion, extremely moving. It takes place near Patras in Achaea, the old word for Greece, the area of the Hellenes, and that’s probably pretty much where Andrew did most of his activity, although these various writings spread him around in different places, as I just mentioned. But let’s go first of all to the story of his death. I think it’s a very edifying story. It’s definitely part of all the traditional stories about Andrew. Some have some elements, others have other elements, but this particular martyrdom in Achaea near Patras, this is in all of them. This is pretty much the heart of the story of the life and martyrdom of the first-called apostle, Andrew.

And I think that what I’ll do—with your indulgence, because you’re listening to this; of course, you could always turn off the machine at any time—but I would like to just read to you the main part of that particular story of the martyrdom of Andrew by crucifixion, because it is, in my opinion, so moving and so true. There’s very important truths that are told in this particular Life of Andrew at the time when he is put to death.

So what happened, according to the Life, which is in all the Lives, whatever other details may be different: the claim is that Andrew was in the city of Patras in Greece, Achaeas, and they were there preaching the Gospel. And there was a proconsul whose name was A-e-g-e-a-t-e-s. I guess you can pronounce it Aegeates. From now on, I’ll just call him “the proconsul.” Now, the proconsul also had a wife named Maximila or Maximilia, and she was a kind of a follower of Andrew, and according to the Life, Andrew had prayed for her and restored her to health when she was on her bed of sickness, and then she became a follower of Andrew and ultimately also a Christian, and this is the very wife of this particular proconsul.

So the proconsul is very angry at the Apostle Andrew, and he commands that he be crucified. And then it says: The presbyters and deacons in the land of Achaea wrote down the following:

We the presbyters and deacons of the Church of Achaea write to all the churches of east, west, south, north: Tell of the passion of the holy Apostle Andrew, which we beheld with our own eyes.

And then the statement that they make is one that really betrays much later theology, so you could see how this was beefed up through the tradition, because it says that they said:

Peace be to you and all who believe in the one God, perfect in Trinity, the true unbegotten Father, the true begotten Son, the true Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son.

Well, these are all formulas of later theological doctrine; it’s highly unlikely that they would use that kind of language in such a perfect form at that time. But in any case, that is the teaching. Definitely Andrew taught the one God and Father, definitely he taught Jesus as the only-begotten Son, definitely he taught that there was a Holy Spirit, and according to Scripture the Spirit does proceed from the Father and rests upon the Son, showing him in his humanity to be the Christ. And so it says:

This is the faith we were taught by the holy Apostle Andrew, and whose suffering we beheld and wish to relate, as much as we are able.

So then they write the story, and the story goes like this. The proconsul was on his way to the city, and he was especially looking for Andrew, and he was especially looking to put him to death. He meets Andrew, and Andrew says to him, to the proconsul, “It would be best for you, O judge of men, to come to know him who is your real Judge, who dwells in the heavens. Acknowledge the true God and worship him, turning away from the false idols and divinities that you now adore.”

The proconsul is angry at him and says, “Are you Andrew, who razes the temples of the gods and teaches the people the sorcerous faith which has recently appeared and which the emperors of Rome have ordered to be destroyed?”

Andrew answers, “The emperors of Rome do not understand what was clearly demonstrated by the Son of God, who came to the earth to save humankind, that the idols are not gods but the abodes of unclean demons, enemies of the human race, who teach men to anger God and cause him to turn away from them. When God turns away from men in anger, the demons lead them astray and enslave them. Finally their souls issue forth naked from their bodies, possessed of nothing but their own sins.”

Now the proconsul gets angrier, and he says, “The Jews nailed your Jesus to the cross, because he was a preacher of fables.”

Andrew answered, “Oh, if only you could understand the mystery of the cross! If only you could comprehend that it was out of love for us that the Creator of the human race endured voluntary crucifixion! He knew beforehand when he would suffer, and he prophesied that he would rise on the third day. At his last supper with us, he announced his betrayal, plainly foretold what would befall him, and went unconstrained to the place where he was delivered into the hands of the Jews.”

Then the proconsul answers Andrew, “I’m amazed that you, apparently a wise man, are a follower of one whom you yourself admit was put to death on a cross. It is all the same whether he was crucified voluntarily or involuntarily. Still he was put to death on a cross.”

Andrew cries out in response, “Great is the mystery of the holy cross! If you wish to learn of it, I will gladly speak to you about it.”

The proconsul objects, “The cross is not a mystery! It’s a punishment for criminals. It’s an instrument of execution.”

Andrew insists, “This punishment is the mystery, of the renewal of humanity, of which I will tell you, if only you will be patient and allow me to speak.” So Andrew says to him, “Be quiet a little bit, and I’ll explain it to you.”

Then the proconsul answers, “I will listen to you patiently, but if you refuse to do as I command, I will force you to endure the mystery of the cross yourself.” So he’s being sarcastic. Andrew says it’s not a punishment; it’s a mystery. So then the proconsul says, well, I can have you suffer that mystery.

Then Andrew answers a marvelous answer; he says, “If I were afraid of punishment by crucifixion, I would not glory in the cross,” he declares. In one of the other versions, in the Latin version, it says, “If I were afraid of the pain of the cross, I would not proclaim its glory.” So if I were afraid of the pain, I would not proclaim its glory. This one says, “If I were afraid of the punishment, I would not glorify the instrument of the punishment, the cross.”

The proconsul says, “You have lost your mind! It is because you have lost your mind that you praise the cross, and because you are foolhardy that you do not fear death.” In other words: You’ve become a total fool; you’ve lost your mind.

Andrew then responds, “I have not lost my mind; I have found my mind. It is not foolhardiness but faith that has set me free of the fear of death, for the death of the righteous is honorable, but grievous is the death of sinners. Therefore it is my desire that you listen to what I want to tell you concerning the mystery of the cross. Acknowledge the truth and believe, thus gaining your life, winning your soul,” said the apostle.

The proconsul replies, “Only that which is lost can be found. If my soul is truly lost, I cannot imagine that you will find it by means of your faith.”

Then Andrew answers him, “I will reveal to you in what perdition men’s souls lie, so that you may recognize the salvation effected through the cross. The first man ushered in death to the world, by the tree of disobedience, and so it was necessary for the race of men, the human race, that death might be also abolished through the tree of suffering. As the first man who brought in death was formed of pure and virgin earth, so it was necessary that Christ, who is at once perfect man and the Son of God and who fashioned the first man, be born of a pure virgin, to restore life everlasting, which has been lost to all men.”

That particular point, by the way, will become a very, very common Christian teaching, that God fashioned man out of the pure virgin soil from which nothing had come, and then the New Adam, who is Christ, is formed out of the pure virgin flesh of the Virgin Mary, from whom no man has come. So as the first Adam is made from pure earth, the second Adam is made from pure flesh of Mary. That’s something that will be repeated through the tradition very often, and it’s sometimes even argued by the Fathers that one of the reasons that Jesus has to be born of a pure virgin is that he must come from an earth, a flesh, from which nothing else has ever come, and then that’s traced back to how God fashioned Adam out of the dust, because adamach, adam, it means the earth; it means earth.

So then it says—Andrew continues, “The Son of God stretched out his blameless hands upon the cross, facing on that wood the transgression of the first man who, lacking self-restraint, stretching forth his hand unto the tree of desire.” So then again it’s a parallel, the way Adam stretched forth his hands to eat the fruit with Eve, Jesus, the New Adam, stretches forth his arms on the tree of the cross. And it’s got to be a tree: you’ve got to have a tree and a tree; you have to have the earth and the earth; and you have to have the stretching out of the hands, Jesus’ hands being blameless, stretched out in love and salvation, Adam’s being blameworthy, stretching out his hand to sin.

Then it says, “Similarly,” St. Andrew continues here in this wonderful story, “in place of the sweet fruit of the forbidden tree, Christ tasted bitter gall.” So the way that Adam tasted really good-tasting fruit from his tree, Christ tasted the bitter gall, because they stuck it into his mouth when he was hanging on the cross.

“Taking on himself the death that was our due, he bestowed immortality on us.” So the point there again is a theological point. Humanity in the beginning was made to be immortal, but by sin it brings death. Christ, who is immortal, comes in and takes on death for our sake and then bestows through it immortality upon us.

Now, when Andrew finished this, the proconsul says to him, “Speak of these things to those who wish to hear you, but if you do not sacrifice to the gods, I will have you beaten with staves and crucified upon the cross which you so greatly glorify.” So again he’s being sarcastic.

Andrew responds, “Every day I offer to the one, true, omnipotent God not the smoke of incense, not the flesh of bulls, nor the blood of goats, but I offer the spotless Lamb of God, who suffered in sacrifice upon the altar of the cross.” So the cross now becomes the altar of sacrifice and the One who is offered is the Lamb of God, and that hearkens back to John the Baptist saying to Andrew, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes upon himself the sin of the world.”

Then Andrew continues, “All the faithful partake of his most-pure body and blood, but the sacrificed Lamb remains whole and alive.”

The proconsul mocks Andrew, “How can this be? You are foolish.”

Andrew answers, “If you wish to understand, become a disciple.” And that’s a most marvelous sentence.

“How can this all be?” the proconsul says. And Andrew gives the answer that we still have to hear today. “You want to understand all this? There’s only one way: you have to become his disciple. If you become a disciple of Jesus, follow what he teaches, do what he did, do what he tells you, then you will understand the mystery of the cross. You will understand that this is the truth; it’s not foolishness. But it’s not going to be by arguing back and forth that you’re going to understand.” “How can this be?” the proconsul says. “How can I know this to be true?” And Andrew answers, “Become his disciple, and you will know, but if you don’t become his disciple, you will never know.”

And we have to continue this same way today in the 21st century. This was said in the first century; now we’re in the twenty-first century. But we have to still say the very same thing, first of all to ourselves, to each other, and then to any human being who cares to hear. Our answer always has to be Andrew’s answer. Do you want to know if the Gospel is true? Do you want to know that Christian faith is true? Do you want to know that what it teaches is true and real? Do you want to know that it’s not a myth or a fantasy? Do you want to know the power of God and the power of Christ and the love of God and the mercy of God? Do you want to have an experience of the divine energies of God in you that come from the Father through the Son and the Spirit? Then you have to become his disciple. You have to obey him, you have to die with him, you have to suffer with him, you have to love God with him, you have to love the neighbor, the enemy, you have to forgive everyone everything—then you will know! But if you don’t do that, you will never know.

And many modern saints teach the same thing. St. Silouan on Mount Athos, he said it very clearly: Until you love your enemy the way Christ loved, you will never know the truth, and you will never know God, and you’ll never be at peace. You can’t find out these truths by arguing. You can’t find them out by reading books. You can’t find them out by philosophizing. You have to hear the Gospel, and I might even dare to say test it: say, “Okay, hypothetically I’m going to accept that this is true, and I’m going to live by it.” And if a person tries to live by it, God will reveal himself to that person, and they will know.

So when the proconsul says, “How can this be, what you’re saying,” Andrew answers, “If you want to know, you want to understand, become a disciple.”

Then the proconsul continues, “I will extract knowledge of it from you by torture.” So he says, “I’m not going to become a disciple. I’ll torture you, and then I’ll know if it’s true or not.” So he’s really blasphemous here—what’s the word?—terrible. I’m not going to suffer; you’re going to suffer, and then maybe I’ll see if it’s true or not.

The apostle answers, “I’m amazed that you, a learned man, speak so foolishly. Do you suppose that you can learn God’s mystery by torturing me? I have already explained to you the mystery of the cross. If you wish to believe in Christ, the Son of God, who was crucified, I will repeat how it is that he was slain and yet lives, how he was sacrificed and is eaten but still remains alive and whole in his kingdom.”

The proconsul muses, “How can it be that he was put to death and is consumed as food, yet remains whole and alive?”

Andrew replies, “If you believe with all your heart, you will come to understand this mystery; but if you do not believe it, you will never understand it.” So faith and testing is how you come to understand. You believe it and you try to put it into practice. So Andrew says, “If you believe with your whole heart, you will come to understand this mystery, but if you do not believe, you will never understand it.”

And you can make that a universal principle. Let’s put it even in the scientific realm. Suppose a person wants to know, I don’t know, Einstein’s theory of relativity. You first have to learn what he says and believe it, accept it on faith and then test it. And then when you test it you will see: is it true or not. It may be true, it may be not, but you first have to trust that it’s true; you have to accept that it’s true, and that’s how science operates. You have a hypothesis, you test it: you see if it’s true or not. You see if it bears up under experimentation. And it’s the same thing with the spiritual life. The question is: Does it bear up under experimentation? Can you put it into practice? Activate the hypothesis, so to speak, and then see what happens. And Andrew’s claim is, if you do that, you will come to know. And that’s the only way that you will come to know.

Of course, now the proconsul is absolutely furious; he’s totally angry. He orders Andrew imprisoned. Then he orders him to be beaten. Andrew remains calm and silent. He is tormented greatly. He speaks and says that transitory sufferings are easily borne, but you must bear those sufferings in order to escape the unending sufferings of hell. And so if you take up the cross, you take up your sufferings, but those sufferings, like St. Paul said, they cannot be compared to the glory of the age to come, nor can they be compared to the suffering which will come to those who reject the love and the beauty and the truth and the glory of God.

So then of course it continues. I will not read any more, but the saint is saying, “I would much prefer to see you believe in Christ and reject the idols. That would bring me true joy. It was Christ that sent me to this land. I have gained many people for him here.” And it’s very interesting that the earliest martyrs never condemn those who are killing them. Later Lives of saints, the saints will do that. They’ll say, “Ah, you’re going to burn in hell someday,” but in the earliest Lives, they don’t do that. They pray for the person to be forgiven, like Jesus from the cross says, “Father, forgive them,” or St. Stephen said, “Lay not this sin to their charge.” So the real [martyr] prays for the person to be forgiven, who is killing them.

But then Andrew even kind of taunts the proconsul a little bit, and he said—this is what he says: “Hear my words, O offspring of death, doomed to everlasting torment! Give heed to me, the servant and apostle of Jesus Christ. Until now I have spoken to you meekly, wishing to instruct you in the holy faith. It was my hope that you would prove to be a reasonable man, recognize the truth, renounce the idols, and worship God, he who dwells in heaven; but since you remain obstinate and imagine that I fear your tortures, I invite you to devise for me the most terrible tortures of which you are capable. The more grievous the tortures I endure, the more I will please my King.” And then they beat him up some more and so one, and they say he’s going to be crucified. And then Andrew says, “I am the slave of the cross, Jesus Christ. I do not fear death by crucifixion, but I desire it. I want it.” And then they say, “Okay, you shall then have it.”

And then the story goes that Andrew gives a long speech, rejoicing in the cross, addressed to the cross: “Hail, O Cross, sanctified by the flesh of Christ, O good Cross, most beautiful Cross!” And of course, all of this is put into his mouth by the hagiographer. Then it says when they lifted him up on the X-shaped cross, they didn’t even put nails into him because they wanted him to suffer so much, so they just tied him to it in the shape of an X, with his feet spread out. And then it says Andrew doesn’t die, but he continues preaching and announcing the Gospel from this cross where 20,000 people, it says, in the city saw him hanging there. That’s, of course, a hagiographical exaggeration; probably there weren’t 20,000 people in Patras, but it’s one of the ways of saying the great multitude came.

And then Andrew says, “Don’t take me down from the cross. Don’t try to spring me.” That’s classic with the martyrs. “I want to go to the One whom I love.” And then he prays, “O Lord Jesus, receive my spirit in peace. Receive me, O good Master, and do not allow me to be taken down from the cross until you have accepted my spirit.” And then it says the light comes from heaven, and Maximilia, the wife of the proconsul, the chaste and holy noble wife, she came to believe in Christ, and she took down the body from the cross after he was dead, she anointed it with costly [ointments], she placed it in her own tomb. So you have a kind of woman myrrh-bearer anointing the body of the crucified Apostle Andrew.

And then it says; it ends, “These things took place on the last day of the month of November, in the city of Patras in Achaea (in Greece), where even until the present day, many blessings are bestowed upon the people.” And then it claims that everyone came, finally, in that particular city, to believe in Jesus. Then it says later on the relics, the body of St. Andrew, were taken to Constantinople by the emperor, Constantine the Great, and they were placed there with the remains of Luke the Evangelist and Timothy, the disciple of the holy Apostle Paul, and they were put in the most splendid church of the apostles, beneath the sacred table of the oblation. So the relics of Andrew were taken to Constantinople. Then it said later on that they were divided up a little bit: a head was given to Rome; I think something else, an arm, was given to—I forgot—some other center, maybe Antioch, I can’t remember. But anyway, the relics remained there.

Now, what we want to see, though, is that in these earliest Lives of Andrew, there’s absolutely no mention—there’s a mention in these later Lives, and it grew up—that he went to Byzantium and so on, but there’s no mention that he was ever, like, the first bishop of Constantinople. And of course, at that time, they would never have considered that any apostle be the first bishop of anywhere, just like Peter was not the first bishop of Rome or the first bishop of Antioch; there were no first bishop. But it’s not very known in the historical documents of the time until way later in the end of the first millennium that it’s considered that Andrew went there and consecrated Stachys, one of the 70 apostles, to be the first bishop of Constantinople, thus giving Constantinople an apostolic foundation.

And this is what we’d like just to say a little bit about right now, because, in Church history—and we say more about this when we discuss the place of bishops and Church organization and structure in the other podcasts that we’re doing about the bishops and the organization of the Church on Ancient Faith Radio here—it’s just interesting to connect this to those other reflections, because what happened was this. Constantinople became the New Rome, and it claimed to have all the prerogatives of the old Rome because it was Rome. However, there was no apostolic foundation of Constantinople. By the time you get to the fifth, sixth century with Justinian, you have the five patriarchates being the central sees of Christendom. That would be the old Rome, the original Rome, founded on the blood of Peter and Paul; then it would be the New Rome, Constantinople, that has no apostolic foundation, but it is the city of the emperor and the senate, and therefore has the prerogatives of the old Rome right after the old Rome; but then you have Antioch, which was founded by apostolic foundation, including Peter himself; you have Alexandria, which was also considered to have an apostolic foundation, with Peter and Mark there; and then you had Jerusalem, which of course was the place of Christ himself.

So what happened was that it was considered that these five patriarchates were the chief patriarchates, but then what happened around the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries was the patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch fell away into the heresies—they were called heresies of monophysitism, monothelitism—and then there were patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria, but they were coming from the Greek world, as they are to this very day, and they were not from the original Christians who were in those places. Like in Alexandria, they were not Coptic Egyptians; in Syria, they were not Syriac; they often were Greek, even by nationality. Sometime they were locals, but there was a split in those churches, which then brought a kind of a darkness upon them, a questioning upon them, and so their apostolicity could not be full-heartedly endorsed. Jerusalem, of course, was just destroyed and had to move to Aelia Capitolina, and then Constantinople had no apostolic foundation.

So what happened was it developed that Rome alone was calling itself the apostolic see, and it would present itself as the apostolic see, and then it began taking prerogatives as being the only apostolic see, even from among the five major patriarchates that were established through the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries in the Roman Empire. So this caused some kind of difficulties. So what happened was, to make the story very short, there developed a legend, a theory, that Andrew founded Constantinople and it was an apostolic see, and it was founded by the older brother of Peter himself, and therefore had the same apostolic prerogatives as Rome did.

Now, this was definitely a legend that developed; it was really not known until about the eighth, ninth century. It only became kind of universally accepted in the tenth century. It’s something very late in Christian history, and you do not find it in the earlier writings. I mentioned these Gnostic writings which spoke about Byzantium and so on, before it ever was Constantinople. But until very late in the first millennium, even after the eighth, ninth centuries, there’s no mention of Andrew ever being in Constantinople and consecrating Stachys from among the 70 apostles to be the first bishop there. In fact, the names of the 70 apostles are not even mentioned; you don’t have a list of the 70 apostles like we have now, and that list is a very strange list. It includes practically every male figure in the New Testament that you can think of. He’s called one of those 70 apostles. It’s a kind of contrived list; forgive me, but that’s what it is.

So what happens is, I mean, if you just look at the record, so to speak, the historical record, you have no record of this idea of Andrew being the founder of Constantinople and appointing Stachys as the bishop there, just as in parallel to, let’s say, Peter being the founder of the Church of Rome and appointing Linus as the first bishop there. Of course, at this time, Peter was not considered the first bishop of Rome; he was the founder who appointed the first bishop, who was Linus. So Andrew would not be considered the first bishop of Constantinople, but he would be the apostle who founded the Church of Constantinople and made Stachys the first actual local episkopos, the local bishop.

But if we look at the history, for example, just very quickly and very superficially… And if you want to read about this in great detail, there’s a wonderful book, a really wonderful book—anyone who’s really interested in this in depth should really read this book—it’s called The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew, and it’s by Francis Dvornik, D-v-o-r-n-i-k, published 1958 by Harvard University Press. Fr. Francis Dvornik was a Roman Catholic priest, a very nice man; Fr. John Meyendorff knew him and used to tell us about him.

And he studies all these documents in great detail to see where did this come from, this idea that Andrew went to Constantinople when it was still Byzantium, founded the church there, and ordained Stachys as the first bishop, and then 20 bishops after him until the time of Constantine the Great. Because early on, all the documents claimed that the first bishop in Constantinople was a certain Metrophanes, and he appears there when Constantine founds the capital city, New Rome, in Constantinople. When Constantine founds Constantinople, then a bishop is put on the throne there, which before did not exist; the bishop was somewhere across the region, in Thrace somewhere, but was not in Byzantium, was not in what became Constantinople. And if you read the early Typikons, the first bishop of Constantinople is called Metrophanes, and he’s only put there at the time of Constantine in the beginning of the fourth century. No bishop is mentioned there before him, certainly no Andrew and no Stachys.

St. John Chrysostom, for example, has many sermons about Andrew, about Peter, about all kinds of things. As the patriarch of Constantinople, he never mentions anything about Andrew being there and founding the Church there. There’s not a word about it.

Now, Andrew did have a connection in Constantinople, because his body was brought there very early, with that of St. Luke the Evangelist and Timothy, the disciple of Paul. And they built this Church of the Holy Apostles where the emperors were buried outside or put in vaults outside the church, and inside the church were the relics of these early Christians: Luke, Apostle Andrew, and Timothy. The first patriarch or bishop to be put in that church as a burial place was John Chrysostom when they brought him back from exile, and he was put there by St. Pulcherria the Empress, and then Patriarch Flavian also—excuse me, John Chrysostom was put there by Proclus, his successor, who brought him back from exile, and then later St. Pulcherria put the Patriarch Flavian there in 451 after the Council of Chalcedon.

So you don’t have any mention in Chrysostom at all about Andrew being there or consecrating anybody. You have Andrew develop there because his body was there; you have lots of sermons about him, but then you have sermons about Peter—Peter is always called the first of the apostles; Andrew’s always praised as his brother, the first-called, who brought him—but you don’t have this teaching at all.

In the year 546, we have a listing of the diptychs of the Church of Constantinople, and they begin with Metrophanes in the fourth century. There’s no mention of Stachys and 20 bishops before Metrophan; it’s just not there. Pope St. Gregory the Great, who loved St. Andrew, he lived in Constantinople as a representative of Rome from 579 to 586. He has no mention of a tradition of Andrew being the founder of the church, and even St. Gregory the Great was irate when the patriarch of Constantinople took the title “ecumenical patriarch”; he said no bishop should be called ecumenical, not even the pope of Rome.

In the seventh century, you have some documents now that would call Constantinople an apostolic see, for example, the acts of the sixth ecumenical council use the term “apostolic” for each of the pentarchy churches. That would be Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem. But they didn’t connect them with the founding of any particular apostle; they were just apostolic because they were the true Church. And as we would say today, any church is apostolic because it traces its lineage back to the apostles. Certainly that Metrophanes who became the first bishop of Constantinople with the title in the fourth century, he was ordained by somebody who was ordained by somebody who was consecrated by somebody who received the laying-on of hands of somebody that went back to the apostolic age.

So, I don’t know, I’m here in Ellwood City, and I would say I’m going to go up to vespers in a few minutes, and I’m going to go to an apostolic church! Every church is apostolic. It doesn’t mean it has literally to be founded by one of the twelve apostles, who then puts in the first bishop. It doesn’t have to be.  And then the argument was that Constantinople had all the prerogatives of an apostolic church because it was the New Rome. It was the successor of the old Rome. It had nothing to do with any Andrew or anybody founding it.

And so you find this all the way through. Chrysostom, Proclus, Basil, Metropolitan of Selecia, 459—no mention of it. The imperial city is mentioned, the relics are mentioned, but nothing about Andrew founding it. Paulinus of Nola, a very famous writer in the Western Church, he speaks about Andrew’s relics being in the church in Constantinople, but he does not mention Andrew as the founder of the Church there in the fifth century in the West. When Justinian built the Hagia Sophia cathedral, he took the relics of Andrew, Luke, and Timothy, and put them into the Hagia Sophia cathedral out of the Church of the Apostles that then became a burial place for patriarchs and bishops, but the apostles themselves were put in the main cathedral. So you have this.

At the Seventh Ecumenical Council, again, which met in Nicaea, across the Bosphorus, you don’t have anyone again mentioning this, but now it starts beginning to appear a little bit. St. Theodore the Studite,  who seems to have recovered pseudo-Dorotheus, that begins to be spread around; that begins to be made known. So different documents start appearing, and they start being merged together. So then it’ll take a few centuries, and then by the time you get to the tenth, eleventh century, you will then have this pretty much taken in all the churches. But still, St. Photios the Great, who fought with Rome, never makes a reference to Andrew as the founder of the Church of Constantinople; just doesn’t exist. The Menologion, the Menaion of the eighth century: no mention again of Andrew and the 20; only Metrophanes is mentioned.

But this pseudo-Dorotheus starts making a come-back, and these other miraculous books of the earliest Church start coming in, and by the time you get to the ninth, tenth centuries, you have a Life of Epiphanius of St. Andrew, where it’s actually said, yeah, he was there, he consecrated Stachys, and there were 20 bishops before Metrophanes was there with Constantine. It was at the same time, by the way, that St. Simeon Metaphrastes, who wrote a Life and Martyrdom of St. Anthony, is the first one who also lists the synaxis of the 70 apostles, that you did not have until that time.

So it seems that this legend of Andrew grew up in order to insist on the apostolicity of Constantinople. When people no longer recognize Constantinople as being the chief see, because it was the place of the emperor and the senate, when Rome was again raising its head to say, “We are the first see; everyone should listen to us”—and in the West, Rome simply became the apostolic see; it was called the apostolic see; to this day it’s called the apostolic see, as if these other sees were not apostolic—so then Constantinople had to do something to try to affirm its standing, and then it accepted the idea that you have to have some kind of apostolic foundation, and then it seems that this early legend of this pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre, it came more to light, was merged with others, and then you had the teaching that we have pretty much today, about Andrew founding, being the apostle who founded, the patriarchate of Constantinople.

However, the evidence is: big names knew nothing about that. John Chrysostom knew nothing about that, Proclus knew nothing about that, Pulcherria, the Fourth Council, knew nothing about it; the Sixth Council knew nothing about it; the Seventh Council doesn’t mention it; Pope St. Gregory the Great doesn’t mention it. It only becomes mentioned later, eighth, ninth, and by the time you get to the end of the first millennium, then it’s pretty much in the synaxaria, and it’s pretty much in the Lives of the saints, and that’s how it seemed to get there.

But that’s just an interesting footnote here to the Life of St. Andrew, how he was used in Church history. I will just end it with a very personal comment, God forgive me, but I think that we have to stop this kind of ecclesiology, I really do. I think that the hour has come to say, you know, let’s be serious. Let’s talk about the pope of Rome and so on and simply say: Peter was never the first bishop there. Every little town in Greece was an apostolic see. There are many more apostolic sees than Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome. The apostles preached all over the place, and even if they didn’t preach, their successor did preach, and that became an apostolic see. Constantinople is a perfectly apostolic see, and even as New Rome has prerogatives—without having to create a legend that it was founded by one of the Twelve.

We just don’t need that, and it leads a lot of people into temptation, because once they look at the facts and study history, and they see, “Oh my goodness, this is a fabrication!”… Somebody asked me recently, “Are you saying that Andrew as the apostle who founded Constantinople is not true and it’s a fabrication?” I had to answer, “Yes, that’s what I believe,” and I think the documents all prove that it’s so, and it’s understandable why they did it, but it’s not justifiable. Many things are understandable, but not everything is justifiable. And maybe it’s time to say this ain’t the way we should be looking at churches anyway. Maybe this is all something that went wrong a long time ago, and certainly we believe in apostolic succession, certainly we believe in the foundation of the Church, certainly we believe in the preaching of the apostles. The Eastern Orthodox Church is not a Protestant church that just gets rid of all this stuff. We have apostolic succession, we have apostolic tradition, we have apostolic worship; we trace the lineage of the apostles. Some of those who were in apostolic lineage became heretics, however. There’s nothing magical or automatic about it.

But what we really don’t need to do is to try to defend the truths of our faith on the basis of things that are more than questionable, that are pretty clearly simply not true, not historically true. And historicity is a huge problem today. We want to be sure about historical foundations of what we do. We don’t want to mess around with that. We can take a historical foundation, it can be embroidered and theologically preached, even like the New Testament does, but there has to be a true historical foundation. And this is what we really want. This feast of St. Andrew kind of provokes us to ask ourselves hard questions about our faith. What is really historically true and must be defended? And what may be a fabrication, for some purpose, but then it becomes a liability.

So may God help us, through the prayers of the holy Apostle Andrew, who is a wonderful saint, and that wonderful conversation with the proconsul should be engraved in our minds and hearts. “Do you want to know if this is true? Become his disciple. It’s the only way to know.”