Who was Andrew the apostle?

The first to follow

Mark and Matthew meet Andrew on the shore of the lake, casting a net with his brother Simon; at Jesus’s call both leave their nets (Mark 1:16–18). John’s Gospel starts earlier, at the Jordan, where Andrew is a disciple of John the Baptist. When the Baptist points at Jesus, “Behold, the Lamb of God!”, two of his disciples walk after him. “What are you looking for?” Jesus asks. “Come and see.” They stay the whole day, and the Gospel remembers the hour: the tenth, about four in the afternoon.

One of the two who heard John and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his own brother, Simon, and said to him, “We have found the Messiah!”

The other disciple is never named. Peter, the future leader of the twelve, reaches Jesus here because his brother went and got him. That is why the Orthodox churches call Andrew Protokletos, the First-Called.

A Greek name from Bethsaida

Andrew is Greek, Andreas, built on the word for a man: manly, brave. No Hebrew or Aramaic name of his survives. John calls Bethsaida “the city of Andrew and Peter” (John 1:44). It stood where the Jordan enters the lake, just inside the lands of Herod’s son Philip, who made it a city and renamed it Julias (Josephus, Antiquities 18.28): a border town, where Jewish Galilee met Greek-speaking country. So when some Greeks in Jerusalem for Passover want to meet Jesus, they go to Philip, the other apostle from Bethsaida with a Greek name.

Philip came and told Andrew, and in turn, Andrew came with Philip, and they told Jesus.

The one who brings people

Andrew rarely speaks, and when he appears he is usually bringing someone to Jesus. First his brother. Then, before the feeding of the five thousand, Philip works out that two hundred denarii of bread would not be enough, and Andrew turns up a boy with five barley loaves and two fish, adding honestly, “but what are these among so many?” (John 6:8–9). Then the Greeks.

He stands next to the inner circle without quite belonging to it. Only Peter, James and John go up the mountain where Jesus is transfigured (Mark 9:2). But on the Mount of Olives, when the disciples ask in private when the Temple will fall, Mark names four: “Peter, James, John, and Andrew” (Mark 13:3). The New Testament mentions him for the last time in a list, one of the eleven waiting in the upper room (Acts 1:13).

Patras, the X-shaped cross and Scotland

Everything after that is tradition. Eusebius, around 325, passes on Origen’s report that Andrew was given Scythia, the lands north of the Black Sea, as his mission field (Church History 3.1.1). The Acts of Andrew, a Christian romance of the late second or the third century, takes him through Greece and ends at Patras: the governor Aegeates has him tied, not nailed, to a cross so that he will suffer longer, and Andrew greets the cross and preaches from it to the crowd. Later art gave his cross an X shape, the saltire.

• Scotland. A medieval legend says relics of Andrew were carried to the coast of Fife, to the town now called St Andrews. The white saltire on blue is Scotland’s flag, and his feast, November 30, is its national day.
• Constantinople. The Ecumenical Patriarchate counts Andrew as its founder, as Rome counts Peter. His relics went to Constantinople in the fourth century, and to Amalfi, in Italy, after the crusaders sacked the city in 1204.
• Patras. In 1964 Pope Paul VI sent back to Patras the relic of his head, kept in Rome since the fifteenth century.