Who Was the Apostle Andrew? (3 of 13)

Andrew is the man who recruited Peter.

The New Testament gives him three scenes and in every one he is doing the same thing: bringing somebody to Jesus and stepping out of the frame. Then he disappears, and what fills the gap is one of the more consequential pieces of legend-building in European history. A country he never came within two thousand miles of took him as its patron, put his cross on its flag, and used him to argue for its independence.

Who Was the Apostle Andrew in the Bible?

A fisherman from Bethsaida working the family boats with his brother Simon. Mark and Matthew have Jesus calling the pair of them off the water together.

John adds a layer the Synoptics do not. Before Jesus, Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist. He is standing beside John in John 1:35 when the Baptist calls Jesus the Lamb of God, and Andrew simply leaves and follows. He was not recruited cold. He had been looking.

How Did Andrew Bring Peter to Jesus?

He went and got him.

John 1:41 says the first thing Andrew did was find his brother Simon and tell him they had found the Messiah. The next verse is Jesus renaming Simon on the spot.

Pentecost, the Cornelius household, the letters, the whole visible career of Peter, all of it runs back through a decision Andrew made in an afternoon. There is no sign he ever resented the trade, and no sign anyone thought to ask.

What Else Does Scripture Say About Andrew?

Two more scenes, both in John, both the same gesture.

In John 6:8, with five thousand to feed and Philip having just calculated that it cannot be done, Andrew notices a boy with five loaves and two fish and brings him forward, then undercuts himself by asking what that amounts to among so many. He brings the person anyway.

In John 12:22, Greeks at the festival want to see Jesus. Philip goes to Andrew, and Andrew takes the request in. Outsiders wanting access, handled by the same man who handled it in chapter one.

He also appears in Mark 13:3 on the Mount of Olives with Peter, James, and John, asking when the temple will fall. It is the only time he stands with the inner three, and the last thing Scripture shows him doing before the list in Acts 1:13.

Where Did Andrew Go After Acts?

Nobody knows, and the earliest answer arrives inside a scheme scholarship does not accept.

Origen, quoted by Eusebius, assigns Andrew to Scythia, north of the Black Sea. That is early and it gets repeated for centuries. The problem is the frame. The assignment belongs to the apostolic lottery, a tradition in which the world was divided into twelve portions and drawn by lot. The lottery is a literary device, and the territories it produces are judged legendary with it. An early date does not rescue a claim generated by a legend-shaped process.

Later tradition adds Achaia. Hold on to Scythia, though. It comes back.

How Did the Apostle Andrew Die?

Crucified at Patras, according to the Acts of Andrew, an apocryphal work from the second or third century.

That is the source. Later writers repeat it, and repetition is not independent attestation when everyone is drinking from the same well. There is no early independent witness of the kind Clement of Rome provides for Peter, and nothing in Scripture points at it. Speculative, and it should be labeled that way even where it has been repeated confidently for fifteen hundred years.

Why Is the St Andrew’s Cross X-Shaped?

Because a later storyteller thought of it.

The saltire does not appear in the earliest accounts of Andrew’s death, which simply have a crucifixion. The X-shape develops afterward, and the reason attached to it, that Andrew asked not to die in the same manner as his Lord, is the same move that produced the upside-down cross for Peter. Two apostles, two distinctive postures, both justified by humility, neither attested where it would matter.

Some historians prefer a quieter explanation: a diagonal cross was one of the forms Roman execution took, and nothing further is needed. That version has the advantage of not requiring anyone’s dying request to have been written down.

Why Is Andrew the Patron Saint of Scotland?

Because Scotland needed an apostle, and Andrew was available.

That sounds cynical. It is the actual mechanism, and it is more interesting than the pious version.

The English church pressed claims of authority over the Scottish one, and those claims were argued in Rome. A national church with its own apostolic founder stood in a far stronger position than one that had received its Christianity secondhand. Andrew solved that better than any other candidate could. He was Peter’s brother, and in John he is called before Peter, which let Scots describe him as first-called. Claiming Andrew meant claiming a founder senior in calling to the apostle Rome was built on.

The claim needed a physical anchor and it got one. A monk named Rule, or Regulus, was warned in a dream to carry Andrew’s bones from Patras to the ends of the earth, and was shipwrecked on the coast of Fife at a settlement called Kilrymont. The tower at St Andrews still carries his name.

Historians generally do not think that happened. The likelier route is Acca, bishop of Hexham, a serious relic collector who fled north in 732. On that reading the Rule legend was built later to push the relics back four hundred years, which made Scotland’s credentials older than any rival claim. There was a rival claim: Columba, who had the considerable advantage of having actually been in Scotland.

Andrew won. Kilrymont was being called St Andrews by around 1200. In 1320 the Declaration of Arbroath, sent to the Pope asserting independence from England, made the argument out loud, telling him that Christ called the Scots almost first to his faith though they lived at the uttermost ends of the earth, and appointed Andrew as their patron forever.

And the reason Andrew fit the argument traces back to Scythia. Scots claimed descent from Scythians, which made Andrew their evangelist by inheritance. A lot drawn in a third-century legend became a legal argument in the fourteenth century.

Where Does the Saltire Legend Come From?

From a battle in 832 that may not have happened as told, first written down six hundred years later.

An army of Picts under Angus mac Fergus is caught by a larger Northumbrian force near what is now Athelstaneford. Angus prays, a white diagonal cross appears in the blue sky, he vows that victory will make Andrew patron of the nation, and he wins.

A Pictish king named Óengus did rule then, so the central figure is plausible. But the Northumbrian in the story is an Athelstan, and the famous Athelstan belongs to the following century. The earliest sustained written version is Walter Bower’s Scotichronicon in the 1440s, and Bower names a different king and dates it around 761. When the surviving versions disagree on the king and the decade, neither is a record.

The flag is a separate question from the legend about its origin. The saltire was in use as a field sign and heraldic device long before anyone could check a ninth-century vision, and by the 1500s it was in wide heraldic use. The continuity is real even where the founding story is not.

Why Does the Bible Say So Little About Andrew?

Because the New Testament is not a collection of biographies, and Andrew’s function in it was complete early.

Look at the ratio. Scripture gives him a few paragraphs. Tradition gave him a mission field drawn by lot, a cross shaped by a storyteller, a shipwrecked monk, a vision in the clouds, a nation, and a flag. Every one of those was built in the space where the record stopped.

None of it is needed. The part that survives scrutiny is the part nobody had to invent. He found his brother and brought him to Jesus, and everything Peter ever did runs back through that.

Part of a series working through the Twelve one at a time. See the overview of the Twelve as a group and the Twelve Apostles timeline, where every claim carries its tier.

Footnotes2

1. The objection to the apostolic lottery is not that it is late, because it is not especially late. It is that the structure generates assignments rather than preserving them. Twelve men, twelve portions of the world, distributed by lot, is a closed system that produces an answer for every apostle. A real historical record does not do that.
2. The Acca route is an inference, not a documented transfer. What supports it is that Acca collected relics and that his flight north in 732 is historical, while the alternative requires a fourth-century Greek monk to have sailed to Fife. The Rule story is not impossible. It is the kind of story that gets written when a shrine needs a founding.

Sources

Origen, quoted in Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.1. Supports the Scythia assignment and its position inside the apostolic-lottery framing. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Acts of Andrew, second to third century. The literary source of the Patras crucifixion. Cited as the origin of a claim, not as a witness to events.

Walter Bower, Scotichronicon (1440s). The earliest sustained written version of the saltire legend, and the version that disagrees with the popular telling on both the king and the date. In print in the Aberdeen edition.

Declaration of Arbroath, 1320. Supports the use of Andrew's apostolic seniority as an argument for Scottish independence. Original held by the National Records of Scotland; English translations widely available.

Where the sourcing stops: reading Andrew's three Johannine scenes as one repeated gesture is my own analysis, and so is the observation that the saltire and the Peter inversion follow the same narrative pattern. Why Andrew beat Columba is the standard historical explanation, though how much weight to give the ecclesiastical motive against the political one is a matter of emphasis among historians.