Who Was the Apostle Philip? Two Philips (6 of 13)

There are two men named Philip in the New Testament, and by the late second century the church had merged them.

That is not a small footnote. It means most of what gets said about Philip the Apostle, including the tomb, the daughters, and the city, probably belongs to somebody else.

Who Was the Apostle Philip in the Bible?

From Bethsaida, the same town as Peter and Andrew, and called directly by Jesus rather than through a middleman. John 1:43 has Jesus finding him and saying follow me.

His first recorded act is recruitment. He finds Nathanael and tells him they have found the one Moses wrote about. Nathanael’s response is the famous sneer about whether anything good can come out of Nazareth, and Philip does not argue with him. He says come and see. Evangelism by invitation rather than debate, and it works.

In John 6:7 he shows a different side. Jesus asks where they will buy bread for the crowd, and Philip immediately calculates that eight months of wages would not buy enough for each person to have a bite. He is the man who runs the numbers, which is useful most of the time and beside the point on this occasion.

What Did Philip Ask Jesus at the Last Supper?

He asked to see the Father.

John 14:8 has him saying Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us. It sounds like a request for a vision, and it comes after three years of following.

The answer is one of the largest claims in the Gospels. Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. Philip’s question pulled it out into the open, which is what his questions tend to do.

Are There Two Philips in the New Testament?

Yes, and they are easy to confuse because their careers rhyme.

Philip the Apostle is one of the Twelve, appears in John, and heads the second group of four in every apostolic list.

Philip the Evangelist is one of the seven chosen in Acts 6 to handle the distribution to widows. He preaches in Samaria, meets the Ethiopian official on the desert road in Acts 8, and later hosts Paul at Caesarea. Acts 21:8-9 says he had four unmarried daughters who prophesied.

Both are named Philip. Both preach. Both are associated with Asia Minor in later memory. The overlap did the rest.

Did Philip the Apostle Die at Hierapolis?

The tradition says so, and the tradition is early, and it still probably has the wrong man.

Polycrates of Ephesus, writing in the late second century and preserved by Eusebius, reports that Philip the Apostle was buried at Hierapolis in Phrygia along with two daughters who had grown old as virgins, with a third daughter at Ephesus. Papias also knew of a Philip and his daughters at Hierapolis.

Look at what is in that description. Daughters. Prophetic reputation. Asia Minor. That is the profile of Philip the Evangelist from Acts 21, down to the detail of the unmarried daughters. Another early witness counts the daughters as four, which is exactly the Evangelist’s number in Acts.

Scholarship overwhelmingly reads this as a case of the wrong Philip. By the late second century the confusion was so complete that the Evangelist’s memory had been absorbed into his apostolic namesake, and once that happens, everything downstream inherits the error.

The martyrdom details, including crucifixion upside down at Hierapolis, come from the late apocryphal Acts of Philip and carry no independent weight.

Was a Tomb of Philip Found in 2011?

A first-century tomb at Hierapolis was identified by archaeologists as Philip’s in 2011, and the announcement traveled widely.

What was found is a tomb of the right period at the right site, in a place where a Philip was venerated. What was not found is anything that names the occupant or distinguishes one Philip from the other. An attribution is not a proof, and in this particular case the attribution runs straight into the identity problem that has been sitting there since the second century.

If the tomb is genuinely a Philip’s, the same question applies to the bones that applies to the tradition. Which one.

Why Does the Philip Confusion Matter?

Because it is a dated, traceable example of how this happens.

Two people share a name. Their stories have surface similarities. Within about a century and a half, one of them has been erased and his life has been transferred to the other, and the transfer is preserved by serious writers who had no reason to lie and every reason to trust what they had received.

Nobody invented anything here. The daughters were real. The city was real. The veneration was real. What went wrong was an identification, and once it was made, every later source repeated it in good faith.

That is worth knowing before assuming that early attestation settles a question. Early can mean accurate. It can also mean the mistake was made early.

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.

Footnotes1

1. The daughter count is the sharpest evidence in the whole tangle. Acts 21:9 gives Philip the Evangelist four daughters who prophesied. One early witness reporting on Hierapolis also counts four. Polycrates has three, split between two cities. The number wobbles the way a memory does, and it wobbles around the Evangelist's figure rather than around any independent apostolic tradition.

Sources

Polycrates of Ephesus, preserved in Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 3.31 and 5.24. Supports the Hierapolis burial claim and the description of the daughters. Free in full at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Acts of Philip, late, apocryphal. The source of the martyrdom details. Cited as the origin of a claim, not as a witness.

Where the sourcing stops: the conclusion that Polycrates has the wrong Philip is the standard scholarly reading rather than my own construction, but the strength of that consensus is something I am describing rather than quantifying.