Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  *11 Jacobus was born around 1230 in Varazze, a town on the Gulf of Genoa in northwestern Italy. He became a Dominican friar early in his life and was eventually elected archbishop of Genoa in 1292, six years before his death. The historical trustworthiness of his two-volume masterwork is questionable, to say the least, and some of its information is based on sources that might not have existed outside Jacobus’s mind. The Golden Legend’s popularity during medieval times is attributable to its energetic, sometimes witty, and often quite bizarre re-creations of saintly lives and deaths. During the Renaissance, however, The Golden Legend was suppressed due to its (in Erasmus’s words) “strange lies,” which is unfair: Jacobus displays not a little skepticism in his accounts and often includes contrasting stories in the interest, one assumes, of his conception of impartial inquiry.

  *12 “Lost” must be qualified: Judas had drifted around the antiquities underground for decades, its existence known to several scholars, though its contents were not.

  *13 From our modern viewpoint Sethian beliefs are more or less incomprehensible, but here goes nothing: Sethian Christianity’s “prime creator god” was known as Ialdabaoth (an apparent corruption of “Yahweh, Lord of the Sabbath”), and his agents were called archons, all of whom were thought to employ adjutant angels as governors of their respective realms. The god worshipped by apostolic Christians was, to Sethians, a lesser god in thrall to Ialdabaoth. Jesus’s crucifixion was a trick on Ialdabaoth, who sought to capture Jesus’s dying soul. Jesus, however, eluded capture, and the release of his soul resulted in the defeat of the archons and terminated Ialdabaoth’s control over humanity. This sounds preposterous, but so do many of orthodox Christianity’s more difficult postulations. The difference is that orthodox Christianity has an available and highly esteemed record of philosophical inquiry to burnish it. No doubt the Sethians had their Augustine, too.

  *14 This was the first known assemblage of New Testament writings, though almost all textual evidence of Marcion’s canon was destroyed. Marcion was also the first to identify Paul as the author of 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians.

  BARTHOLOMEW

  * * *

  Saint Bartholomew on the Island: Rome, Italy

  ALONG THE TIBER • ISOLA TIBERINA • BARTHOLOMEW’S CENTRALITY • NATHANAEL OF CANA • THE APOCRYPHA • WITHIN THE CHURCH • ADALBERT • TRAVELS & DEATHS • MARTYRDOM CULTS

  I.

  Early one morning, I walked along the calm, torpid Tiber River, the sky above streaked with watermelon light. While Rome’s busiest streets were lined with anorexic sidewalks unable to accommodate the girth of two stout tourists, the banks of the Tiber were graced with walkways as spacious as patio decks. As I walked, I came upon occasional islets located just offshore. In the city’s museums, I’d seen nineteenth-century woodcuts that showed gentlemen picnicking with ladies on these tiny riparian retreats. Today, Rome’s homeless had colonized much of the Tiber’s walkways and many of its islets. I passed several of their encampments: the cardboard-box homes, the clotheslines hung with stained, once-white clothing. The dogs—so many of Rome’s homeless had dogs—watched me with curious, liquid eyes as I passed, their owners asleep beside them.

  In the middle of the Tiber, there was one large, remarkable island, Isola Tiberina (Tiber Island), which had been so incorporated into the surrounding city that newcomers usually had to stare for several minutes before realizing it actually was an island. Its diamond shape and rounded, streamlined edges made it resemble a mothballed galleon miraculously run ashore in the middle of Rome. This was by design. During ancient times, the island was made to look like a trireme, the many-oared warship common to the Greco-Roman world. Sadly, the only remaining part of this ancient edifice was an eight-foot-long section of travertine marble prow on the island’s southeastern edge. On the prow’s facing, the erosion-smoothened shape of a snake-coiled staff could still be seen. Both serpent and prow were references to one of Tiber Island’s many origin myths. In the third century BCE, supposedly, during a devastating plague, desperate Romans had requested the aid of healers from the great Peloponnesian shrine of the Greek god Asclepius, son of Apollo. Asclepius’s ambassadors arrived in a trireme and had with them a snake, their god’s symbol, which on sight of Tiber Island squirted free from its basket and swam for shore. A healing shrine was constructed on the island at the spot of the serpent’s landing. The island had been honored for its restorative character ever since.

  Fatebenefratelli Hospital now stood on a raised area at the island’s western tip. Most of its windows’ curtains were drawn, giving the hospital a sullen, bedridden look. Outside, on the hospital’s back veranda, a few young doctors and nurses smoked in their pale orange hospital fatigues. A white travertine apron girdled the island, where, on sunny summer days, many teenagers lounged, sunbathed, and awaited phosphorescence. Beyond the island, the Tiber River turned rapid, spilling in hard white waterfalls over a series of small manufactured ledges, at the base of which swirled an eddy-entrapped polyethylene gumbo of soccer balls, raft-sized Styrofoam hunks, and plastic Coke bottles.

  The two bridges that connected Tiber Island to Rome dated from the first century BCE. The more ancient of the two, Ponte Fabricio, was the city’s oldest standing bridge. The Ponte Cestio, the younger bridge, led to a neighborhood known as Trastevere; Ponte Fabricio led to the Jewish Ghetto, home to Rome’s largest synagogue, which was located directly across the river from the hospital. Trastevere was the Jewish quarter in the first and second centuries, and the ghetto was where, in the sixteenth century, Pope Paul IV ordered all Jews to remain after nightfall. These erstwhile ethnic bastions were today highly fashionable neighborhoods.

  Large numbers of Jews had lived in Rome even before the Diaspora, arriving within the sometimes coerced, sometimes voluntary (Herod, for instance, educated his sons here), but largely constant traffic that began between imperial Rome and Palestine in 63 BCE, when Pompey conquered the region and terminated several decades of Jewish independence under the Hasmonaean monarchy. Many of Rome’s first Jews were slaves or prisoners of war who received eventual emancipation and settled in Trastevere. Judaism likely brought Rome its first Christians as well: the founders of the Roman church are widely presumed to have been Jewish Christians.

  For decades, few in Rome bothered to distinguish between the two faiths. Only when Christianity became more Hellenized, and its concerns more clearly delineated from those of the Jews, did most Romans parse the differences. The emperor Claudius ordered one of Rome’s most famous Jewish expulsions from the city in the 40s. The historian Suetonius, writing eighty years after the fact, noted that Claudius’s expulsion was the result of a Jewish riot led by one “Chrestus,” whom Suetonius apparently misunderstood to be a Jew operating in Rome. Whatever the case, this “riot” suggests early tensions in Rome’s synagogues between those who maintained some type of faith in Jesus and those who did not.

  Claudius’s expulsion order is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, during a sequence that finds Paul in Corinth. There Paul meets Aquila and Priscilla, who had “recently come from Italy…because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome.”*1 Although Aquila is a Jew, he and his wife are also believers in Jesus, having already been baptized when Paul meets them. They wind up accompanying Paul on his travels to Ephesus. Although Aquila’s appearance in Acts is brief, we are told his home region (Pontus, in modern-day Turkey), his wife’s name (Priscilla), his occupation (like Paul, a tent maker), and the reason he is in Corinth. Aquila is the very definition of a minor New Testament figure, and yet we are privy to quite a bit more biographical information concerning him than, say, the apostle Bartholomew, whose resting place happened to be on Tiber Island.

  II.

  In all the canonical apostle lists, Bartholomew occupies a central spot among his brethren. This placement determined how he was viewed. As one early Christian wrote, “Bartholomew, at the center of the sacred number twelve, is in accord by his sermonizing with th
ose preceding him and those following, as strings of the harp make harmony.” Yet Bartholomew’s name appears merely four times in the New Testament and never beyond the lists of the Twelve. He says nothing and is ascribed no action. His name (bar Tolmai) means “son of Tolmai.” Jerome believed Bartholomew hailed from a noble family, deducing that Tolmai was a reference to 2 Samuel 3:3, where in a genealogical list we meet one “King Talmai of Geshur,” whose daughter Maacah bore David’s son Absalom. A later piece of Christian deduction links Tolmai to the name Ptolemy, making Bartholomew a scion of the Egyptian dynastic line. The contrasting tradition of Bartholomew’s having been a simple farmer comes from the literal Hebrew meaning of talmai, “one abounding in furrows.”

  Matthew, Mark, and Luke—otherwise known as the synoptic (“seen together”) gospels due to their similarities and Matthew’s and Luke’s seemingly clear reliance on Mark—all list the apostles Philip and Bartholomew together. Meanwhile, John, who does not mention Bartholomew, indicates a close friendship between Philip and Nathanael. Thus, Bartholomew has traditionally been understood as being the same person as Nathanael, which would make Bartholomew his patronymic and Nathanael (which means “God has given”) his first name: Nathanael bar Tolmai.

  John’s Nathanael of Cana appears twice in the gospel. His first appearance involves Philip, who tells him he has found the one “about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.” Nathanael is skeptical but goes to see Jesus anyway. On seeing Nathanael approach, Jesus proclaims him to be “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael asks, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus tells Nathanael that he saw him sitting under a fig tree, apparently during a vision, which impresses Nathanael greatly. He cries out, “You are the son of God!” Jesus, allowed one of his few moments of humor, says, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.”

  Nathanael’s other appearance is near the end of John, when several disciples are fishing in Galilee after Jesus’s resurrection but before his ascension. Nathanael, in this scene, is given nothing to say, but his inclusion among important disciples such as Peter and Thomas is interesting, as is the relative priority John gives Nathanael in Jesus’s calling of the apostles. From gospel to gospel, the order of the first group of apostles’ calling is inconsistent, but tradition has worked out a more or less accepted order: Andrew, Peter, John, and James, followed by Philip and Nathanael. While the synoptic gospels contain Jesus’s primary calling of the two pairs of brothers, they lack the calling of Philip or Nathanael. If John’s fishing scene and his account of Nathanael’s early calling is an echo of something even vaguely historical, Nathanael bar Tolmai—whose existence is already teetering on several presumptive pinheads—might then be reasonably viewed as one of Jesus’s first and most important followers.

  Yet Bartholomew is otherwise absent from Christian scripture. Early Christians set out to remedy this problem, resulting in an unusually colorful farrago of apostolic lore. The first five hundred years of Christianity are marked by an eruption of writings, now collectively called the Apocrypha—the word, which derives from Greek, means “hidden away”—that set out to explain what the gospels and epistles did not. While none of this work became part of the New Testament, a good deal of it intruded, in an almost viral way, into the greater body of Christianity.*2 The stories told within the Apocrypha were irresistible to many Christians, perhaps more so due to the stories’ unofficial, unsanctioned status among church leaders. In many ways, exploring and adding to apocryphal stories was an early form of fan fiction: Tertullian writes of one unfortunate Christian presbyter who, having been identified as the author of the apocryphal Acts of Paul, was brought to trial, convicted, and stripped of his office. Yet without the Apocrypha, the Twelve Apostles would seem even more irrecoverably distant. It is within these strange works that we find most instances of apostolic quirk or personality.

  Nearly every bit of apocryphal writing has its oddities: fish resurrected from the dead, sentient dogs, gouged-out eyes miraculously healed, unusually loquacious demons, and wonderfully dislocating sentences such as “Jesus went and sat at the rudder and piloted the craft.” But the apocryphal literature involving Bartholomew is highly peculiar: one episode involves the apostle learning secret cosmic knowledge from Mary the mother of Jesus, despite her warning that to disclose this information will destroy the world; another work, attributed to Bartholomew, has Jesus battling the six serpent sons of Death; another, The Acts of Philip, in which Bartholomew co-stars, features the apostles coming across a talking baby goat and leopard, who adorably take Communion together; yet another appears to involve, of all things, a werewolf.

  What might the resting place of Bartholomew resemble, given his adventures outside the literature of the New Testament? A sand castle guarded over by a chimera and gryphon? A glittering rocket ship? No. The church of San Bartolomeo all’Isola was small and somewhat plain. An equally modest police station had been built beside it. I sat for a while watching the police station until two chain-smoking carabinieri (Rome’s military police) emerged and stood next to their boxy dark blue Jeep. Their uniforms—black, red-striped pants and tight Kevlar vests—were simultaneously splendid and silly. These men looked as prepared to enter into hostage-exchange negotiations as they did to punch a train ticket to Assisi.

  Within an hour or so, the church piazza began to fill with people, many of them enjoying the next-door café and nursing tiny cups of coffee. A few seekers wandered through the piazza, including a steady stream of small, portly nuns in the habits of their preference or order: the nursing orders in white, the Franciscans often in brown, the French Little Sisters of the Lamb in blue, the Filipina sisters in black. The few tourists who bothered to stop did so only to consult their maps. It was easy to see why. Compared with many Roman places of worship, Saint Bartholomew on the Island seemed the product of an almost pathological degree of architectural restraint. Pitched roof, simple wood mullions in its windows, plain columns. While the foundation of this church was more than one thousand years old, the building itself would not have looked terribly out of place in an otherwise humble town square in 1904 Nebraska. At the spot where the “mast” of the island’s simulated trireme had once stood was a statue of Bartholomew himself. Bearded and curly-haired, he was holding the curved flensing knife with which he was, according to legend, skinned by Armenian heathens. Other legends have Bartholomew being crucified and then skinned. Other legends have him being skinned, crucified, and then beheaded.

  The day before, I’d gone to the Sistine Chapel to see another Bartholomew. In the lower right-hand corner of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, you can find a bald, muscular, nearly naked Bartholomew holding his own earthly hide while he gazes up at a beardless Jesus. The skull-less, floppy face dangling from Bartholomew’s hide is a cunning self-portrait of the artist himself. Michelangelo began work on The Last Judgment decades after he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, an undertaking he had to be coaxed into accepting. During both Sistine projects, the conditions under which Michelangelo labored were horrid. He constructed his own scaffolds because he suspected the first scaffold built for his use had been designed to kill him. Some of this perceived abuse must have moved Michelangelo to powerfully identify with Bartholomew, whose gruesome traditions mark him as the most hideously tormented of all the apostles.

  Inside Saint Bartholomew on the Island, I was met by an assortment of soft, peaceful darknesses. All the wooden pews and kneelers were freestanding, movable. The nave, lined with a dozen columns, was tiny. Up near the chancel, I could see small candlelit chapels on either side of the altar. High windows tinted lilac on one side and pink on the other created a pollinated-seeming glow in the eaves above. These were not stained-glass windows (the creation of which necessitated an elaborate and costly process that had fallen in and out of favor in church construction over the centuries) but rather simple colored glass.

  I walked along th
e church’s right aisle and found a large black metal bowl hanging on the wall. The church’s custodian, a young Italian woman wearing faded red jeans, Puma sneakers, and a tight gray sweater, approached. Her hair was straight, black, and flat, her skin as nearly white as the strip of scalp revealed by her severe part. She was smiling, big-eyed, eager to talk. Quite obviously, I was her first visitor of the day.

  “It was stolen once, in 1981,” she said, when I asked about the large black metal bowl. “But then returned in 1985. No one knows why it was stolen. Relics like this are often stolen in Rome. And usually they’re returned. Such a theft is too difficult for many thieves to live with.”

  “So the bowl’s an official relic?” I asked.

  She nodded. “This is the bowl in which the remains of Bartholomew were first brought here. Until then, our church was devoted to Alberto.” Or, as he was also known, Saint Adalbert, who in the late tenth century resigned his bishopric in Prague due to frustration with the stubborn pagan leanings of his converts and came to Rome to live as a monk. In Rome, he befriended Otto III, who later dispatched him back to his homeland, where he was martyred by an ax-wielding pagan. At some point in the late tenth century, Otto built this church in honor of him. Or such were the legends.