Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  An ancient legend preserved by Jacobus de Voragine mentions Bartholomew’s remains being held in Mesopotamia as of the sixth century. Another of Jacobus’s legends describes how, after Bartholomew’s flaying, the “pagans” in Armenia, “profoundly” displeased by the miracles that attended Bartholomew’s body, put the bones into “a leaden coffin” and threw it into the sea. By “God’s will” Bartholomew’s storm-tossed remains reached the island of Lipari, near Sicily. This would have required God’s will, or at least a flatbed semi, seeing that the Caspian Sea, from whose shores the Armenians supposedly pushed Bartholomew’s coffin, has no connection to the Mediterranean. When Bartholomew’s body reached Lipari, a local volcano, “which did harm to those who lived nearby,” drew back in reverence at “a distance of a mile or more.”

  In the early ninth century, Saracens invaded Sicily, sacked Lipari, and supposedly looted Bartholomew’s tomb. In a legend known to Jacobus, Bartholomew appears to a surviving monk and demands that his scattered bones be collected. The monk angrily asks why he should do anything at all for Bartholomew, “since you allowed us to be overrun and did nothing to help us.” Bartholomew explains that he attempted to protect the people of Lipari, but their sins had grown so brazen he “could no longer obtain pardon for them.” Duly chastised by this questionable theodicy, the monk wonders how he can ever hope to find Bartholomew’s bones amid the greater carnage. Bartholomew promises that if the monk looks for them at night, he will find bones “that shine like fire” among the less blessed ribs and scapulae. The monk does as Bartholomew asks and puts the bones on a ship bound for Benevento, a town in southeastern Italy.

  The greater portion of Bartholomew’s remains did not stay long in Benevento, for in the tenth century Otto requested the bones be sent to Rome, apparently for safekeeping. Eventually, they found their way into Adalbert’s church. The bishop of Benevento seems to have kept some of Bartholomew’s body, for in the eleventh century he raffled Bartholomew’s arm to England’s Edward the Confessor, who, in turn, handed it over to Canterbury Cathedral.*3 None of this bone trade is particularly unusual, and almost all of the apostles exist in fragments, sometimes even in churches devoted to them, where different body parts are scattered around church grounds. Still, the fact that the skinned, tortured Bartholomew of tradition was so frequently dismembered after his death says something about the lucklessness with which he has been perceived through Christian time. Given his gruesome fate, it is probably fitting that today Bartholomew is largely known for his feast day’s connection to a bloody Paris night in 1572, when thousands of Protestant French Huguenots were dragged from their beds and slaughtered in the street by French Catholics, which is known as the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.

  The custodian walked over to the altar, where Bartholomew’s remains were kept in a massive, tub-shaped, lion-head-adorned sarcophagus of porphyry granite. A slightly oversized slab lay atop Bartholomew’s sarcophagus, beside which a batch of fresh sunflowers had been left. These flowers were courtesy of a “pilgrim,” the custodian told me. She went on to explain that Bartholomew had been martyred in Turkey and was considered the patron saint of Spain. This was interesting—which is to say, entirely new—information to me, given that tradition generally holds that Bartholomew was martyred in Armenia and James son of Zebedee is widely acknowledged as Spain’s patron saint. Before I could challenge her, a gaggle of Spanish-speaking tourists, led by an amply chinned, fast-talking guide, entered the church. The custodian and I loitered politely in the church’s wings while the guide gathered his group around the altar. “Besides Spaniards,” the custodian said to me quietly, “we have many tour groups from Lipari, where Bartholomew’s remains were first kept. It is all part of a famous Italian pilgrimage route.”

  The Spanish guide gestured and talked. “I think James is the patron saint of Spain,” I whispered to her.

  “Okay,” she said.

  The Spanish tour guide pointed up at the ceiling and at the walls, all of which were covered with paintings of monks beneath opened heavens, Rembrandtishly dark crucifixions, popes healing lepers, oriental heathens astounded by placid Christian interlopers’ miracles, and one strange painting of an adult Jesus holding himself as an infant. When, finally, the Spaniards left, the custodian pointed out the short, wastepaper-basket-sized chunk of an old Roman column found in front of the altar. An image of a man had been carved onto it. Bartholomew? “No,” she said. “Alberto. It’s from the tenth century.” I asked her if it seemed strange that Adalbert, a martyr with historical ties to Rome, had been usurped by an apostle about whom so little is known. “There are many churches dedicated to Bartholomew,” she said. “It’s a very ancient devotion. He has many visitors, as you just saw.” She stared at his sarcophagus for a moment. Then she shrugged. “But in the end, yes, it’s also a tourist attraction.”

  III.

  At some point in the third or fourth century, a myth emerged among Christians that Bartholomew had traveled to India in the first century and evangelized its people. Ambrose, the fearsome fourth-century bishop of Milan, wrote of “the winged feet” with which Bartholomew reached the fabled land. Eusebius knew of the same legend, which involved the Christian scholar Pantaenus, who was supposedly the first known head of a Christian academy in Alexandria. According to Eusebius, Pantaenus “found that Matthew’s gospel had arrived [in India] before him and was in the hands of some there who had come to know Christ. Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached to them and had left behind Matthew’s account in the actual Hebrew characters.”

  The tradition that Bartholomew traveled to India is an old one, at least among Western Christians. In The Golden Legend, Jacobus de Voragine collated several such legends, describing both Bartholomew’s mission to and supposed death in India. One Jacobus source provides the most elaborate physical description of an apostle found in ancient Christian writings:

  He has black, curly hair, white skin, large eyes, straight nose, his hair covers his ears, his beard long and grizzled, middle height. He wears a white robe with a purple stripe, and a white cloak with four purple gems at the corners. For twenty-six years he has worn these, and they never grow old. His shoes have lasted twenty-six years. He prays a hundred times a day and a hundred times a night. His voice is like a trumpet; angels wait upon him; he is always cheerful, and knows all languages.

  Although this is clearly a description of a lunatic, Bartholomew’s evocation here would guide many later physical representations of him.

  Some scholars view the legends of Bartholomew’s travels in India as a result of a geographical misunderstanding common in ancient times. In this view, “India” was used as shorthand for any distant place, much as “Timbuktu” is used today. Other scholars point out that India was not necessarily so fantastical a clime for early Christians to imagine. Alexander the Great traveled through India as early as the fourth century BCE, as any educated writer at the time would have known, and in The Jewish War one of Josephus’s fanatical Zealot leaders says, “If we do need the testimony of foreigners, let us look to those Indians who profess to practice philosophy.”

  The land to which Bartholomew has been most frequently linked is Armenia, the first nation to make Christianity its official creed, though, once again, the evidence of his travels there is obviously legendary. According to one fancifully exact account, Thaddaeus preached in Armenia for twenty-three years and was joined by Bartholomew around 60 CE. Bartholomew was martyred, according to this traditional chronology, around 68, a few years after Peter and Paul.

  It may be that the early Armenian Church claimed its apostolic connection to Bartholomew for purely tactical reasons, which was a common gambit for many communities whose beliefs ran counter to a hardening Christian orthodoxy. In the case of the Armenian Church, those beliefs concerned what is now called Monophysite Christianity, which holds that Jesus’s humanity and divinity were not separate but united in one cohesive nature. The Western church, which regarded Jesus’s humanit
y and divinity as entirely separate, rejected Monophysite beliefs as anathema, even though its thinkers took their own sweet time in discerning the precise nature of the internal coexistence of Jesus’s humanity and divinity. Monophysitism became the official stance of Armenian Christianity in the middle of the fifth century, after the Council of Chalcedon, which granted equal stature to Jesus’s human and divine selves. Religious historians, however, would be well advised to thank their lucky stars for the Armenian Church, which translated and preserved an impressive amount of early theological work, written by the giants of first- and second-century Christianity and later destroyed by the forces of orthodoxy. Several of these texts, important works by Irenaeus among them, today survive only in Armenian.

  IV.

  On the Tiber island, Bartholomew’s young custodian was eager to discuss an easel-propped painting that stood behind the sarcophagus. The painting, a recent commission, had been done in the floating, allegorical Byzantine style and depicted rows and rows of Christian martyrs. Above the angels hovered Bartholomew and Adalbert carrying a banner that read, in Latin, “We are all one thing,” which is to say, Christian. As though to illustrate this point, the martyrs depicted in the painting came in every age and gender and size and color. All wore white robes and all carried palm fronds, the traditional symbol of the martyr. I asked the custodian what was the big deal about this fascinatingly unremarkable painting. “Important things are happening in our church,” she said. In the jubilee year of 2000, for example, Pope John Paul II announced that Bartholomew on the Island would from now on devote itself to celebrating the martyrs of every branch of Christianity, with a keen focus on newer martyrs, such as the Catholic priests who died in the Holocaust, the Russian Orthodox priests who died in the gulag, and even “Protestant martyrs,” she said, like Martin Luther King Jr.

  Behind the martyr painting was a much larger painting that depicted Bartholomew’s martyrdom. It was a nasty piece of work, showing the apostle, tied to a tree, being circled by fearsomely mustached, knife-wielding, dark-skinned men in turbans. Amazingly, this was not even the most offensive image I had seen of Bartholomew’s martyrdom. The most offensive image I had seen was painted by Nicolò Circignani—a sixteenth-century analogue to the torture-horror filmmaker Eli Roth—which is found in Rome’s Chiesa dei Santi Nereo e Achilleo. The image depicted pagans in the bloodily nightmarish middle stages of tearing off Bartholomew’s skin, with one pagan bracing himself against a tree for better pulling leverage. Circignani’s work savored the spectacle of bloody apostolic martyrdom, and I was hardly the only one troubled by it. On a visit to Rome, Charles Dickens was so disgusted by Circignani’s visions of apostolic murder he could hardly stand to look at them.

  The custodian checked her cell phone for incoming text messages. It was getting close to lunchtime, Italy’s three-hour midday bacchanal of triumphant do-nothingism, and she was meeting a friend. But I had another question for her. With Christianity triumphant, and Christians able to worship freely in Rome for many centuries, why this fixation on martyrdom? Had this fixation not done enough damage to the faith already? Why continue to roll in the entrails of the martyred?

  Several early Christians attempted to warn their fellow believers about valorizing martyrdom. Origen, whose father was a martyr, was ambivalent, concerned that consciously seeking out death from oppressors was a form of suicide. Clement of Alexandria disliked martyrdom, because it required another man to sin. Slowly, and then definitively, these views lost out. Consider a letter written by the disciples of the famously martyred early Christian leader Polycarp, which was written in the first half of the second century. This letter—the first recorded description of Christian martyrdom—proclaims their martyred leader’s bones to be “more precious than stones of great price, more splendid than gold.” Or consider Ignatius, who wrote the following to the Christians of Rome in the early second century while on his own way to martyrdom: “Let me be food for the wild beasts, through whom I can reach God.” The only Christian who would dare come between him and death, Ignatius wrote, was one who “hated” him. Or consider Tertullian, writing around the turn of the third century: “Does God covet man’s blood?…I might venture to affirm that he does.” Tertullian went on to refer to martyrdom as “a second new birth” and, sounding more than a little Islamist, cautioned the pagan magistrates of Carthage that the “oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.”

  Those who die for their faith will always be admired by their co-religionists. But in a culture in which faith is normative rather than embattled, fascination with those who die for their faith quickly loses its devotional aspects. As far back as the second century, Marcus Aurelius made this point in his Meditations, criticizing Christians for their “obstinacy,” the undignified and “tragic show” they put on, in their lust for martyrdom. While some Christians were martyred for their faith, and even thrown to lions, the earliest Christian accounts of martyrdom fail to make clear one interesting wrinkle: killing men and women for perceived apostasy was highly uncommon among pagans, and most ancient-world authorities were inclined to be lenient toward Christians, many of whom, like Ignatius, demanded death. Martyrdom, then, is a difference-obliterating mind-set that leaves death as the only thing to venerate. Dying in Buchenwald, assassination by South American death squads, starving in the gulag, suffering the bullet of a racist Memphis sniper—did these fates have anything measurably in common with the supposed martyrdoms of Bartholomew, Adalbert, and Polycarp? If not, why did this church want to pretend that they did?

  The custodian would hear none of this. “Roman Christianity is the story of martyrdom,” she said, clearly irritated by my questions. “This church’s goal is to remind the world that martyrdom is still going on. Seventy million Christians have been killed for their faith, and more than half of them died in the last one hundred years.” She took me to the small shrines along the church’s western wing and stopped at the reliquary of a Salvadoran priest who was shot in the head by Communists in the 1980s. On display was a photograph of him at his desk, slumped over a book, the bullet wound behind his ear hauntingly small. The book he was reading when he was assassinated was on display here, as was his stole. She then bid me to follow her to the church’s most recently installed reliquary, which was dedicated to some Anglican priests murdered by Malaysian guerrillas in 2001. Inside the display case was a blood-spotted cloth belt and a walking stick. “You see?” the custodian said, clearly convinced that these modern relics proved her point. Without martyrs, there would be no relics, and without relics we would not be standing here.

  A platter of candles was nearby, half of which were lit. As the candles wept wax tears, their stubborn little flames quivered in a draft I could not quite feel.

  * * *

  *1 Actually, it is likely that Claudius banished only the agitating ringleaders of Rome’s Jewish unrest—which is to say, its Jewish Christians. To ban “all the Jews,” as Acts has it, would have been impossible. As Roman citizens, they would have had to be tried individually before banishment.

  *2 Incredibly, the first raft of apocryphal Christian material was not available in any English translation until 1727, though certain popular legends inspired by the Apocrypha were widely familiar to Christians.

  *3 This accounts for the apostle’s unusually strong veneration in England, where many dozens of churches, and one of its best hospitals, are devoted to him.

  HISTORESAI: ON PAUL

  * * *

  GALATIANS • AGAINST CEPHAS • PAUL & THE PILLARS • THE GENTILE QUESTION • PAUL’S AUDACITY • THE FATE OF THE JERUSALEM CHURCH • THE WAY • EBION • A CURIOUS DISTINCTION • “YOUR LAW”

  I.

  From a purely historical perspective, Paul’s letter to the Galatians—which argues to a confused, apparently skeptical audience that Christians were no longer bound by Jewish ritualistic thinking—might be the most significant work of the New Testament. Among other things
, it enshrines for all history significant tensions between two of Christianity’s first and most prominent figures: Paul, the Pharisee turned Christian who preached in the name of Jesus across a wide swath of the Mediterranean world; and Cephas/Peter, the supposed leader of the Twelve Apostles. Because of this, Galatians has proved, for many believers, a disquieting document indeed.

  According to the scholar J. Louis Martyn, reading Galatians is “like coming in on a play as the curtain is rising on the third or fourth act,” for “what has already occurred has involved a number of persons in addition to Paul and the Galatians.” Among the players are Paul, Cephas/Peter, James the brother of Jesus, and missionaries the Jerusalem church has dispatched in an apparent attempt to keep watch on Paul.

  The letter—written sometime in the later 50s, before any gospel we know of had been composed—is addressed to the “churches of Galatia,” which suggests that the epistle-triggering crisis was not centered on any one church but rather spread evenly throughout the region, which today would be much of south-central Turkey. The Galatian Christians were Hellenized Gentiles who, until Paul’s missionary outreach, had probably been pagans; it is unlikely that their community contained many Jews. Ethnically speaking, they were probably Celts (the Latin word for “Celt” is Gallus) who had gradually migrated eastward from their homeland in the European heartland’s Danube basin. Celts moving in the opposite direction had also claimed the British Isles and Gaul, which, like Galatia, was named for them.

  Most scholars place Paul in Greece or Macedonia when he received news of his Galatian converts’ upset. What happened was this: Some time after Paul left the Galatians, they were visited by Christians who still maintained Jewish ceremonial rites such as circumcision. These visitors, in turn, demanded that the Galatians obey the same rites. Paul disagreed, believing Gentile Christians coming into the faith were not required to obey aspects of Jewish Law such as circumcision. Paul’s letter was intended to be read aloud to every Galatian church; Paul himself was probably mindful that his circumcision-favoring opponents would still be among the Galatians as the letter was read, which adds an extra talon or two to its already sharp tone. The writing of Galatians was apparently such a personally upsetting occasion for Paul that near the end of the short letter he pushes his scribe out of the way and takes from him his pen: “See what large letters I make when I am writing in my own hand!” The conflict between Paul and these rival missionaries had obviously been boiling for some time. That the Galatian churches were now affected by it was, for Paul, the last straw.