Apostle

by Tom Bissell

  II.

  Arman and I arrived in Patras too late to do much more than drink. We ended our night in a barren, hauntingly joyless club called the Disco Room. When, at 3:00 a.m., we staggered out of the Disco Room and looked down toward the end of Patras’s major thoroughfare, Agios Andreou, we saw a glowing X-shaped cross that distinguished the square of Patras’s flagship church, also named Agios Andreou. Arman, after carefully contemplating the X-shaped cross, asked if I saw it, too. Arman, who was Jewish, seemed noticeably relieved when I said that I did.

  The X-shaped cross is known in heraldic terms as a saltire, though it is more commonly called Saint Andrew’s cross. As such, it is found on any number of flags, many from lands that claim a connection to the supposed mission of Andrew. The flag of Scotland is emblazoned with Andrew’s cross, as is the Union Jack, as is the flag of the Russian navy. Andrew himself is the patron saint of Romania, Luxembourg, Ukraine, Russia, Scotland, and, of course, Greece, where he is most fervently honored. In Greek, andreas means something akin to “masculine,” “manly,” or “brave.” One scholar calls the name “very rare” among Jews, and many have wondered whether Andrew, like his brother Simon Peter, had a Jewish name the gospels do not record.

  According to John’s gospel, Andrew was the first called member of the Twelve, after which he brought into Jesus’s circle Peter, who would become the most famous of all the apostles. According to Mark, Andrew is with Jesus as he begins his public career in Capernaum, after which he enters “the house of Peter and Andrew” and heals Peter’s ailing mother-in-law. Later in Mark, when Jesus goes to raise from the dead the daughter of Jairus, “one of the leaders of the synagogue,” he specifically forbids everyone to follow him “except Peter, James, and John”—apostles who have all received special nicknames from Jesus and who will later be the only witnesses to the signal demonstrations of his power: the raising of Jairus’s daughter, the transfiguration, the teaching on the Mount of Olives (wherein Jesus prophesies the destruction of the Temple), and Jesus’s pre-arrest agony at Gethsemane. Despite being Peter’s brother, Andrew is denied access to this “inner three” circle of disciples.

  Matthew, for his part, mentions Andrew only once outside his list of the Twelve, and Luke mentions Andrew only within his list of the Twelve. Why Andrew all but disappears from the synoptic gospel story as it developed from Mark is one of the New Testament’s many narrative mysteries. For unknown reasons, John’s gospel contains a relatively large portion of unique Andrew material. The gospel first places him in Bethany, some eighty miles away from Capernaum—a walking journey of several days—where he is an apparent member of the group surrounding John the Baptist. After the Baptist hails a walking-by Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” John tells us, two of the Baptist’s disciples immediately begin to follow Jesus; one of these young men is Andrew.

  After spending a day with Jesus, Andrew seeks out his brother Peter and tells him, “We have found the Messiah,” and brings him before Jesus. Following this, Andrew is narratively absent from John until Jesus’s feeding of the five thousand, when he is said to point out the nearby “boy who has five barley loaves and two fish,” which Jesus proceeds to use as miraculous raw material. The next time Andrew appears in John’s gospel is when “some Greeks” (citizens, probably not coincidentally, of Andrew’s future spiritual protectorate) approach Philip and proclaim their interest in meeting Jesus. John’s dogged narration of what happens next (“Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus”) is the last of Andrew’s gospel appearances.

  One popular Christian writer imagines Peter and Andrew as placidly accepting their assigned roles—one glorious and honored, the other obscure and sidelined—in the gospel tradition. “To be fair to both,” he writes, “let us say that Peter became the fisherman of men en masse and Andrew was a fisher for individuals.” Yet Andrew’s few gospel appearances do seem to mark him as a mediating figure. Andrew introduces Peter to Jesus, points out the boy with the loaves and fishes, and handles Jesus’s Greek well-wishers on behalf of Philip. To indulge in the dutiful anachronisms of modern popular Christianity, the Andrew of the gospels comes off as the Twelve’s press secretary: invisible but for when Jesus needs him to step forth and make his talents known.

  III.

  Arman and I spent a good portion of our first morning in Patras emetically acquainting ourselves with the various porcelain basins of our hotel room’s lavatory. After these horrors subsided, the only thing I could keep down was grapefruit. Eventually, I asked Arman if he wanted to join me for a walk down Agios Andreou to Saint Andrew’s Church. His answer was a complicatedly silent stare. I set off alone.

  Agios Andreou was a street of abrupt and decisive phases. Near the port of Patras’s landing area, for instance, there was an overabundance of banks. These gave way to the bars and cafés Arman and I had crawled the night before. This gave way to furniture stores and gas stations and solar-panel depots and other motley concerns. A gigantic cruise ship—a nine-story neighborhood set afloat—was leaving port and, as I walked, almost kept pace with me; it seemed, comically, as though this ship were following me. In the bright sunlight, the ship’s shiny metal was as hard to look at as a huge white sun. (At night, these ships looked like astonishingly massive light sculptures floating through the interstellar silence of space.) Once the ship pulled ahead, I had a clear view of the Bay of Patras, home to many large pointy islets and islands that, from a distance, resembled Matterhorns of forested rock.

  Much of Patras was closed because of a recently concluded festival that involved three days of celebration and a week of recovery; an air of postcoital exhaustion hovered low over everything. One old man stopped to ask me what I thought of Greece. When I told him that I already liked it much better than Italy, he laughed, shook my hand, and then began talking about his daughter. There was “not so much good jobs,” in Greece, he told me, especially for “the young Greek woman.” (It would get worse.) He asked, “In America has good jobs for the young Greek woman?”

  Saint Andrew’s square was big and empty enough to presently host two games of pickup soccer. The church complex comprised three buildings: the old Saint Andrew’s Church, a low yellow-white building with a red-tile roof and few windows; a small, slender four-story structure next to the old Saint Andrew’s, which faced the ocean and appeared to have once been some kind of sea-monitoring lookout tower; and the new Saint Andrew’s, a large, forcefully symmetrical anthology of domes, towers, and right angles. If one only glanced at its large central blue dome and the eleven smaller blue domes that surrounded it and the busily designed latticework that distinguished its eight full towers, one could not be blamed for mistaking Saint Andrew’s Church for a mosque.*2

  I approached the church’s ocean-facing entrance, which was typically used by parishioners, and passed through the shade of a few sharp-leafed palms planted along the square’s perimeter. Only one tree marked the square proper, in the shade of which a Romany woman sat and begged.

  In the early twentieth century, according to the official church guidebook, Patras announced “an international competition for the elaboration of the architectural design” for a new church. The new Saint Andrew’s Church, as it stands, adhered to the cross-in-square design commonly employed by the architects of Byzantine churches and still often used today. The architect of Saint Andrew’s Church, however, was a Frenchman. The church guidebook admits that the Frenchman’s original design led to “a violent criticism,” seeing that this “imaginative and indeed imposing design” did not meet “the requirements of the Orthodox Byzantine style. Besides, it was obvious that the French architect…was influenced by the Western architectural style.” Today, however, the people of Patras are justifiably proud of Saint Andrew’s Church. Able to accommodate seven thousand worshippers, it is the largest church in Greece.

  The sign that greeted me as I entered read, THANK YOU FOR ENTERING THE CHURCH PROPERLY DRESSED. Greek Orthodox beliefs were often extremely con
servative; I hoped no strictures had been placed on denim and T-shirts. In the church’s shallow narthex, a perturbed man wearing a mustard-colored sweater, green slacks, and a belt as high as his rib cage approached me, his hand demandingly extended. “Money,” he said.

  As I reached into my pocket for the entrance fee, I looked down at the floor mosaic, noting among the otherwise impeccably Christian symbols and designs two highly unusual animals. The first was a rabbit, historically avoided in most churches because of the Latinate similarity of cuniculus (rabbit) and cunnus (cunt). The rabbit, in Christian allegory, became a symbol of sexual prolixity, which is evident today in our phrase “breeding like rabbits.” The second unusual animal was an octopus, for which many months of scouring dictionaries and encyclopedias of Christian art would fail to exhume a single exegetical mention.

  IV.

  The official guide to Saint Andrew’s Church claims that its namesake’s missionary travels were a “herculean undertaking, even by modern standards.” According to the church guide, Andrew began in Bithynia (in modern-day Turkey) and then moved on to the cities Sinope, Amisus, and Trapezus. From here, he journeyed less comfortably to Scythia and into the Caucasus regions, before ending up in Ukraine, where he supposedly planted a cross at the site of a Kiev church today devoted to him. After this, he backtracked to Byzantium, where he founded its first Christian see, allowing Constantinople its later status as the patriarchate of the Eastern Orthodox faith.*3 His next stops were Thrace, Macedonia, and Thessaly, before, finally, he returned to Greece. “The coming of Andrew to our city,” the official Patras guide says, “is evidenced by absolutely authentic old Christian sources.”

  Yet many early Andrew traditions place him exclusively in Scythia. According to Eusebius, writing in the fourth century and working off information he received from Origen (the first of the church fathers to mention Andrew), “Thomas…was chosen for Parthia, Andrew for Scythia, John for Asia, where he remained till his death at Ephesus.” Scythia might have served as a kind of ultima Thule of anti-Christian hostility and as absolute rhetorical proof of the apostles’ devotion. At the height of its influence several hundred years before the birth of Jesus, Scythia encompassed part of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, Russia, and even Poland. By the first and second centuries CE, however, Scythian-controlled territory had shrunk to a fraction of its former size; the Scythians themselves had become a subject people severed from their marauder-nomad origins. The writers of apocryphal Christian literature involving Andrew, which Origen and Eusebius were clearly familiar with, persisted in portraying the Scythians as the same beastly tribe that had once terrified Herodotus.*4

  The traditions of Andrew’s having founded the mother churches of the Russian Orthodox and Byzantine faith developed too late, and out of a too-obvious need for fast-tracked authority, to be taken seriously. According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints, the tradition of Andrew’s founding the Byzantine patriarchate (which does not appear before the fourth century) was deeply “connected with the prestige attached to his claimed relics,” which the Christians of Constantinople believed they held. Andrew’s connection to Kiev (which does not appear before the ninth century) is likely due to its church’s desire to imagine for itself venerable Byzantine heritage. Andrew’s obscure prominence (or prominent obscurity) as the little-discussed brother of the most famous apostle made him the perfect founder for a certain kind of early Christian community, particularly those, like Kiev’s, that were less affected by the theological debates and leadership crises that marked the development of Western Christianity.

  In time, however, a small, struggling group of westerly Christians in the British Isles staked its claim to Andrew. There were Christians in Britain as early as the fourth century, but Andrew was not imagined as having evangelized that land until many centuries later. An early fourteenth-century declaration of the Scottish faith cited Andrew, “the first to be an apostle,” as its church’s founder and spiritual father. Roman Catholicism, of course, claimed Peter. As tensions between the Scottish and the Roman Catholic churches grew (they would break relations entirely in 1560), Andrew, as Peter’s brother, expanded in mythic prominence among his Scottish claimants.

  When the official guide to Saint Andrew’s Church speaks of Andrew’s death in Patras as having been confirmed by “absolutely authentic old Christian sources,” it is speaking primarily of The Acts of Andrew, an apocryphal work many early Christians resisted due to its unsavory championing in heterodox circles. Despite that, Saint Andrew’s Church was decorated with numerous scenes drawn from this strange work. As I looked about the narthex, I noticed a man clad in black from ankle to Adam’s apple—unbuttoned black sport coat over a black undershirt, bell-bottomishly roomy black pantaloons—emerge from a side room and wander behind the desk of the ticket-taking area. He was either a Greek Orthodox priest or the Prince of Darkness’s personal assistant. He began to obsessively straighten the book and pamphlet shelves behind the ticket-taking partition. Here was a man who had made the church’s tiniest matters of upkeep a personal concern. “Father,” I said, moving toward him. “Excuse me?”

  The priest turned to me. He was a young man with a beard that made him seem decades older. I had seen other Greek Orthodox priests, and they, too, had sported large beards, but his was a transcendent achievement in hirsutism. The longer I looked at his beard, the less beard-like it seemed. Thick and frizzy, it was more apron than beard.

  I asked the father if he was available to provide a tour of the church.

  My request seemed to surprise him. “Where are you from?” he asked.

  As I told him, he raised his hand and admitted with a quick laugh that he did not understand English well. I slowly explained that I was a writer from the United States interested in Andrew. The father leaned forward and tilted his ear toward me while keeping his eyes fixed on the marble floor. His face was distinguished by a concerning number of dark brown moles; a milky, ripe pimple graced the center of his forehead.

  “Andreas,” he said, once I had finished talking. “Yes. Andreas here. Come. Church first, then Andreas.”

  Father Spiridon began our tour by asking me if I thought his church was beautiful. I told him that it was among the most beautiful churches I had seen. We stopped beneath the wooden chandelier hung from the impressively high dome on equally impressively long chains. With only a dozen feet between it and the church floor, this chandelier resembled a piece of lowered theatrical scenery. The decorative focus was a two-headed eagle that sat perched atop the chandelier. (Patriarchs of the Eastern Church often wore similar two-headed eagles in necklace form.) This eagle, Father Spiridon told me, represented two things: “People and God. One. One people, one God, one Jesus.”

  That sounded like three things, I decided not to say. Instead, I waved my hand across the church’s many freestanding chairs, all of which lacked kneelers. I knew that in many Eastern Orthodox churches men and women are separated during the service. I asked Father Spiridon if that was the case here. He shrugged and made an equivocating hand gesture. “No,” he said, “because now the church a little…free. More free than before.”

  “You support that change?”

  He shook his head, not understanding my question.

  “Yes to change?” I asked, my thumb up.

  He nodded. “Change good,” he said, putting up his own thumb. “Yes.” As for the freestanding chairs, Father Spiridon explained it this way: “No chair in Orthodox Church in Russia, Ukraine, Serbia. But in Greece chair.” With that potential sticking point past us, he directed my attention to the church’s dome. “Look now.”

  Gazing omnipotently down at us from the dome was the Byzantine Jesus. His great brown bun of hair was parted smartly down the middle. He wore majestic white robes, held a book, and was encircled by rings of angels and saints. Far beneath him, along the dome’s edge, was a smaller figure of Andrew on an X-shaped cross. What stayed with you, when looking up at the Byzantine Jesus, was the face. The expres
sion of the typical Byzantine Jesus ranged from blank to disappointed to blankly disappointed. It was, almost always, a face devoid of love or concern.

  “Pantokrator,” Father Spiridon said.

  According to the precepts of Eastern Orthodox church design, the dome must always be occupied by an image of the so-called Christ Pantokrator, and Christ Pantokrator must always be represented in a certain way: on his heavenly throne, surrounded by carefully arranged angels, iconographically unchallenged by the local figure (in this case, Andrew) to whom the church was devoted, holding the Law, and exuding the general air of being, in the words of one writer, “more emperor than friend.” An apt if inexact Greek-to-English translation of Pantokrator: Christ the Everything Ruler. Christ the Everything Ruler was certainly not the Jesus of the gospels. He was, instead, a calculatedly imperial warrior Jesus as imagined by the heirs of Constantine.

  Father Spiridon directed my attention to the semi-hemispherical dome of the apse above the church sanctuary. “Maria,” he said. Just as the Pantokrator had to be in the dome, the apse of most Eastern Orthodox churches had to be occupied by Mary, and, below her, the Twelve. In many traditions, Mary’s head had to be covered by the maphorion, a veil native to Greek rather than first-century Palestinian culture. This church’s apsidal Mary was depicted as stretching her arms protectively over a modern Patras and its coastal waters, on the cursive waves of which bobbed (rather incongruously) a tiny white cruise ship. Thanks to an ovular cutaway, the fetal Jesus—probably the most upsetting Jesus I had ever laid eyes on—could be seen within Mary’s egg-shaped womb. Fetuses do not typically have hair; this fetal Jesus not only had hair but a widow’s peak. Most fetuses do not wear clothes; this fetal Jesus wore several layers of robes. This was another convention of Eastern representation. While the art of Western Christianity evolved to allow for fully and fragilely human representations of the infant Jesus, the art of Eastern Christianity did not. Its infant and fetal Jesus was almost always depicted as a miniaturized and rather freakish mini-man. The one exception to this was the so-called Glykophilousa Virgin, in which Mary holds the baby Jesus to her cheek, which became allowable in the East only due to the image’s heartstring-pulling popularity.