by Tom Bissell
All five Acts were, in some manner, canonized by the Manichaeans, a faith instituted by one Mani (216–276 CE), the Babylon-born son of Jewish Christian or Ebionite parents who frequently referred to himself as an “Apostle of Jesus Christ.” It is believed the Manichaeans used the noncanonical acts in lieu of the canonical Acts of the Apostles. This is significant because few Near Eastern religions proved more infuriating to the Christians of the third and fourth and fifth and sixth and seventh centuries than Manichaeism, a theological stitch-up of various Christian, Jewish, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian tropes. Eusebius judged the faith a “demon-inspired heresy” and “deadly poison” that was “brought from Persia” and “infected our own world.” The Acts’ damning association with Manichaeism provides one explanation for Eusebius’s ferocious condemnation.
The stories these works contained were nevertheless important to many church fathers, because they were virtually the only information they had as to what the apostles were up to after Jesus’s ascension. Most scholars believe the original versions of the apocryphal Acts were written in the second and third centuries, with later additions to the texts cropping up in the intervening centuries.
No complete Acts of Andrew exists. The sixth-century bishop Gregory of Tours found an apparently complete Latin translation of it, which he deemed “excessive” in its prolixity. “And of this,” he wrote, “I thought good to extract and set out the ‘virtues’ only, omitting all that bred weariness.” What he expunged included several of its miracle stories, which Gregory deemed too fantastical,*8 along with passages that praised celibacy and denounced military service, which necessitated sacrifices to pagan gods. In The Acts of Andrew, the hero’s death requires many pages to transpire; Gregory deals with Andrew’s passing in three fleet paragraphs. This gloss of what Gregory called “a book of miracles of the holy apostle Andrew” is today the guide scholars use to reassemble various other extant fragments of the work, which survive in Greek, Latin, Coptic, and Armenian.
An important part of The Acts of Andrew, that of its hero’s martyrdom, has no fewer than eight distinct versions, the most important of which is Armenian. It floated around the ancient Christian world independent of the Acts of which it was once part, though some scholars have argued that Andrew’s Acts and martyrdom were joined later in the development of the Andrew tradition. Another work that has a clear but uncertain relation to The Acts of Andrew is The Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals. Dennis Ronald MacDonald, who has closely studied the texts, believes they were once the same work. This, he argues, explains much of the confusion surrounding the church fathers’ apparent confusion as to where Andrew was active as a missionary.
The unknown author of The Acts of Andrew was apparently influenced by the earlier Acts of Peter, which survives in a single fragment. Both open with one apostle (in Peter, Paul; in Andrew, the Judas-replacing apostle Matthias) before suddenly refocusing on the apostle for whom the texts are named. In Peter, its namesake receives the shipboard aid of one captain Theon; in Andrew, its namesake receives the shipboard aid of a bona fide captain Theon, which is to say Jesus himself in disguise. In The Acts of Peter, Peter converts many of his jailers to Christianity; in The Acts of Andrew, Andrew does the same. Both Peter and Andrew, finally, request in their respective Acts to be crucified in a manner different from that of Jesus.
VII.
It was time to see the chapel area that contained the supposed relics of Andrew, perhaps the most traveled relics of any of the Twelve. One tradition, recorded by Jerome, has the relics being removed from Patras and taken to Constantinople’s Church of the Holy Apostles, which was consecrated in 356, as a way to compete with the Roman church and its collection of Peter relics. Some of Andrew’s relics were, in turn, removed from Constantinople in the fifth century by the legendary saint Regulus, a former resident of Patras and the first bishop of the Scottish church. Regulus was told by an angel to carry Andrew’s remains to “the ends of the earth.” After being shipwrecked off the coast of Scotland, he buried his share of Andrew relics at what is now St. Andrew’s, thereby altering the fate of golf forever. Supposedly, in the early thirteenth century, Andrew’s relics were removed from Constantinople, possibly by Catholic crusaders, and sent to Amalfi, Italy. In 1461, a Byzantine tyrant sent Andrew’s skull to Pope Pius II in Rome, and a painting of Pius receiving the skull can still be found in the chapel beside Peter’s tomb in the Vatican. The skull would eventually take an honored spot atop one of the four gargantuan pillar reliquaries placed around the high altar of Saint Peter’s. Another Roman church, Sant’ Andrea al Quirinale, designed by Bernini and containing Guillaume Courtois’s seventeenth-century painting of Andrew’s martyrdom—perhaps the most beautiful painting of its kind—once claimed to have had a few of Andrew’s relics, though my visit there turned up nothing. In 1964, Pope Paul VI returned the Vatican’s collection of Andrew relics (a finger, a cranial fragment, and small bits of the cross to which Andrew was supposedly tied) to the patriarch of Constantinople, who restored them to their rightful place of adoration in Patras. Paul’s gesture was intended to repair relations between Roman Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church, and it probably came as startling news to the Christians of Amalfi, as its duomo—which, like Amalfi itself, is dedicated to Andrew—holds in its crypt its own purported Andrew skull.
Although Father Spiridon had not yet been born when Andrew’s relics were returned to Patras, I asked him if people here still talked about it. “Many priest still talk about that day,” he said—one of his infrequent bursts of nearly perfect conversational English. The local guidebook to Patras puts it this way: “The relics were restored again to our city during an official celebration which occurred in the presence of 31 archbishops and a high-rank mission from the Vatican…502 years following the delivery of the Saint’s skull to Pope Pius I.” Moreover, the guidebook claimed, the relics of Andrew served as a force that “shields, protects and preserves our city as well as the Greek Nation against all perils and situations.” The Greeks’ adoration of relics was, among the nations of western Europe, the watermark of a certain kind of religious credulity. They were much more credulous about their relics than, say, German and French Christians and slightly less credulous than, say, Italian and Spanish Christians. I wondered, unkindly, if this did not go some distance in accounting for the relative modernity of these nations.
The guidebook also referred to some unspecified “damage” done to the original reliquary—which was made of gold, shaped like a human face, and several hundred years old—in which Andrew’s remains had arrived from Rome. One of Patras’s less stable citizens was not able to tolerate the head-shaped reliquary and, shortly after its arrival, seized the object, removed its contents, and dashed it against the floor. In this action, the deranged man had his reasons: Greek Orthodox doctrine has on the books an ancient forbiddance of three-dimensional representations of the human face. Thus did Patras, in living memory, experience a one-man revival of Iconoclasm. When I asked Father Spiridon about the smashed reliquary, his mouth and eyes and nostrils all identically widened and, just as quickly, contracted. Suddenly he looked very tired. I dropped it.
There was a lengthy queue of people waiting their turn to seek Andrew’s blessing. Father Spiridon and I walked around them by traversing the reliquary’s parclose. As we looked upon the pride of his church, Father Spiridon offered no tour guidery. The reliquary was enclosed by low white marble walls, with two narrow gaps to allow in visitors, and surrounded by silver candelabras. Above the reliquary, held up by several thick green columns, was the Canopy of Martyrdom, its bottom decorative edge so precisely carved and delicately perforated that it resembled the work of some nanomachine sculptor.
At the center of the reliquary itself was a keg-shaped stand, on it a glass case of bank-teller-window density. Behind the glass was a silver canister shaped not like a human face but like Saint Andrew’s Church itself. This replacement vessel was engraved with traditional
scenes of Andrew’s life. For several minutes, Father Spiridon and I watched Andrew’s visitors approach the relics. Many of them scribbled out a message on a slip of church-provided paper, folded it, and stuffed it into a slot beneath the case. One old man in a suit and tie wrote a long message and left immediately, while an old peasant woman wearing multiple shawls wrote no message but kissed the glass. A man who had what appeared to be leprosy—his hair falling out in clumps, his nose peeled, a good portion of his cheek reduced to open red sore—prayed before the relics for the longest time, not surprisingly. A pair of teenage girls earnestly wrote out their prayers and hurried away.
When the line thinned, Father Spiridon kissed the glass, crossed himself, and gestured for me to join him. We stood there looking at the silver canister for at least half a minute. The only thought that occurred to me was why “gentle Andrew,” as Patras’s guidebook calls him, had served throughout Christian history as one of the most martial apostles. Crusades-era chronicles include frequent mentions of him, sometimes turning up as an apparition to lead lost crusaders to safety, sometimes materializing in the middle of battle to enthusiastically massacre Muslims. Scottish Christianity, too, is filled with warlike Andrew omens. One legend claims that on the eve of a decisive eighth-century battle against the English a Scottish king named Hungus was visited in a dream by Andrew, who promised him victory. During the battle itself, an X-shaped cross appeared in the sky.
When I told Father Spiridon I was finished, he guided me around the Canopy of Martyrdom to a large bronze case bolted to the church wall. It contained pieces of the cross to which Andrew had supposedly been tied and was, naturally, X shaped. The case’s glass panels allowed an interior view of plush maroon padding and chunks of what appeared to be driftwood. The best I could say about these relics—which arrived in 1979 from Marseille, where they had been stored since the thirteenth century—was that they did not appear to have endured two thousand (or one thousand, or two hundred) years of disintegrating wear. I asked Father Spiridon about this, and for the first and only time that day he shrugged in a way that indicated that even he had his doubts about their authenticity.
We had two final stops to make. The first was, in Father Spiridon’s words, “old church Andreas.” The local guidebook claims that the church had been built on “the exact place” where Andrew had been crucified. According to legend, it had also been the site of a temple built in honor of Demeter. A nearby wellspring was part of this temple’s oracle, a wellspring now called the Well of Saint Andrew.
We walked inside Old Saint Andrew’s through a doorway draped with carpets that bore the image of the apostle crucified. The air had a crowded, librarial mustiness, which was heightened by the sight of several Greek Orthodox priests in their black habits and strange hats walking silently about on the thickly carpeted floor. The church’s murals looked somehow submerged and faded, and the ceiling was cracked in several places. The one area in which Old Saint Andrew’s surpassed New Saint Andrew’s was its frankly impossible number of icons, which a number of old Greek women were visiting, and kissing, one by one.
Everyone within the church turned to greet Father Spiridon lovingly, and he was intercepted for a blessing half a dozen times. During one such blessing, I wandered away and found Andrew’s sub-reliquary near the church sanctuary, behind a wooden throne. This smaller reliquary was, like its big brother next door, silver and surrounded by a marble shrine. A plaque read, EX DIGITO. The finger of Andrew. Father Spiridon soon rejoined me and explained that the finger had once been kept at the monastery on Mount Athos, a semiautonomous monastic republic given to a Christianity harsh enough to forbid anything female—animals included—to set foot anywhere near it.
“You look Athos?” Father Spiridon asked me.
By now, I had come to speak fairly good Greeklish and understood that he was asking me if I had ever been to Mount Athos. “No,” I said.
“Come,” he said, and led me to what I gathered was his favorite icon: Mary and Jesus, their bodies cast in effulgent silver. Father Spiridon directed my attention to the blood coming out of Mary’s cheek. “This Athos,” he said. “Very beautiful. Go to Athos and look. Athos have this. Original. Long ago Turkey people, bad people, Mussulman people—”
Father Spiridon, no!
“—they take original. Look blood? They do to Maria.” He made a stabbing motion. My best reconstruction: bad Turkey Mussulmen attacked Athos, stabbed the original icon, after which it bled. This was a replica of that mugged icon.
We went outside for our final stop: the Well of Andrew. It was surrounded by a black gate and covered by a wooden canopy. Father Spiridon explained that an open, pleasant area next to the well was where Andrew had actually been crucified. Before we descended into the well, I asked if I could stand at the spot of Andrew’s crucifixion. Father Spiridon sighed and extended his hand, as if to say, Go ahead, weirdo.
There were, I supposed, worse places to have been crucified than this wind-strafed, seaside pulpit. The view was not quite panoramic, but I could see a good portion of the sea and up into the hills above Patras’s lower quadrant. Of all the apostolic crucifixions, Andrew’s is among the least historically preposterous, in that the earliest crucifixions for which we have evidence took place in Athens in the seventh century BCE. Rome apparently first learned of crucifixion from the Carthaginians during the Punic Wars.
Crucifixion seems to have begun as a way to humiliate the already dead; the Romans were the first to make it punishment in and of itself. Its punitive aspects were a by-product of crucifixion’s actual intention, which was to psychologically terrorize the families and friends and allies of the crucified. In the Roman world, crucifixion was mostly applied to the lower classes (an obscure reference to the socio-economics of crucifixion can be found in Tacitus, where he speaks of a man being “executed as slaves usually are”) or political offenders or both. The first record we have of Jews practicing crucifixion comes from Josephus, in which he writes of the Hasmonaean ruler Alexander Jannaeus, who ordered eight hundred captive rebels to be crucified in the middle of Jerusalem, after which he “butchered their wives and children before their eyes.” Josephus lamented the “brutality” and “impiety” of crucifixion, as it was not a Jewish form of punishment, and even the New Testament (Hebrews 12:2) speaks of crucifixion’s obvious “shame.” The second-century anti-Christian writer Celsus referred to “the disgraceful circumstances” in which Jesus died, and one apparently popular pagan form of anti-Christian mockery was a bit of graffito that depicted a crucified donkey.
Near the end of the Jewish War, the Romans were crucifying so many Jews, as many as five hundred a day, that the entire region ran out of wood. For all of this, the archaeological evidence supporting the practice of crucifixion is astonishingly weak. Only one body, out of the thousands that have been recovered, shows clear evidence of having been crucified in Roman Palestine. The remains were found in 1968, in a tomb just outside Jerusalem proper, the victim’s heel bone driven straight through with a nail. His name: Yehohanan ben Hagkol. It is estimated that he was executed sometime between 50 and 70 CE, when he was in his twenties.
“At any period of history,” the scholar Raymond E. Brown writes, “those who practice torture are not overly communicative about the details.” Which means it is not at all unusual that the details that would allow us to understand crucifixion in the ancient world remain so sketchy. Among the many things we do not know about Jesus’s crucifixion is the shape of the implement on which he was crucified. Early depictions of a traditional cross in relation to Jesus are few and far between. The oldest example is from the second century and shows a tiny, weirdly contorted, nude Jesus carved into a gem. This may be a Sethian Christian artifact of religious derision directed at rival Christians who, the Sethians believed, overemphasized the crucifixion. The gospels say surprisingly little about the nature of Jesus’s crucifixion. In Mark and Luke, it is covered in a single sentence. John takes two sentences. In Matthew, it is
a clausal aside: “And when they had crucified him…” We do not have the faintest idea if nails were actually used to crucify Jesus. Of the synoptic gospels, Matthew and Mark are silent on nails, and Luke merely suggests that nails were used when his resurrected Jesus asks the disciples to look at his hands and feet. John’s gospel is less ambiguous about the use of nails, with Thomas’s proclaiming that only when he’s touched “the mark of the nails in his hands” will he believe in Jesus’s resurrection. The only other early Christian documents to say explicitly that nails were used to crucify Jesus are The Gospel of Peter and Ignatius’s letter to Smyrna, neither of which is canonical.
Incredibly, historians cannot even be sure that a cross was involved. (Several early Jewish Talmudic references to Jesus’s execution seemed to indicate that he was, of all things, stoned.) While the Jesus tradition came to involve a crossbeam crucifixion, one very early depiction of his crucifixion—found in Saint Sabina, in Rome, from the 430s—shows a kind of shared scaffold against which Jesus and the two executed alongside him are tied or nailed. From this, we can see it was not always assumed that Jesus and the bandits were individually crucified. If a stake with a crossbeam was involved in the crucifixion of Jesus, how was it attached? Again, we have no idea. The crux immissa (the Latin name for our familiar cross) is only one of several options. It might have been, for instance, V shaped. It might have been an upright stake. The author of The Epistle of Barnabas and Justin Martyr both believed Jesus had been crucified on a T-shaped cross. Andrew’s X-shaped cross was known in antiquity as the crux decussata and is as likely as any other to have been used against the historical Jesus. How would an X-shaped cross have changed our understanding of him? Splayed in such a way, would he be even more vulnerable, even more humiliated?