Bartholomew the Apostle

Life and Ministry

Bartholomew is named in the Synoptic apostle lists and in Acts 1, and most scholars from antiquity onward identify him with the Nathanael of Cana whom Philip brings to Jesus in John 1, since Bartholomew (Bar-Tolmai, son of Tolmai) is a patronymic and Nathanael is a personal name. Jesus calls him an Israelite in whom there is no guile, and Nathanael's confession — Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel — is among the earliest Christological declarations in the Gospel. He appears again after the resurrection at the Sea of Tiberias and is present at Pentecost. Eusebius reports a tradition, drawn from Pantaenus of Alexandria, that Bartholomew preached in India and left behind a Hebrew copy of Matthew's Gospel; later sources extend his mission to Greater Armenia, where he is remembered as one of the apostles to the Armenian people alongside Thaddaeus.

Circumstances of Death

Armenian tradition, preserved in the Martyrdom of Bartholomew and in the witness of the Armenian Apostolic Church, places his death at Albanopolis on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, in the kingdom of Polymius. Having healed the king's daughter and converted the royal household, Bartholomew aroused the hostility of the king's brother Astyages, who ordered him arrested. The most widely received tradition, reflected in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, is that Bartholomew was flayed alive and then beheaded; an alternative tradition records crucifixion head-downward. The precise mode is unrecoverable; the consensus of the early sources is that he died a violent death in Armenia for refusing to renounce Christ.

Legacy

The Armenian Church reveres Bartholomew with Thaddaeus as her two founding apostles, and the monastery of Saint Bartholomew, built at the site of his martyrdom, stood for centuries until it was destroyed in the twentieth century. His relics rest at San Bartolomeo all'Isola in Rome and at the Frankfurt Cathedral. His witness declares that the man Jesus saw under the fig tree — known in his whole heart before he spoke — was the same man who let his skin be taken from him rather than take back his confession. The cost of knowing and being known by Christ is total; so is the joy.