Philip the Apostle

Life and Ministry

Philip, like Andrew and Peter, was from the lakeside town of Bethsaida. The Fourth Gospel, which gives him more attention than the Synoptics, records his call directly by Jesus with the same words used to Matthew — Follow me — and his immediate evangelism of Nathanael (Bartholomew): We have found him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth. He is the apostle Jesus tests before the feeding of the five thousand, the apostle the Greeks approach at the Passover requesting to see Jesus, and the apostle who in the upper room asks Lord, show us the Father. Eusebius, citing Polycrates of Ephesus writing about AD 190, places Philip's later ministry in the Roman province of Asia, settling at Hierapolis in the Lycus Valley, where he is buried with his daughters. He must be distinguished from Philip the Evangelist of Acts 8, though early sources sometimes blur the two.

Circumstances of Death

The Acts of Philip, a fourth-century apocryphal text, embroiders the older Hierapolis tradition with a narrative of his struggle against the cult of the viper-goddess there and his crucifixion head-downward (in some versions, crucifixion through the heels) under the proconsul of Phrygia. Archaeological excavations at Hierapolis in 2011 by the Italian team led by Francesco D'Andria identified the apostle's tomb and a first-to-fifth-century martyrium church complex built over it, lending physical confirmation to the literary tradition that Philip was buried at Hierapolis as the focus of an early Christian shrine. The mode of execution remains traditional rather than archaeologically verified; the location does not.

Legacy

Hierapolis became one of the major pilgrimage sites of early Asia Minor, and Philip's daughters — known as the four prophesying virgins of Acts 21:9 — became important witnesses for the second-century chronological framework of the apostolic generation. Philip's witness is that the apostle who asked Show us the Father was the apostle who saw, in time, Christ on the cross of glory and chose the same way home. The first man called Follow me from this town followed Him the whole distance.