II class — Universal Calendar, Missale Romanum 1962
I. Identitas et Origines
Bartholomew is one of the Twelve, and the whole of what may be said of him with certainty is contained in a handful of verses. His name appears in each of the four apostolic lists — Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:14, Acts 1:13 — and nowhere else in the New Testament under that form. The name itself is not a personal name at all but a patronymic: Bar-Tolmai, “son of Tolmai” (or Talmai, a name that appears in the Old Testament for a king of Geshur, 2 Kings 3:3). Whatever he was called by his mother, Scripture has preserved only his father’s name. This is the first and most characteristic thing about the Apostle: he is, in the record, almost entirely hidden.
In the three Synoptic lists he is paired with Philip, and Luke’s Philippum et Bartholomaeum is a fixed coupling. It is this pairing that grounds the tradition, now very widely held in the Latin Church, that Bartholomew is the man whom the Fourth Gospel calls Nathanael. St. John never names a Bartholomew; the Synoptics never name a Nathanael; John’s Nathanael is brought to Christ by Philip (John 1:45), and reappears among the seven disciples at the Sea of Tiberias after the Resurrection, where he is identified as “Nathanael, who was of Cana of Galilee” (John 21:2). The inference is natural, and it has been adopted by most Catholic commentators since at least the ninth century; but it should be stated plainly that the identification is not a patristic consensus. St. Augustine thought Nathanael was not one of the Twelve at all, reasoning that the Lord chose unlettered men and that Nathanael, learned in the Law, was passed over precisely on that account. The identification is therefore received here as a strongly probable tradition of the second tier — not as an article of the historical record — and the sections that follow draw on the Johannine portrait of Nathanael under that explicit reservation.
If the identification holds, Bartholomew was a Galilean of Cana, the village of the Lord’s first sign, and a man of some learning in the Scriptures — a “true Israelite,” in the Lord’s own word, of the kind who searched the Law and the Prophets and waited for the Consolation of Israel. Nothing whatever is known of his family, his trade, or his age.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The one scene in which the Apostle speaks is John 1:45–51, and it has served the Church for two millennia as the whole portrait of his soul.
Philip, newly called, finds Nathanael and announces that the One foretold by Moses and the Prophets has been found: “Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth.” Nathanael’s reply is the reply of a man who knows his Scriptures and his geography: “Can any thing of good come from Nazareth?” The Messiah was to come from Bethlehem; Nazareth is nowhere in the prophets. Philip does not argue. He says only, “Come and see.” And Nathanael comes.
Before he has said a word, Christ speaks of him to the others: “Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile.” The Latin has fixed the phrase in the Church’s memory — Ecce vere Israelita, in quo dolus non est — and the Fathers heard in it a deliberate contrast with the patriarch Jacob, whose name Israel was won only after a life of cunning (Genesis 27:35). Here at last is a son of Israel in whom the ancient supplanter’s guile has been purged. Nathanael, startled, asks how he is known; and the Lord answers with the most enigmatic sentence in the passage: “Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee.”
What happened under the fig tree is not told. The Fathers understood that Christ was disclosing a knowledge of something hidden — a prayer, a resolution, an interior movement that no man had witnessed — and that the disclosure was itself the proof of divinity. St. Augustine, in his seventh tractate on John, gave the scene a further and deeper sense that has passed into the Latin tradition: the fig tree is the tree whose leaves covered the shame of Adam; to be seen “under the fig tree” is to be seen by God in the shadow of sin and death, before grace, and to be called from there. Nathanael’s confession follows at once and entire: “Rabbi, thou art the Son of God, thou art the King of Israel.” It is the first confession of the divine Sonship in the Fourth Gospel from a disciple’s lips, given not after a miracle of power but after a miracle of knowledge — the experience of being wholly seen and wholly known.
The Lord’s reply is a promise: “Greater things than these shalt thou see. Amen, amen, I say to you, you shall see the heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” Once more Jacob is in view — the ladder of Bethel (Genesis 28:12) — and Christ declares Himself the ladder, the place where heaven and earth are joined. To the guileless Israelite is promised the vision that Jacob had only in dream.
The virtues the Church has always drawn from this passage are three. The first is sincerity, the absence of dolus — a transparency of soul before God and men that the Lord Himself praised. The second is the honesty of his doubt: Nathanael does not pretend to a faith he does not have, and it is precisely this candor that makes his subsequent faith so complete. The third is docility to the invitation “Come and see” — the willingness to test a claim by drawing near to Christ rather than by keeping one’s distance. These are the virtues of a man who loved the truth more than his own prior judgments, and they are, in the Church’s reading, the reason his conversion was instantaneous once the truth stood before him.
Beyond this scene, Scripture places him with the Eleven in the upper room after the Ascension (Acts 1:13), persevering in prayer with Mary the Mother of Jesus and the brethren, and therefore among those upon whom the Holy Ghost descended at Pentecost. If he is Nathanael, he was also among the seven who saw the risen Lord on the shore of Tiberias and ate the bread and fish He had prepared (John 21:2–13).
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
After Pentecost the New Testament falls silent about Bartholomew, and the historian must proceed by tiers.
The earliest and most valuable witness stands at the second tier. Eusebius of Caesarea, in the fifth book of his Ecclesiastical History (5.10), records that Pantaenus, the Alexandrian teacher of Clement, travelled to “India” toward the end of the second century and found there Christians who already possessed the Gospel of Matthew in Hebrew letters, which they said had been left to them by the Apostle Bartholomew. St. Jerome repeats the notice in De viris illustribus (ch. 36). The report is not contemporary with Bartholomew, but it is early — within a century and a half of the apostolic age — and it comes through a sober source. What Eusebius meant by “India” is disputed; the word in antiquity could cover South Arabia, Ethiopia, and Parthia as well as the subcontinent. The tradition of a Bartholomew mission eastward beyond the Roman frontier is nonetheless the oldest thread we possess.
The Armenian tradition is the most enduring. The Armenian Church has from ancient times venerated Bartholomew and Thaddeus (Jude) as its founding apostles, and calls itself Apostolic on that account. The Roman Martyrology takes the same line: the Apostle preached the Gospel in India and then passed into Greater Armenia, where he suffered. The Armenian claim is old and consistent, but the earliest Armenian sources that attest it are themselves several centuries removed from the events, and Western historians have generally placed it at the second tier as strong tradition rather than at the first as documentary fact. The site of his martyrdom and tomb was long shown at Albanopolis (identified with Albak or Bashkale in what is now south-eastern Turkey), where a great monastery of St. Bartholomew stood until the twentieth century.
Other regions have claimed him. Various Greek and Latin writers assign him to Lycaonia, to Mesopotamia and Persia, to the shores of the Black Sea, and to Egypt. Most of these are either confusions with other apostles or reflections of the elasticity of the word “India.” They are noted here only so that the reader may understand why the older Roman Breviary lessons speak of him preaching “to the Indians” and then in Armenia: this is the Martyrology’s synthesis of the Eusebian and Armenian threads, and it is the synthesis the 1962 liturgy inherits.
There survives under his name an apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew — or rather a family of texts, of which the Questions of Bartholomew is the best preserved — in which the Apostle interrogates the risen Christ, the Virgin, and even the devil about the mysteries of the Descent into Hell and the Incarnation. St. Jerome mentions a Gospel of Bartholomew among the apocrypha in the prologue to his commentary on Matthew, and the Decretum Gelasianum lists it among the rejected books. These writings are of interest to the historian of early Christian imagination, but they have no claim on the Apostle’s authorship and no place in the Church’s doctrine; they are third-tier material of a peculiar kind — not pious tradition about him, but pious fiction attributed to him.
The Apostle’s true munus is the one the Mass of his feast proclaims. The Epistle (1 Corinthians 12:27–31) sets the Apostles first among the members of the Body of Christ, and the Gospel (Luke 6:12–19) recounts the night of prayer on the mountain and the choosing of the Twelve — Bartholomew among them — followed by the descent to the plain where “virtue went out from him, and healed all.” The liturgy thus places Bartholomew not in a reconstructed itinerary but in the founding act of the apostolic college, and it is there, rather than in Armenia or India, that his office in the Church is most surely located.
IV. Mors et Cultus
The manner of his death belongs to the third tier, and must be so labelled. The Latin Passio Bartholomaei (Bollandist BHL 1002, transmitted in the collection attributed to Pseudo-Abdias) tells of his preaching in Armenia, the conversion of King Polymius, and the fury of the king’s brother Astyages, at whose command the Apostle was flayed alive and then beheaded. A Greek tradition, found in some Byzantine sources, has him crucified head downwards. The Roman Martyrology for 24 August follows the Latin passio: “at Albanopolis in Greater Armenia, the birthday of the blessed Apostle Bartholomew, who, having preached the Gospel of Christ in India, passed into Greater Armenia, and there, having converted many to the faith, was flayed alive by the barbarians and, at the command of King Astyages, completed his martyrdom by beheading.” None of this can be traced to a source earlier than the fifth or sixth century, and the passio as we have it shows every mark of the genre. The Church retains the account as traditio pia: it is the reason the Apostle is depicted holding his own skin, and it has formed the piety of a thousand years.
The history of his relics is better documented, and it is a history of flight before invaders. St. Gregory of Tours, writing before 594, reports in the Gloria martyrum (ch. 33) that the body of Bartholomew rested at Lipari, the island off Sicily — the earliest Western testimony to his cult, and evidence that by the sixth century the relics were believed to have come there from the East. The received account of their arrival, borne by sea in a stone coffin, is legend; their presence at Lipari is not. In 838 the Saracens sacked Lipari; the relics were rescued and translated in 839 to Benevento by the Lombard prince Sicard, where they remain in the basilica that bears his name. In 983 the Emperor Otto III obtained what he believed to be the Apostle’s body for his new church on the Tiber Island in Rome, the present San Bartolomeo all’Isola — though Benevento has always maintained that what went to Rome was the body of St. Paulinus of Nola, and the dispute has never been settled. An arm-relic was given to Canterbury by Queen Emma in the early eleventh century; the cathedrals of Frankfurt and Pilsen preserve further portions.
His feast in the West has stood on 24 August since the Carolingian period (the ninth-century martyrologies of Ado and Usuard already have it there), though 25 August appears in some earlier books. In the Roman Rite of 1962 it is a feast of the second class, celebrated in red with Gloria and Creed and the Preface of the Apostles. The Byzantine Church keeps him on 11 June together with St. Barnabas, and commemorates the translation of his relics on 25 August; the Armenian and Syriac churches keep their own days. The coincidence of Latin feast and Greek translation-feast within a single day is one of the small liturgical hinges between East and West, and the Apostle of Armenia is a saint common to all the ancient churches, Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian alike.
His patronage has followed his passio. Because he was flayed, he is patron of tanners, leather-workers, bookbinders, glovers, and butchers, and of the Florentine salt and cheese merchants who once hung their wares in skins. Michelangelo painted him in the Last Judgment holding the knife and the empty skin, and gave the skin his own face. In London the great priory and hospital of St. Bartholomew at Smithfield, founded by Rahere in 1123 after a vision of the Apostle, still bears his name, and the Bartholomew Fair held on his feast was for seven centuries the largest in England.
One further association must be recorded soberly. On the night of 23–24 August 1572, the feast of St. Bartholomew, the Huguenot leadership gathered in Paris for a royal wedding was massacred, and the killing spread through France for weeks. The event has been called by the Apostle’s name ever since. It is a matter of history, not of hagiography, and is set down here only so that the reader of the Apostle’s life may not be surprised by it elsewhere; the Apostle “in whom there was no guile” bears no part in it.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
Bartholomew wrote nothing that survives, and the apocrypha under his name are not his. His documenta are therefore the passages of Scripture that concern him and the Church’s meditation upon them.
The first is the Lord’s word about him, and it is the only description of an Apostle’s interior character that Christ Himself pronounced: Ecce vere Israelita, in quo dolus non est. The Church has taken this as the standard of the Christian intellect. Guilelessness in the Gospel sense is not naïveté — Nathanael was skeptical, and rightly — but the refusal to deceive oneself or others, the transparency that lets the truth in when it arrives. St. John Chrysostom, in his twentieth homily on the Gospel of John, dwells on Nathanael’s exactness: he did not object to Philip from malice but from knowledge of the prophecy about Bethlehem, and it was this exactness, not credulity, that Christ praised. The Doctor’s point is that sincere difficulty is no obstacle to faith; it is the soil of it.
The second is the fig tree. St. Augustine’s reading — that to be seen under the fig tree is to be seen in the shadow of Adam’s covering, in the state of sin, before one has seen Christ — gives the scene its full theological weight: grace precedes conversion, and God’s knowledge of the sinner precedes the sinner’s knowledge of God. “I saw thee” is the whole doctrine of prevenient grace in three words. St. Thomas, commenting on the chapter in his lectures on John, gathers the patristic readings and adds that the mention of the fig tree shows Christ disclosing what was hidden from all but God, which is why Nathanael’s confession is a confession of divinity and not merely of Messiahship. The medieval and Counter-Reformation commentators follow this line without dissent.
The third is the promise of the opened heaven and the ascending and descending angels. It is the Apostle’s own reward held out to him: the greater vision that lies beyond the first recognition. The Church reads it as the promise of the beatific vision to all who confess Christ with Nathanael’s sincerity — and as the definition of what Christ is, the ladder joined to earth at Bethlehem and to heaven at the Ascension, on which the whole traffic between God and man passes.
Two shorter texts complete the dossier. The Introit of his Mass, from Psalm 138, has the Church say of the Apostles what David said of God’s friends: “To me thy friends, O God, are made exceedingly honourable; their principality is exceedingly strengthened” — the honour of the Apostles being the honour of friendship with God. And the Communion antiphon, from Matthew 19, gives the Apostle’s reward in the Lord’s own promise to those who have followed Him: they shall sit on twelve seats, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. The true Israelite, in the end, judges Israel.
VI. Oratio
Collect of the Mass of St. Bartholomew, Apostle — 24 August, Missale Romanum 1962
Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui hujus diei venerandam sanctamque laetitiam in beati Apostoli tui Bartholomaei festivitate tribuisti: da Ecclesiae tuae, quaesumus; et amare quod credidit, et praedicare quod docuit. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given us the venerable and holy joy of this day in the feast of Thy blessed Apostle Bartholomew: grant unto Thy Church, we beseech Thee, both to love what he believed and to preach what he taught. Through our Lord Jesus Christ Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
The Collect asks for two things, and the order matters: first that the Church love what the Apostle believed, and only then that she preach what he taught. Faith precedes proclamation; love of the truth precedes the announcing of it. It is an ancient prayer, and it is the proper prayer for an Apostle of whom almost nothing is known but his faith — for what Bartholomew believed is the one thing about him the Gospel records in his own words.
Liturgical notes. Mass Mihi autem (Introit Ps. 138:17). Epistle 1 Cor. 12:27–31; Gradual Ps. 44:17–18, Constitues eos; Alleluia Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus; Gospel Luke 6:12–19; Offertory Ps. 138:17; Communion Matt. 19:28. Gloria, Creed, Preface of the Apostles. Red. Second Vespers of the feast.
VII. Aspiratio
O blessed Bartholomew, true Israelite in whom there was no guile, who wast seen by the Lord beneath the fig tree before ever thou hadst seen Him, and who, being seen, didst confess Him at once as Son of God and King of Israel — obtain for us a heart without deceit, that we may neither lie to God nor to ourselves nor to our neighbour, and that when the truth stands before us we may say, as thou didst, Rabbi. Thou who wast promised the opened heaven and the angels ascending and descending upon the Son of Man, and who for that vision didst give thy body to the knife: ask for us the grace to love what thou didst believe and to hold fast what thou didst preach, that we too may come to see the greater things, in the kingdom where Christ is the ladder and the door. Amen.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Tier 1 — Scripture Matthew 10:3; Mark 3:18; Luke 6:14; Acts 1:13 (the apostolic lists). John 1:45–51; John 21:2 (Nathanael). 1 Corinthians 12:27–31 and Luke 6:12–19 (the Mass of the feast).
Tier 2 — Early historical witnesses Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica 5.10 (SC 41), on Pantaenus and the Hebrew Matthew. St. Jerome, De viris illustribus 36. St. Gregory of Tours, Liber in gloria martyrum 33 (MGH SRM I/2), on the relics at Lipari. The Armenian tradition of apostolic foundation, as given in the classical Armenian historians (Moses of Chorene, Agathangelos), to be read with the caution proper to its date.
Patristic and scholastic commentary St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Ioannem 20 (PG 59). St. Augustine, In Ioannis Evangelium tractatus 7 (CCSL 36). St. Thomas Aquinas, Super Evangelium S. Ioannis lectura, cap. 1, on Nathanael and the fig tree.
Tier 3 — Passio and apocrypha Passio Bartholomaei (BHL 1002), in the Pseudo-Abdias collection; Greek and Latin texts in Bonnet, Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha II/1. Quaestiones Bartholomaei, in Hennecke–Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. I. R. A. Lipsius, Die apokryphen Apostelgeschichten, on the whole dossier.
Reference Martyrologium Romanum, 24 August. Acta Sanctorum, Aug. V (24 Aug.). Butler’s Lives of the Saints, 24 August. Catholic Encyclopedia (1907), “Bartholomew.”
Learning paths Lives of the Saints — the Apostles: a sequence through the apostolic feasts of the 1962 calendar, in which Bartholomew’s is the last of high summer. Sacred Liturgy — the Common of Apostles and the Preface of the Apostles; the Mass Mihi autem as the type of an apostolic feast. Theology and Doctrine — prevenient grace, from the fig tree of John 1 to the Second Council of Orange. East-West Comparative — the Armenian Apostolic Church and the apostolic foundations claimed by the churches beyond the Roman frontier.