Holy Apostle Bartholomew

He was born at Cana of Galilee, the same village where the Lord turned water into wine. The synoptic Gospels number him among the Twelve under the name Bartholomew, 'son of Tolmai,' which is a patronymic; the Gospel of John, which never uses that name, calls him Nathanael and tells the story of his call. The two have been identified as the same man from very early in the Church's reading.

He was sitting under a fig tree when his friend Philip brought him word of the Lord. He answered with the question 'Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?' But he came when Philip said 'Come and see,' and as he was coming the Lord saw him from afar and said, 'Behold an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile.' When the Lord told him that he had been seen praying under the fig tree, before Philip had called him, Bartholomew confessed: 'Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art the King of Israel.'

After Pentecost the traditions send him on some of the longest journeys of any of the Twelve: into Mesopotamia, into India, where Eusebius records that Pantaenus of Alexandria in the second century found a Hebrew copy of Matthew left by him, and at last into Armenia, where the Armenian Church honors him with Thaddaeus as her founding apostle.

In Armenia he converted the king Polymius and a great part of his court. The king's brother, raised against him, ordered him arrested, and he was flayed alive and then beheaded at Albanopolis on the western shore of the Caspian. His iconography often shows him holding his own skin as the witness of his cost. The Orthodox Church keeps his memory on the eleventh of June together with Barnabas, and on the twenty-fifth of August at the translation of his relics.