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Thought
for the Week Sunday 23 August – Saint Bartholomew
Today,
we remember the life of, and think about, Saint Bartholomew. His actual feast day, that is the day on
which scholars think he was martyred for the faith, is tomorrow, the 24th
August, but in this Chaplaincy, we do not often have services except on
Sundays, so we are keeping Bartholomew today.
It
was the twelve Apostles who carried on the work and ministry of Jesus from
the first Pentecost, and it is their work which laid the foundations of the
Church of which we today are part.
Their work, their ministry, their relationship with, and their view
of, God and his Son Jesus Christ, and of the world is thus literally
crucially important in our understanding of the faith and the Church, and our
part in both. We are part of that
church that they helped to build up, and they are part of us. We
know almost nothing at all about Bartholomew.
His name means “son of Tolmai”.
There is a Tolmai in the Old Testament; he was King of Geshur, and his
daughter Maacha was one of David’s wives, and the mother of his much loved
third son, Absalom, who was killed after leading a disastrous revolt against
his father. This might indicate that
Bartholomew the Apostle was related to King David. He would then have been a cousin of Jesus,
who, through Joseph, was descended from King David. On the other hand, Bartholomew could be
translated as “son of the furrows”, or perhaps as “ploughman”, or
“farmer”. If we look at possible Greek
origins, rather than Hebrew, then perhaps his name means “Son of Ptolemy” –
the Ptolemies had alternated with the Seleucids in ruling Judea for about two
hundred years before the Romans came.
Ptolemy himself was credited (particularly by himself) as having
founded the great library at Alexandria, and so a “son of Ptolemy” might be
expected to be a scholar. Bartholomew
is in sixth place in the list of the Apostles given in all three Synoptic
Gospels (that is Matthew1, Mark2 and Luke3), and he is in
seventh place in the list in the Acts of the Apostles4. In each case he is named next to
Philip. He
is not mentioned at all in the fourth Gospel, but in his place, next to
Philip, is mentioned Nathaniel5, who,
intriguingly gets no mention at all in the synoptics. Just as we do have a Christian name, for
instance, John (which means, “God is gracious”), and a surname, for instance,
Robinson (which means “son of Robin”), so many people in Jesus’ time would
have a forename, like Nathaniel (which means gift of God), and a family name
such as Bartholomew. Most scholars
accordingly agree that Nathaniel and Bartholomew are one and the same person. We
do know a little bit more about Nathaniel; the fourth Gospel tells us the
story of his calling in some detail.
Philip, who like Andrew and Peter, came from Bethsaida, was the fourth
disciple to be called. He went and
found Nathaniel, and told him, “We have found the Messiah, Jesus of
Nazareth!” Nathaniel replied,
“Nazareth! Can anything good come out
of Nazareth?” Despite Nathaniel’s rather mean-spirited, chauvinistic
reaction, on seeing Nathaniel, Jesus said of him, “Here is an Israelite in
whom is no guile.” Continuing his
rather sceptic approach, Nathaniel asked Jesus “How do you know me?”, and
Jesus replied, “I saw you sitting under the fig tree before Philip spoke to
you.” Immediately, Nathaniel’s
attitude changed completely, and he acknowledges who Jesus is, “Rabbi, You
are the Son of God, You are the King of Israel!” The
fourth Gospel tells us that Jesus had a special friend amongst the Disciples,
“the one whom Jesus loved”, but, again intriguingly, it does not tell us
which Disciple he is. However, the
greatest King of Israel, David, had a special friend, Jonathon, King Saul’s
son. Jonathon, means “Given by God”,
just as Nathaniel means “Gift of God”.
Not only is Nathaniel the first Apostle
to call Jesus “Son of God”, though John the Baptist called Him that at his
Baptism, he is also the only Disciple of whom Jesus makes an approving remark
straight away. Just perhaps, Nathaniel
is to Jesus, the ultimate Messiah, so Jonathon was to David, his great
forerunner. You may have noticed that
today’s Gospel reading does not mention Bartholomew, and is all about who is
the greatest of the Disciples. If
Bartholomew was “the Beloved Disciple”, then this makes sense. The important person is not any one of the
Disciples, but Jesus himself. We are
all beloved disciples, and perhaps that’s why the beloved disciple is not
named in the fourth Gospel. Have
you ever tried to snooze under a fig tree?
I have, as that is where our hammock is rigged in the garden. It is not easy, as too much sunlight
filters down between the leaves, and I keep a large umbrella handy to give me
better shade. The prophet Micah6 gives us a
lovely picture of peace, with “every man free to sit under his own vine, and
under his fig tree, and none shall make him afraid”. You can certainly snooze under a vine, as
the dense foliage takes not only most of the light, but also a good
proportion of the heat out of the sun.
However, for reading and study, you can’t beat the dappled shade cast
by the fig tree. Micah knew this, and
is therefore suggesting that in the ideal world which will be after the Day
of the Lord, when God’s Kingdom comes on earth, we will be working and
resting in God’s garden, just as Adam and Eve did before the fall. By
the first century, to be sitting under a fig tree, was a poetic way of saying
that you were studying God’s word, and, taking advantage of this symbolism,
some of the Rabbis would actually teach their followers, all sitting under a
fig tree. As this idea developed, so
the fig tree came to stand for Israel itself, the shade tree, giving enough
light to study under, but tempering the glaring heat of the sun, so that
beneath its branches, the Children of Israel might enjoy the word of God and
its sweet fruits for ever. (This may
help us understand Jesus cursing the barren fig tree, but that’s another
sermon altogether.) We
can safely assume, therefore, that Nathaniel had been studying God’s word
under the fig tree, before he was called by Philip. If we want, like Nathaniel, to do God’s
work, we too must study his word. Eusebius
of Caesarea (there were lots of Eusebiuses) was the first church historian
after Saint Luke. He lived
approximately 263 – 339, and tried to write an accurate history of the
Church. He is not always reliable
about people, but like Luke, he is meticulous about events and dates. He was consecrated Bishop about 313, and
was prominent at the Council of Nicea in 325, although his proposed creed was
considered too woolly, and we got the Nicene creed instead, a later version
of which we still use today. In about
324, Eusebius’s “Church History” was published, and in it he records that,
after Pentecost, Bartholomew made a missionary journey to India, and left
there a copy of the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.
There are two complications here.
First, the term “India” was much vaguer than it now is, and included
much of Turkey and Arabia. Second, in
its earliest days, the Gospel according to Saint Matthew was often called
“the Gospel of Matthew to the Hebrews”, so it may have been the Greek version
that we know today, and not a Hebrew translation at all. A few scholars think that the fourth Gospel
as we have it was translated from Hebrew, but all agree that Matthew’s
Gospel, like Mark’s and Luke’s was originally written in Greek. That
is as much as we can know with any certainty about Saint Bartholomew;
everything else is vague. For example,
there are at least three places, a long way apart, where he is said to have
died, and at least two methods of his death, and some of the people supposed
to be associated with his martyrdom actually lived a hundred years
later. The
Armenians claim to have been evangelised by Bartholomew, and claim to have
received his Gospel of Matthew. If he
was a scholar, as sitting under the fig tree suggests, and if he went out to
Armenia, soon after Pentecost, as Eusebius records, then perhaps he did
indeed translate the Gospel of Matthew into Hebrew to use in the synagogues
of Armenia, because at that stage, the Apostles still assumed that faith in
Jesus was for the Jews; it was only later on that they came to see it as
being for everybody; even for you and me. But
the universal nature of the Gospel is one of the things that Jesus makes
clear at the last supper, where the argument about status for the Disciples
takes place. As they recline at the
dining table, like Roman nobility, He tells the twelve, “I am among you as a
table-slave”, and a table-slave was usually a foreigner, perhaps a prisoner of
war, and the least important of all the people in the household. To put it another way, in order truly to
serve God, we must be as outcasts, foreigners, the poorest of the poor. Only then can we put ourselves in their
shoes, and love them unconditionally, as Jesus loves us, and lays down his
life for us. Only then can we share in
the glorious banquet in the Halls of Heaven, where He who served us has
risen, and gone before us to prepare us a place. There we will know whether Bartholomew and
Nathaniel are the same person, whether he was indeed “the beloved disciple”,
and where he actually did go as a missionary.
And there we will be known too – will we have sat under the fig tree,
studying God’s word? Will we have
tried to put the Gospel of Jesus into understandable terms for those He has given
us to be with on this journey through the world? What we know for sure of Bartholomew is
that he was a good man, an Israelite in whom is no guile. God bless you, as you work to be like
him. Amen. 1Matthew 10, 2-4;
2Mark 3, 16;
3Luke 6, 14;
4Acts 1,13; 5John 1, 43 - 50 6Micah
4, 4 Father Charles Howard: Anglican
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