Was Nathanael Really Bartholomew? The Apostle With Half a Name

Cold open

Picture it like this, as many readers do. A man sitting under a fig tree. Someone called Philip finds him, with news. They've found him: the one Moses wrote about. Jesus of Nazareth.

And the man under the tree says... "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

His name is Nathanael. And if you've ever heard a sermon about him, you were probably told that Nathanael is the apostle Bartholomew. Same man, two names.

Here's the thing. The Bible never says that. Not once.

Bartholomew is in every list of the twelve apostles, and does absolutely nothing else. Nathanael gets two lovely scenes in John's Gospel, and never appears in a single list. Two names that never meet on the same page.

So were they one man? Who first said so, and when? And how did Bartholomew end up, in later legend, being skinned alive... and then painted by Michelangelo holding his own skin?

As always, we'll be honest about it. Scripture, I'll tell you. Tradition, I'll tell you. And legend... well. You'll know.

Let's begin.

Half a name

Scripture

Bartholomew appears exactly four times in the whole Bible: in the lists of the Twelve in Matthew, Mark, Luke and the Book of Acts. He never speaks. He never does anything. He's a name in a list.

But even the name is interesting. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, he comes straight after Philip: "Philip and Bartholomew." Remember that. It'll matter.

Scholarship

Now, Bartholomew isn't really a first name. Most scholars take it as the Aramaic bar Talmai: "son of Talmai." Bar means "son." It's a surname, of a sort. Like calling someone "Johnson."

In the Old Testament, one Talmai is a king of Geshur, the grandfather of King David's son Absalom. Another is one of the descendants of Anak, the giants of the Book of Numbers. So, a royal name, or a giant's. Take your pick.

And the name was still around in the first century. The Jewish historian Josephus mentions a bandit chief of the 40s AD called Tholomaios, "Tholomy" in the classic English translation... who came to a sticky end. No relation that we know of. And Josephus spells King Talmai of Geshur exactly the same way.

So if Bartholomew means "son of Talmai"... it's quite possible he also had a first name of his own. And that's the crack the whole Nathanael theory grows out of.

The man under the fig tree

Scripture

Let's meet Nathanael properly, in chapter one of John's Gospel. Jesus has just called Philip, from Bethsaida, the town of Andrew and Peter. And Philip goes off and finds Nathanael. John doesn't tell us how the two knew each other.

"Philip found Nathanael and said to him, 'We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.'"

And Nathanael, bless him, answers with a question. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"

Scholarship

Nazareth was a small village, and it's never once mentioned in the Old Testament.

Scripture

And later in John's Gospel, people object that the Messiah should come from Bethlehem, not Galilee. Nathanael's not the only one with doubts.

But Philip doesn't argue. He just says three words. "Come and see."

So Nathanael comes. And as he approaches, Jesus says of him: "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit!"

Nathanael asks: "How do you know me?"

And Jesus answers: "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."

And whatever that answer meant to him, his reply is extraordinary. Nathanael, the sceptic of a few lines ago, says: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"

Speculation

What was he doing under that fig tree? Praying? Studying the Scriptures? Having a quiet nap? People have guessed for centuries. John doesn't say.

Scripture

Then Jesus tells him: "You will see greater things than these." And he widens it out. In the Greek, the next "you" is plural: "You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man."

Scholarship

Many commentators hear an echo here of Jacob's dream in Genesis, the ladder reaching to heaven: "behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!" Jacob, later renamed Israel, and famous for deceiving his brother. So an "Israelite indeed, in whom there is no deceit"... being promised Jacob's ladder. It's a lovely piece of writing.

Two names that never meet

Scripture

And then Nathanael disappears. For twenty chapters. He turns up just once more, right at the end of John's Gospel, after the resurrection, by the Sea of Tiberias, as John calls the Sea of Galilee.

"Simon Peter, Thomas, called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples were together."

That's the only place we learn where he came from: Cana, the village where, in John's Gospel, Jesus turned water into wine.

So here's the puzzle. John talks about "the Twelve," but never lists them, and never mentions a Bartholomew. Matthew, Mark and Luke list them... and never mention a Nathanael.

The case for one man

Scholarship

So who first put them together?

You might expect it to be one of the great early church writers. It isn't. As far as scholars have been able to find, no ancient Christian writer says it. The earliest writer known to make the identification explicitly is a Syriac bishop called Isho'dad of Merv, writing around the year 850. That's eight hundred years after the events.

But late isn't automatically wrong. Here's the case, and it's a clever one.

One. That surname, "son of Talmai," leaves room for a first name.

Two. The two names never overlap. Matthew, Mark and Luke have Bartholomew but no Nathanael; John has Nathanael but no Bartholomew. If they're one man, that's exactly what you'd expect.

Three. Philip. In John, it's Philip who brings Nathanael to Jesus. And in Matthew, Mark and Luke, Bartholomew's name sits right next to Philip's. Coincidence? Supporters of the theory think not.

Four. When Nathanael reappears in John's last chapter, he's in very select company: Peter, Thomas, and "the sons of Zebedee," whom the other Gospels call James and John. Not bad company for a man who supposedly wasn't one of the Twelve.

It's an attractive case. Many scholars, and many church traditions, find it likely. Others think the evidence is too thin to say. But "likely" isn't "stated." And there's another side.

The case against

Scripture

First, look closely at John chapter 21. It calls the group "disciples," not "the Twelve." And John uses "disciples" for a wider circle than the Twelve: back in chapter six, "many of his disciples" walk away, and Jesus turns to "the twelve." Chapter 21 even mentions "two others," unnamed. So being on that beach doesn't prove Nathanael was an apostle.

Second, the Philip link isn't perfect. In the list in Acts, the second volume that follows Luke's Gospel, the pairs get shuffled: it's "Philip and Thomas," then "Bartholomew and Matthew." Philip's partner is now Thomas, not Bartholomew.

Scholarship

And John features people the other Gospels never mention, like Nicodemus, who came to Jesus by night. Nobody squeezes Nicodemus into the Twelve. Nathanael could simply be another of John's special witnesses.

Tradition

In the early 400s, Saint Augustine preached on this very passage. And he concluded that Nathanael was not one of the Twelve. His reasoning? Nathanael was "learned and skilled in the law," and Jesus deliberately "chose unlearned persons, that He might by them confound the world."

That's Augustine's interpretation, not a historical record. But one of the great teachers of his day didn't think Nathanael was an apostle.

Legend

An older text even lists them as two different people. A second-century book called the Letter of the Apostles opens with a roll call: "John, Thomas, Peter, Andrew, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Nathanael..." Two separate names!

Case closed? Not quite. Because the same list ends with "Judas Zelotes", that's Judas the Zealot, "and Cephas." And in the New Testament, Cephas is simply Peter's name in Aramaic. So either the author has counted Peter twice... or he treated Cephas as a different man.

Tradition

Around the year 200, Clement of Alexandria, as quoted by Eusebius, made the Cephas whom Paul opposed at Antioch a different man from Peter. Either way, that roll call is no reliable test.

Later Tradition

And centuries later, some Eastern calendars of saints, Greek, Coptic and Ethiopian, didn't make Nathanael Bartholomew at all. They made him Simon the Zealot. Simon's other nickname, "the Cananaean," sounds a lot like Cana, Nathanael's home town.

Tradition

In the Catholic Church, the Nathanael story is even the Gospel reading on Bartholomew's feast day, the twenty-fourth of August. It's just not something the Bible itself states.

So here's the honest verdict. Bartholomew and Nathanael may be the same man. But the Bible never says it, no ancient writer we know of says it, and it shouldn't be taught as fact. On this channel, it gets the label it deserves: an inference.

India... or somewhere like it

So what became of Bartholomew? For that, we need the early church writers.

Tradition

In the early 300s, the historian Eusebius tells of Pantaenus, a teacher from Alexandria in the late 100s. Word for word:

"Pantaenus... is said to have gone to India. It is reported that among persons there who knew of Christ, he found the Gospel according to Matthew... For Bartholomew, one of the apostles, had preached to them, and left with them the writing of Matthew in the Hebrew language."

Notice the careful wording. "They say," he begins. Then "is said." "It is reported." Eusebius is passing on a story, not swearing to it.

Seventy or eighty years later, Saint Jerome retells it, minus the hedging. Pantaenus "found that Bartholomew, one of the twelve apostles, had preached" there, and brought the Hebrew Gospel back to Alexandria. Same story. Firmer wording.

In the 400s, the church historian Socrates says Bartholomew was given "the part of India contiguous to" Ethiopia.

Scholarship

But which India? Ancient writers used "India" rather loosely. "Next to Ethiopia" sounds, to many historians, less like India and more like southern Arabia, or the Horn of Africa. They still debate where Pantaenus actually went.

Skin, bones and a book of questions

And now... the legends. Brace yourself.

Legend

There's a story, the Martyrdom or Passion of Bartholomew, set in India. Bartholomew frees the daughter of a king called Polymius from a demon, silences a demon living in an idol of the goddess Astaroth, and converts the king. The king's elder brother has the apostle killed.

But how? That depends which version you read. In the Latin, he's beaten with clubs and flayed alive. In a later Greek translation, he's beheaded instead. A list of the apostles once credited to Hippolytus says he was crucified upside down, and buried in Armenia. And an Armenian version sets his death in Armenia itself.

Four versions. At least three different deaths. And none of them comes from Scripture. The oldest surviving copies of the Latin story date from the 700s. Later tradition, East and West, settled on Armenia, at a town remembered as Albanopolis, and in the West, that's where the flaying was placed.

Tradition

Today, the Armenian Church honours Bartholomew, together with Thaddaeus, as the apostles who first brought Christianity to Armenia, in a tradition that grew up in later centuries. In far eastern Turkey, near the Iranian border, the ruins of a medieval Armenian monastery of Saint Bartholomew stand at the traditional site of his martyrdom.

Scholarship

The flaying won, at least in art. On the wall of the Sistine Chapel, in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, Saint Bartholomew holds a knife in one hand... and in the other, his own empty skin. And the drooping face on that skin? Since 1925, it has been widely seen as a self-portrait of Michelangelo himself. A joke? A confession? Nobody knows.

Tradition

His bones had adventures too. A church historian of the early 500s reports that the emperor Anastasius sent a relic of Bartholomew to his new frontier city of Dara, in Mesopotamia.

Legend

At the end of the 500s, the bishop Gregory of Tours tells how pagans threw the apostle's body into the sea in a lead coffin... and it floated all the way to Lipari, a little island off Sicily.

Scholarship

From Lipari, relics went on to Benevento, in southern Italy, in 838, and around the year 1000 to San Bartolomeo, on Rome's Tiber Island, where they're venerated today. Whether any of these bones were ever Bartholomew's... no one can say.

Legend

And finally, a strange book, the Questions of Bartholomew, of uncertain date, perhaps from the 400s or 500s. In it, Bartholomew asks Jesus where he went after the cross... and then gets to interrogate Satan himself, dragged up in fiery chains by hundreds of angels, or, in the Latin, more than six thousand. Quite the promotion, for a man whose Gospel record is a name in a list.

Close

So. Let's go back to that fig tree.

Here's what the Bible actually gives us. A name in four lists, always among the Twelve. A name that probably means "son of Talmai," though even that comes from the scholars, not the text. And, in John's Gospel, a sceptic called Nathanael who was told "come and see"... came... and saw.

Were they the same man? Maybe. But it's a guess first found in writing, as far as we know, eight centuries later, and the Bible itself never says it.

And maybe that's the lesson from this one. The most famous "fact" about Bartholomew is an inference. The most famous image of him, holding his own skin, is a legend. And the most solid thing we know is simply that he was there: chosen, named, one of the Twelve.

Sometimes, that's enough.

Next time: three names in four lists. Thaddaeus... a Judas whom Luke calls "Judas of James"... and, in some old manuscripts, Lebbaeus. One apostle? Or a muddle? And where does Jude fit in?