The Acts Of Andrew.

        About the middle of the third century, perhaps as late as A.D. 620, some Christian, probably in Greece or Asia Minor, wrote a story of the wanderings, wonders, and discourses of Andrew, ending with his martyrdom. Its chief purpose seems to have been to discourage marriage and to lead women converts to forsake their husbands; it falls into line with the other apocryphal Acts in their aversion to marriage. It was probably not heretical, though highly ascetic, and also exhibited some Gnostic echoes.

        Little remains of the Acts of Andrew, and what there is mostly relates to the efforts of a woman named Maximilla to escape from her husband Aegeas or Aegeates, the proconsul of Greece, and Andrew's encouragement of these efforts. His encouragement is successful, and the proconsul has him crucified. On reaching the place of execution, Andrew utters an address to the cross, reminiscent of Peter's rhapsody before his cross. He lingers for three days on the cross, refuses release, and dies.

        In his famous chapter on the New Testament canon (Church History iii. 25. 6) Eusebius speaks of Acts of Andrew and of John, which he describes as heretical. His reference in iii. i. i, z, to Origen's account, now lost, of the labors of these apostles, John in Ephesus and Andrew in Scythia, may imply that Origen knew the Acts of each of them. But Eusebius is the earliest writer to mention them, and we cannot be sure that Origen knew them or that they existed in his day.

        Gregory of Tours (A.D- 538-94) came across the Greek Acts of Andrew and produced a Latin epitome of them, frankly omitting the tedious parts (the discourses were probably fairly long) and emphasizing Andrew's miracles. This epitome is in the main embodied in the Andrew section (Book 3) of Abdias' Apostolic History.

        The scene of the story is not Scythia, north of the Black Sea, which Eusebius said was the field of Andrew's labors, but Pontus, Bithynia, Macedonia, and Greece, where Andrew finally suffers martyrdom at Patrae, the modern Patras. Gregory prefaced his account of it with a summary of the Egyptian Acts of Andrew and of Matthias (or Matthew) among the cannibals, who kept any strangers who fell into their hands for thirty days and then ate them, tagging each one with the date of his arrival so as to make no mistake. (This verges on the Odyssey and the Arabian Nights). On a ship steered by Jesus himself, Andrew comes and rescues Matthias and the other victims. A sequel to this episode is supplied by the Acts of Peter and Andrew, in which Peter causes a camel to go through the eye of a needle. But these were not part of the third-century Acts of Andrew. All that we really possess of it is (1) the story in Euodius (On Faith, against the Manicheans 38) around A.D- 4oo about Maximilla's efforts to escape from her husband; (2) a Vatican Greek fragment, telling of Andrew's discourses in prison, especially those encouraging Maximilla to leave her husband; and (3) the martyrdom of Andrew.

        Epiphanius (d. 403), in Heresies 47, says that the Acts of Andrew, as well as those of John, Thomas, and others, was appealed to by the Encratites, who were vegetarians and total abstainers and renounced marriage and private property (chap. 6r), and by the Origenians or eunuchs (chap. 63). Innocent I, in his letter of A.D- 405, according to some manuscripts, condemns the Acts of Andrew, stating that they were written by “the philosophers Neochares and Leonidas,” perhaps a miswriting of Leucius Charinus, the reputed author of the Acts of John.