Saint Philip the Apostle: 'Come and See' and the Two Philips of Hierapolis

The sixth installment in a series on the Twelve Apostles.

Of the Twelve apostles whom Jesus called from the Galilean lakeshore, Philip is the one we meet on the page in postures of practical mediation. He brings Nathanael to Jesus in John 1, having himself just been called. He answers Jesus’s testing question about feeding five thousand in John 6 by reckoning what two hundred denarii would buy and admitting it would not be enough. He brings Greek pilgrims who want to see Jesus to Andrew, and the two together bring them to Jesus, in John 12. And he asks, on the night before Jesus dies, to be shown the Father — which elicits from the Johannine Christ one of the central Christological self-revelations of the Fourth Gospel: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”⁠¹ Outside these four scenes the canonical text gives him no individual voice. He appears in every apostle list, always fifth; he is present in the Upper Room at Pentecost; and after Acts 1:13 he disappears from the New Testament entirely.⁠²

The patristic record then opens a problem that the post will spend serious space engaging. By the late second century, the bishop Polycrates of Ephesus is writing to Pope Victor of Rome in defense of the Quartodeciman Easter practice and naming, among the “great lights” of Asia who have fallen asleep, “Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who fell asleep in Hierapolis; and his two aged virgin daughters, and another daughter, who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests at Ephesus.”⁠³ A decade later the Montanist debater Proclus, defending female prophecy in his dialogue with Gaius of Rome, names “four prophetesses, the daughters of Philip, at Hierapolis in Asia. Their tomb is there and the tomb of their father.”⁠⁴ Eusebius preserves both witnesses side by side in Ecclesiastical History 3.31 and 5.24, identifies the Philip in question as the apostle, and leaves the discrepancy between three daughters and four unresolved. The earlier and quieter witness of Papias of Hierapolis — bishop of that very city in the early second century, who reports that he heard wonderful tales from “the daughters of Philip” — has the same problem in concentrated form: the underlying fragment names only “Philip,” and the apostolic identification is Eusebius’s editorial framing four generations later.⁠⁵

The four-daughter detail is the forensic key. It exactly matches Acts 21:8–9, where Luke describes Paul lodging in Caesarea with “Philip the evangelist, who was one of the Seven,” and notes that this Philip “had four virgin daughters gifted with prophecy.”⁠⁶ The Acts Philip is the Hellenist deacon of Acts 6:5, the Samaritan evangelist of Acts 8:5–8, the catechist of the Ethiopian eunuch at Acts 8:26–40 — and a different man, by Luke’s own explicit identification, from the apostle Philip of the Twelve. The most economical reading of the patristic chain is the one Arthur Cushman McGiffert defended in his standard 1890 NPNF2-1 edition of Eusebius and that modern critical scholarship (Bauckham, Brown, Fitzmyer, Bruce, Barrett, Schnabel, Eisen, Matthews) has overwhelmingly settled into: the Philip whose four prophetic daughters lived at Hierapolis in the second-century memory of Papias and Proclus was Philip the Evangelist, the Acts Philip, and the apostolic identification preserved by Polycrates and propagated through Eusebius reflects a second-century conflation that the later Catholic and Byzantine liturgical traditions inherited and made permanent.⁠⁷

This post tries to read three bodies of source material against each other with the honesty that Garrett’s readers expect. The New Testament evidence first, scene by scene, with the Greek text behind the NABRE and the patristic reception that has shaped Catholic exegesis from Chrysostom and Augustine forward. Then the post-apostolic record on the Philip of Hierapolis with the Two Philips problem named candidly and the magisterial position located precisely. And finally the Catholic liturgical witness — May 3 in the Roman calendar, November 14 in the Byzantine, the Tau cross and basket of loaves and dragon in the iconography, and the careful “is said to have died” hedging in Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 Wednesday catechesis on Philip that supplies the Catholic magisterial template for honest engagement with the apostle whose Hierapolitan martyrdom tradition is real liturgical memory and questionable historical reconstruction at once.⁠⁸

The Catholic magisterium of the last forty years has held both of these things at once without scandal. The 2004 Martyrologium Romanum commemorates Philip the Apostle on May 3 with the traditional Hierapolitan hagiography (cross, stoning) and Philip the Evangelist on October 11 with the Acts résumé, formally distinguishing the two men whom critical history reassigns the death narrative between. Benedict XVI in 2006 carefully sources Philip the Apostle to John’s Gospel and treats the Hierapolis death tradition with the modal qualifier “is said to” — the magisterial signal that the Catholic Church does not stake the apostolic veneration of Philip on the source-critical disambiguation of which Philip held which territorial tradition. Lex orandi preserves the conflated apostolic veneration; historia critica corrects the disambiguation without scandal to faith. That is the posture this post follows.

Philip in the New Testament

The four apostle lists

Philip appears in all four New Testament apostle lists, always fifth in order. Matthew 10:2–4: “Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James, the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddeus; Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.”⁠⁹ Mark 3:18: “Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon the Cananean.”⁠¹⁰ Luke 6:14: “Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot.”⁠¹¹ And Acts 1:13: “Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.”⁠¹²

The ordering matters because the apostle lists are structured in stable triads. The Synoptics order them: first triad — Peter, James and John (the inner three), or Peter, Andrew, James, and John (the two pairs of brothers); second triad — Philip, Bartholomew (Nathanael), Matthew, Thomas; third triad — James the Less, Thaddaeus (Jude), Simon the Zealot, and Judas Iscariot (or, in Acts 1:13 with Judas removed, Judas son of James). Philip is always at the head of the second triad. He is therefore among the first eight, never beyond the middle. Pope Benedict XVI in his September 2006 catechesis on Philip drew the inference plainly: “He always comes fifth in the lists of the Twelve (cf. Mt 10:3; Mk 3:18; Lk 6:14; Acts 1:13); hence, he is definitely among the first.”⁠¹³

Bethsaida, Andrew, and Peter

John 1:44 places Philip in the same Galilean fishing town as the brothers Andrew and Peter: “Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the town of Andrew and Peter.”⁠¹⁴ The town’s location has been disputed in modern archaeology — the conventional identification with et-Tell, three kilometers north of the modern Sea of Galilee shoreline, has been challenged in favor of el-Araj, closer to the shore — but the New Testament’s interest in Bethsaida is unambiguous and does not depend on which mound the village occupied. Bethsaida-Julias was rebuilt and renamed by the tetrarch Philip son of Herod the Great (Luke 3:1 — the Galilean tetrarch Philip, named for whose Bethsaida this is, not the apostle) and lay just east of the Jordan in territory that was partly Hellenized and partly Jewish.⁠¹⁵

What matters for the apostolic Philip is the company he keeps. Andrew bears a Greek name (Ἀνδρέας, “manly”). Peter bears an Aramaic name (Cephas) with a Greek translation (Πέτρος) that the Fourth Gospel itself glosses at John 1:42. Philip bears a Greek name. The three Bethsaida apostles together constitute the band’s most demonstrably Hellenized triad in onomastic terms. When in John 12 some Greeks at the feast want to see Jesus, the narrative does not have them approach Peter, or James, or John, all bearing Aramaic-derived names; it has them approach Philip, who then goes to Andrew, and the two of them together approach Jesus. The Greek-named Bethsaida apostles are the structural bridge to the Gentile world. Benedict XVI named the observation: “Although Philip was of Jewish origin, his name is Greek, like that of Andrew, and this is a small sign of cultural openness that must not be underestimated.”⁠¹⁶

The Four Johannine Scenes

“Come and see” — John 1:43–46

The first of Philip’s four substantive scenes in the Fourth Gospel sets the pattern that the next three develop. Jesus, on the day after his encounter with John the Baptist and the first two disciples (one of them named, Andrew; one unnamed, traditionally John the son of Zebedee), decides to go from the Jordan to Galilee. Verse 43: “The next day he decided to go to Galilee, and he found Philip. And Jesus said to him, ‘Follow me.’”⁠¹⁷ The Greek verb of finding is εὑρίσκει — “he finds” — and it is the keyword of the entire opening sequence of the Fourth Gospel. The Baptist’s two disciples find Jesus by following him. Andrew finds his brother Simon and brings him to Jesus. Jesus himself finds Philip with no human mediator named. Philip then finds Nathanael.⁠¹⁸

The dialogue with Nathanael is the apostolic core of the scene. Philip tells him: “We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law, and also the prophets, Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.” Nathanael, in the most characteristically Israelite skepticism of the Fourth Gospel, retorts: “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” Philip answers in two Greek words: Ἔρχου καὶ ἴδε. “Come and see.”⁠¹⁹

The two verbs are the same two verbs Jesus had used moments earlier with the Baptist’s two disciples at John 1:38–39 (“Come, and you will see”) and they will be the same two verbs the Samaritan woman uses to her townsmen at John 4:29 in inviting them to meet Jesus.⁠²⁰ Within the Johannine literary structure, “come and see” is the signature Christological invitation: not argument, not proof, but ostension. The Catholic theological tradition has read this as the irreducibly experiential character of Catholic evangelization. Pope Benedict XVI named the structure in his 2006 catechesis on Philip:

In his dry but clear response, Philip displays the characteristics of a true witness: he is not satisfied with presenting the proclamation theoretically, but directly challenges the person addressing him by suggesting he have a personal experience of what he has been told. The same two verbs are used by Jesus when two disciples of John the Baptist approach him to ask him where he is staying. Jesus answers: “Come and see” (cf. Jn 1:38–39). We can imagine that Philip is also addressing us with those two verbs that imply personal involvement. He is also saying to us what he said to Nathanael: “Come and see.” The Apostle engages us to become closely acquainted with Jesus.⁠²¹

John Chrysostom, in his twentieth homily on John, had read the same scene with a complementary patristic emphasis on Philip’s scriptural literacy:

Andrew was persuaded when he had heard from John, and Peter the same from Andrew, but Philip not having learned anything from any but Christ who said to him only this, “Follow Me,” straightway obeyed, and went not back, but even became a preacher to others. For he ran to Nathanael and said to him, “We have found Him of whom Moses in the Law and the Prophets did write.” Do you see what a thoughtful mind he had, how assiduously he meditated on the writings of Moses, and expected the Advent? For the expression, “we have found,” belongs always to those who are in some way seeking.⁠²²

What Chrysostom registers — and what every careful patristic and medieval Catholic reader of the scene has registered after him — is the vocational asymmetry of Philip’s call. Andrew is called through the Baptist’s witness. Peter is called through Andrew. Philip is called directly by Jesus, with no human intermediary in the text. And yet the moment he is called he becomes a human intermediary for Nathanael. The pattern is recognizably Catholic: the immediacy of Christ’s call to one is the source from which the mediated call extended to another flows. The Catholic understanding of the apostolic structure of the Church — that Christ calls his Church into being through immediate divine election that then operates through mediated apostolic witness — has a Johannine root in this scene.

Raymond Brown in the Anchor Bible commentary on John reads the entire first-week narrative of the Fourth Gospel (1:19–2:11) as a deliberate seven-day creation typology with the Cana wedding on day seven as the new creation’s first sign. Philip’s call falls on day four in this structure, the day on which the lights are made in Genesis 1:14–19 — a coincidence Brown notes but does not press too hard.⁠²³ The more substantive observation Brown does press is that “come and see” presents the Johannine theological epistemology in compressed form: knowledge of Christ is not propositional in the first place but experiential, and the propositional content the apostles will preach afterward depends on the prior encounter the apostles have themselves had.

“Two hundred denarii would not be enough” — John 6:5–7

The second Johannine scene transposes Philip from Bethsaida to a hillside on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus has crossed by boat and a crowd of five thousand has followed him. The Synoptic Gospels all narrate the feeding of the five thousand, but only the Fourth Gospel singles out Philip and gives him a direct exchange with Jesus. Verse 5: “When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Philip, ‘Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?’” Verse 6: “He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.” Verse 7: “Philip answered him, ‘Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little [bit].’”⁠²⁴

The Greek of verse 6 is the load-bearing phrase: τοῦτο δὲ ἔλεγεν πειράζων αὐτόν. The participle πειράζων — “testing” — is the same verb the Septuagint uses of God testing Abraham at Genesis 22:1 and of the Israelites testing God at Exodus 17:2. In the Johannine context the valence is pedagogical rather than adversarial: Jesus is not setting Philip a trap but is drawing out the disciple’s existing reasoning so that the impending miracle will register against the disciple’s prior confessed inability. The denarius was a Roman silver coin, the standard daily wage for an agricultural laborer (Matthew 20:2). Two hundred denarii was therefore approximately eight months’ wages for a day-laborer. Philip’s calculation is not panic but quiet competence: even substantial capital outlay would not feed a crowd of this size adequately. The arithmetic is correct. The point is that the arithmetic is beside the point.⁠²⁵

Chrysostom, in his forty-second homily on John, read the scene precisely on this pedagogical axis:

Wherefore then does He ask “Philip”? He knew which of His disciples needed most instruction; for this is he who afterwards said, “Show us the Father, and it suffices us,” and on this account Jesus was beforehand bringing him into a proper state. For had the miracle simply been done, the marvel would not have seemed so great, but now He beforehand constrains him to confess the existing want, that knowing the state of matters he might be the more exactly acquainted with the magnitude of the miracle about to take place.⁠²⁶

Chrysostom’s coupling of John 6 with John 14 — the testing that prepares the disciple who will later ask to be shown the Father — is the standard patristic reading. Augustine, in the twenty-fourth Tractate on John, reaches the same conclusion through a different argument:

The Lord asked, whence they might buy bread to feed the multitude. And the Scripture says: “But this He said, proving him;” namely, the disciple Philip of whom He had asked; “for Himself knew what He would do.” Of what advantage then was it to prove him, unless to show the disciple’s ignorance? And, perhaps, in showing the disciple’s ignorance He signified something more… For we sometimes ask what we do not know, that, being willing to hear, we may learn; sometimes we ask what we do know, wishing to learn whether he whom we ask also knows.⁠²⁷

The Catholic theological substance the Eucharistic-prefiguration tradition draws from John 6 begins precisely at this Philippine moment. The miracle that follows — Christ taking bread, giving thanks, distributing it, and the fragments left over filling twelve baskets — uses the four verbs (ἔλαβεν, εὐχαριστήσας, διέδωκεν / ἔκλασεν…ἐδίδου) that the institution narratives use of the Last Supper bread.⁠²⁸ The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites the feeding directly in its treatment of the Eucharist at §1335: “The miracles of the multiplication of the loaves, when the Lord says the blessing, breaks and distributes the loaves through his disciples to feed the multitude, prefigure the superabundance of this unique bread of his Eucharist.”⁠²⁹

Philip’s failure to think beyond denarii is the structural failure of every age of the Church when it reckons the gift of Christ in the currency of human sufficiency. Two hundred denarii are not the answer; the answer is the Christ who blesses and breaks and distributes, the Christ whose own broken body is the bread that does not run out. Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 catechesis named the substance: “Here one can see the practicality and realism of the Apostle who can judge the effective implications of a situation. We then know how things went. We know that Jesus took the loaves and after giving thanks, distributed them. Thus, he brought about the multiplication of the loaves. It is interesting, however, that it was to Philip himself that Jesus turned for some preliminary help with solving the problem: this is an obvious sign that he belonged to the close group that surrounded Jesus.”⁠³⁰

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus” — John 12:20–22

The third Johannine scene happens in Jerusalem in the last week of Jesus’s earthly ministry, after the triumphal entry and shortly before the Last Supper discourse. Greek pilgrims who have come up to the city for the Passover feast approach Philip with a request. Verses 20–22: “Now there were some Greeks among those who had come up to worship at the feast. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, ‘Sir, we would like to see Jesus.’ Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.”⁠³¹

The “Greeks” of verse 20 (Ἕλληνες) are not Greek-speaking Jews of the diaspora (those would be Ἑλληνισταί in the Lukan usage at Acts 6:1, 9:29). The Johannine Ἕλληνες are Gentile sympathizers — God-fearers, in the Lukan terminology of Acts 10:2 — who have made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem and worship in the Court of the Gentiles. The narrative gives no further specification of where they have come from. What matters is that they are Gentile, that they request access to Jesus, and that they make the request through Philip rather than through one of the more obviously prominent apostles. The conventional explanation — defended by Brown, by Köstenberger, and by Benedict XVI himself in his 2006 catechesis — is that Philip’s Greek name and his Bethsaida origin marked him as a likely linguistic and cultural intermediary, the apostle the Greek-speakers would naturally approach.

Pope Benedict’s 2006 reading captures the implication precisely:

Once again, we have an indication of his special prestige within the Apostolic College. In this case, Philip acts above all as an intermediary between the request of some Greeks — he probably spoke Greek and could serve as an interpreter — and Jesus; even if he joined Andrew, the other Apostle with a Greek name, he was in any case the one whom the foreigners addressed. This teaches us always to be ready to accept questions and requests, wherever they come from, and to direct them to the Lord, the only one who can fully satisfy them. Indeed, it is important to know that the prayers of those who approach us are not ultimately addressed to us, but to the Lord: it is to him that we must direct anyone in need. So it is that each one of us must be an open road towards him!⁠³²

What follows in the Johannine narrative is theologically decisive. The Greeks’ request does not in fact result in Jesus meeting them. Instead it triggers Jesus’s announcement that “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (12:23). The scholarly reading common to Brown, Moloney, Carson, and Köstenberger is that the Gentile approach is the narrative occasion for “the hour” — the universal Gentile mission can only commence through the cross, and the Greeks who have come to see Jesus will in fact see him through the lifting up at Calvary that the rest of John 12 announces.⁠³³

Chrysostom in his sixty-sixth homily on John traced Philip’s caution to the apostolic commission of Matthew 10:5–6:

Philip gives place to Andrew as being before him, and communicates the matter to him. But neither does he at once act with authority; for he had heard that saying, “Go not into the way of the Gentiles”: therefore having communicated with the disciple, he refers the matter to his Master.⁠³⁴

Augustine, in his fifty-first Tractate on John, drew out the broader ecclesiological figure:

See how the Jews wish to kill Him, the Gentiles to see Him…. Here, then, were they of the circumcision and they of the uncircumcision, like two house walls running from different directions and meeting together with the kiss of peace, in the one faith of Christ. Let us listen, then, to the voice of the Cornerstone: “And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour has come that the Son of man should be glorified.” Perhaps some one supposes here that He spoke of Himself as glorified, because the Gentiles wished to see Him. Such is not the case. But He saw the Gentiles themselves in all nations coming to the faith after His own passion and resurrection.⁠³⁵

The Catholic theological substance is the universal apostolic mission. Philip becomes, in this scene, the literal apostle of access. The Greeks do not bypass him to reach Christ; they come to Christ through the apostolic mediation of the Greek-named Galilean from Bethsaida who in turn brings them through Andrew. The Catechism of the Catholic Church grounds the universal Catholic missionary mandate in this Johannine pattern at §849–§851, where the missionary mandate of Matthew 28:19–20 is read in light of “the apostolic Tradition” that the universal Catholic Church is the sacrament of salvation for the nations.⁠³⁶

“Lord, show us the Father” — John 14:8–9

The fourth and theologically most consequential Johannine scene happens in the Upper Room on the night before Jesus dies, during the long Farewell Discourse that runs from John 13 through John 17. Jesus has just told Thomas, who has asked where Jesus is going and how the disciples are supposed to know the way: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him” (14:6–7). Philip intervenes with what reads on the page as honest spiritual desire: “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.”⁠³⁷

The Greek of verse 8 is Κύριε, δεῖξον ἡμῖν τὸν Πατέρα, καὶ ἀρκεῖ ἡμῖν. The imperative δεῖξον (“show”) is the same verb the Septuagint uses of Moses’s request at Exodus 33:18: “Show me your glory” (δεῖξόν μοι τὴν σεαυτοῦ δόξαν). The NABRE footnote on John 14:8 names the typology explicitly: “Show us the Father: Philip is pictured asking for a theophany like Ex 24:9–10; 33:18.”⁠³⁸ Philip is asking for what Moses asked for and was partially denied. The Old Testament theophanies that lay behind the request — Moses on Sinai seeing God’s back but not his face, the elders on Sinai seeing “the God of Israel” and yet living, Isaiah seeing the LORD high and lifted up — are the experiential horizon Philip’s request stands within. He is asking for the theophany that the Hebrew Bible promises and partly delivers and yet always reserves for some eschatological fulfillment.

Jesus’s response to Philip is one of the central self-revelations of the Fourth Gospel. The NABRE: “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves” (14:9–11).⁠³⁹

The grammatical and theological reading of “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (ὁ ἑωρακὼς ἐμὲ ἑώρακεν τὸν Πατέρα) has been essentially unanimous in the orthodox patristic and Catholic tradition. Chrysostom, in his seventy-fourth homily on John, read it as the explicit assertion of the Father-Son substantial identity that the homoousian definition of Nicaea would centuries later make confessionally precise:

“Have I been so long time with you, and have you not known Me, Philip?” He says. What then? Replies Philip, “Are you the Father after whom I enquire?” “No,” He says. On this account He said not, “have you not known Him,” but, “have you not known Me,” declaring nothing else but this, that the Son is no other than what the Father is, yet continuing to be a Son… For Philip sought the knowledge which is by sight, and since he thought that he had so seen Christ, he desired in like manner to see the Father; but Jesus shows him that he had not even seen Himself.⁠⁴⁰

Augustine, in his seventieth Tractate on John, took the same reading and pressed it toward the doctrine of Christ as the perfect imago of the Father:

Not, certainly, that He who is the Son is also the Father, but that the Son in no respect disagrees with the likeness of the Father. For had not the Father and Son been two persons, it would not have been said, “If you have known me, you have known my Father also.” Such is certainly the case for “no one,” He says, “comes unto the Father but by me: if you have known me, you have known my Father also;” because it is I, who am the only way to the Father, that will lead you to Him, that He also may Himself become known to you. But as I am in all respects His perfect image, “from henceforth ye know Him” in knowing me; “and have seen Him,” if you have seen me with the spiritual eyesight of the soul.⁠⁴¹

Cyril of Alexandria, in his commentary on John (the ninth book of which treats John 14 at length), used the verse against the Arian denial of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father. Cyril argued that the seeing in question cannot be physical sight: the Son’s visibility to Philip discloses the invisible Father only because Son and Father share one essence (μία οὐσία). The eye that sees the incarnate Son does not see two persons in serial succession but one nature in two persons: the Father and the Son together, in the one act of revelation.⁠⁴²

Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologiae I, q. 35, a. 2, establishes Imago as a personal name proper to the Son, citing Colossians 1:15 (“Who is the Image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creatures”) and Hebrews 1:3 (“Who being the brightness of His glory, and the figure of His substance”) as the explicit scriptural warrants for the name. The Father-Son visibility relation that John 14:9 articulates — “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” — is the Johannine ground from which the wider Catholic doctrine of Imago consubstantialis draws, and Aquinas develops the connection at length in his Commentary on John ad loc. The argument in ST I, q. 35, a. 2 is that the Son alone is the perfect, consubstantial, personal image of the Father; the Holy Spirit proceeds but is not named “image”; only the Son is.⁠⁴³

Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 catechesis gave the Catholic doctrinal substance in a sentence that has become a touchstone:

These words are among the most exalted in John’s Gospel. They contain a true and proper revelation…. To express ourselves in accordance with the paradox of the Incarnation we can certainly say that God gave himself a human face, the Face of Jesus, and consequently, from now on, if we truly want to know the Face of God, all we have to do is to contemplate the Face of Jesus! In his Face we truly see who God is and what he looks like!⁠⁴⁴

The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites the verse three times in three distinct doctrinal registers. At §151, Jesus is “the unique and definitive object” of Christian faith: to believe in Jesus is to believe in the Father. At §470, in the Christology of the human nature of Christ as the perfect expression of the divine person of the Son: “In his soul as in his body, Christ thus expresses humanly the divine ways of the Trinity.” And at §516, in the treatment of “Christ’s whole earthly life as Revelation of the Father”: “Christ’s whole earthly life — his words and deeds, his silences and sufferings, indeed his manner of being and speaking — is Revelation of the Father. Jesus can say: ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.’”⁠⁴⁵

Philip’s request is the prayer of every theophanic longing — Moses on Sinai, the prophets, the mystics, the church in every age — answered finally not by a vision granted but by an identity revealed. The Father is seen in the Son. The Son is the perfect, consubstantial Image. The doctrine that the Catholic Church will eventually call Imago consubstantialis, the homoousion of Nicaea, the dyophysite-yet-one-person Christology of Chalcedon — all of this has a Johannine taproot in the exchange between Philip and Jesus on the night before Jesus died.

That theology, in turn, makes the figure of Philip in Catholic devotion intelligible. He is the apostle who asked the question whose answer is the whole of the Catholic confession of Christ. The Roman calendar gives Jn 14:6–14 as the Gospel reading on his feast day. The Liturgy of the Hours’s Office of Readings for May 3 prescribes Augustine’s seventieth Tractate on John — Augustine’s commentary on Philip’s question — as the second reading.⁠⁴⁶ The Catholic Church reads Philip’s voice into its prayer because his question elicits the Father-Son revelation that the Catholic Church spent four centuries finding the dogmatic language to confess.

The Two Philips Problem

Philip the Evangelist, one of the Seven (Acts 6:5; 8:5–40; 21:8–9)

The disambiguation problem that opens after the canonical text begins inside the canonical text itself. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles introduces, alongside Stephen the protomartyr, a second Hellenist Christian named Philip — clearly distinct from Philip the Apostle of the Twelve, whom Luke has already named at Acts 1:13 — as one of the seven deacons chosen by the Twelve at Acts 6:5: “The proposal was acceptable to the whole community, so they chose Stephen, a man filled with faith and the holy Spirit, also Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas of Antioch, a convert to Judaism.”⁠⁴⁷

The NABRE footnote on Acts 6:2–4 captures the significance of the Seven precisely: “Stephen and Philip are presented as preachers of the Christian message. They, the Hellenist counterpart of the Twelve, are active in the ministry of the word.”⁠⁴⁸ The Seven are the Greek-speaking, Hellenist-Jewish parallel to the predominantly Aramaic-speaking Twelve. Their nominal function — “to serve at table” (διακονεῖν τραπέζαις) — gives the Catholic Church its etymological derivation of the diaconal order. Their actual ministry, as Acts unfolds, is more capacious: Stephen disputes with the Hellenist synagogues of Jerusalem (6:9), preaches the great Acts 7 sermon, and is stoned to death. Philip preaches the gospel in Samaria with apostolic confirmation (8:5–25), evangelizes the Ethiopian eunuch on the road to Gaza (8:26–40), and ends up resident in Caesarea Maritima.

The NABRE wording at Acts 8:5–8 makes the Samaritan mission clear:

Now those who had been scattered went about preaching the word. Thus Philip went down to [the] city of Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them. With one accord, the crowds paid attention to what was said by Philip when they heard it and saw the signs he was doing. For unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice, came out of many possessed people, and many paralyzed or crippled people were cured.⁠⁴⁹

And at Acts 8:26–40 the encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, the catechetical archetype of the early Church’s mission to the nations:

Then the angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, “Get up and head south on the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, the desert route.” So he got up and set out. Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace…. Then he ordered the chariot to stop, and Philip and the eunuch both went down into the water, and he baptized him. When they came out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away, and the eunuch saw him no more, but continued on his way rejoicing. Philip came to Azotus, and went about proclaiming the good news to all the towns until he reached Caesarea.⁠⁵⁰

The third Acts passage is the decisive one for the disambiguation problem. Acts 21:8–9, the “we passage” in which Luke narrates Paul’s journey toward Jerusalem and his stay in Caesarea on the way: “On the next day we resumed the trip and came to Caesarea, where we went to the house of Philip the evangelist, who was one of the Seven, and stayed with him. He had four virgin daughters gifted with prophecy.”⁠⁵¹

The NABRE footnote on 21:8 is one-line: “One of the Seven: see note on Acts 6:2–4.”⁠⁵² Luke himself, in canonical Scripture, deliberately identifies this Philip with the precise epithet that distinguishes him from the Twelve — “Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven.” The two Philips are not a creation of post-apostolic confusion; they are two distinct men whom Luke names with deliberate care. The four-daughters detail of 21:9 is part of Luke’s identifying description, not an afterthought: this is the Philip with the four prophetic-virgin daughters, and Luke is writing within decades of the events he describes, citing first-person experience (“we” — Luke himself was apparently among the travelers staying with Philip).

Polycrates of Ephesus and the patristic record (c. 190)

The patristic record that names a “Philip at Hierapolis” begins to crystallize a century after Luke. The earliest substantive witness is Polycrates of Ephesus, bishop of that city in the last quarter of the second century, in his letter to Pope Victor of Rome defending the Asian “Quartodeciman” observance of Easter on the fourteenth of Nisan against the emerging Western practice of celebrating Easter always on a Sunday. Eusebius preserves the letter in Ecclesiastical History 5.24, in the long-form quotation that has reached us through the Schaff-McGiffert NPNF2-1 edition of 1890:

We observe the exact day; neither adding, nor taking away. For in Asia also great lights have fallen asleep, which shall rise again on the day of the Lord’s coming, when he shall come with glory from heaven, and shall seek out all the saints. Among these are Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who fell asleep in Hierapolis; and his two aged virgin daughters, and another daughter, who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests at Ephesus; and, moreover, John, who was both a witness and a teacher, who reclined upon the bosom of the Lord, and, being a priest, wore the sacerdotal plate.⁠⁵³

The shorter version of the same passage appears at Ecclesiastical History 3.31.2–3, where Eusebius is treating the deaths and burial sites of John and Philip directly:

For in Asia also great lights have fallen asleep, which shall rise again on the last day, at the coming of the Lord, when he shall come with glory from heaven and shall seek out all the saints. Among these are Philip, one of the twelve apostles, who sleeps in Hierapolis; and his two aged virgin daughters, and another daughter who lived in the Holy Spirit and now rests at Ephesus; and moreover John, who was both a witness and a teacher.⁠⁵⁴

Polycrates is writing from Ephesus around AD 190. His own testimony is significant on three counts. He is bishop of the nearest major see to Hierapolis. He claims continuity with seven of his own ancestors who were bishops in the same Asian provinces. And he writes within a century of the events he describes — closer to the death of Philip the Apostle (whenever that occurred) than we today are to the death of Abraham Lincoln. He explicitly calls this Philip “one of the twelve apostles” and explicitly numbers his daughters at three: two aged virgins buried at Hierapolis, and a third who “lived in the Holy Spirit” and is buried at Ephesus.

Proclus the Montanist (c. 200) and the four-daughters problem

The disambiguation problem opens in earnest at Ecclesiastical History 3.31.4, where Eusebius cites a second second-century source on Philip’s daughters at Hierapolis — a witness whose number differs from Polycrates’s by one. The source is Proclus, a Montanist leader who debated the Roman presbyter Gaius around AD 200 in the famous Dialogue of Gaius that Eusebius treats elsewhere. Proclus, defending the Montanist appeal to female prophecy as a continuation of the apostolic prophetic gift, cites the apostolic prophetesses of Hierapolis. Eusebius preserves the citation:

After him there were four prophetesses, the daughters of Philip, at Hierapolis in Asia. Their tomb is there and the tomb of their father.⁠⁵⁵

The numbers do not match. Polycrates says three daughters: two virgin at Hierapolis, one at Ephesus. Proclus says four prophetesses, all at Hierapolis. Acts 21:8–9 says the Philip with four virgin prophetic daughters was Philip the Evangelist of the Seven, who lived in Caesarea (not Hierapolis).

The classic modern resolution of the tension is the one Arthur Cushman McGiffert, the Union Theological Seminary scholar whose 1890 translation of Eusebius for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series remains the standard English text, gave in his editorial footnote 858. The footnote merits long quotation because it does the writer’s work:

Philip the apostle and Philip the evangelist are here confounded. That they were really two different men is clear enough from Luke’s account in the Acts (cf. Acts vi. 2–5, viii. 14–17, and xxi. 8). That it was the evangelist, and not the apostle, that was buried in Hierapolis may be assumed upon the following grounds: (1) The evangelist (according to Acts xxi. 8) had four daughters, who were virgins and prophetesses. Polycrates speaks here of three daughters, at least two of whom were virgins, and Proclus, just below, speaks of four daughters who were prophetesses. (2) Eusebius, just below, expressly identifies the apostle and evangelist, showing that in his time there was no separate tradition of the two men. Lightfoot (Colossians, p. 45) maintains that Polycrates is correct, and that it was the apostle, not the evangelist, that was buried in Hierapolis; but the reasons which he gives are trivial and will hardly convince scholars in general. Certainly we need strong grounds to justify the separation of two men so remarkably similar so far as their families are concerned. But the truth is, there is nothing more natural than that later generations should identify the evangelist with the apostle of the same name, and should assume the presence of the latter wherever the former was known to have been.⁠⁵⁶

McGiffert’s editorial footnote 866 on the Proclus passage extends the argument:

Polycrates’ report bears the stamp of truth as contrasted with mere legend, because it accounts for only three daughters, while universal tradition speaks of four.⁠⁵⁷

The logic is that Polycrates is closer to the source — geographically (Ephesus is adjacent to Hierapolis), chronologically (a century after the events, rather than longer), and confessionally (he is writing in defense of an Asian liturgical tradition he claims to have received). When Polycrates says “three daughters,” he is reporting what the Asian church of his day had in fact preserved: two virgin daughters buried at Hierapolis, and a third (possibly married, since she is not called a virgin) buried at Ephesus. That count of three does not match the Lukan four. The natural inference is that the Hierapolitan Philip — whose three daughters Polycrates accurately reports — was not the four-daughter Philip of Acts 21:8–9. Or, alternatively, that the Polycrates-Hierapolitan Philip was someone else, whose three daughters got conflated in later generations with the four daughters of the canonical Philip the Evangelist, producing the version of the story Proclus a decade later was repeating. Either reading destabilizes the apostolic identification: in the first, Polycrates is correct that the Hierapolitan Philip had three daughters but mistaken in calling him an apostle (since the Lukan-evangelist Philip had four); in the second, the entire Hierapolitan tradition has accreted around a person whose actual identity we cannot now recover.

Papias of Hierapolis (c. 110–130)

The earliest witness in the chain is also the most ambiguous. Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in the early second century, wrote a five-book work called Expositions of Oracles of the Lord (Λογίων κυριακῶν Ἐξηγήσεις) sometime around AD 110–130. The work is lost. Fragments survive in citations by Irenaeus, Eusebius, and others. Eusebius preserves the relevant fragment at Ecclesiastical History 3.39.9:

That Philip the apostle dwelt at Hierapolis with his daughters has been already stated. But it must be noted here that Papias, their contemporary, says that he heard a wonderful tale from the daughters of Philip. For he relates that in his time one rose from the dead. And he tells another wonderful story of Justus, surnamed Barsabbas: that he drank a deadly poison, and yet, by the grace of the Lord, suffered no harm.⁠⁵⁸

McGiffert’s footnote on this passage is the editorial signal that matters. The “Philip the apostle” framing is Eusebius’s, not Papias’s. The underlying Papias fragment, as McGiffert observes, says only that he met “the daughters of Philip” at Hierapolis — without specifying which Philip. Eusebius four generations later, working from the Polycrates identification and propagating it backward through the chain of his sources, glosses Papias as having met “the daughters of Philip the apostle.” Papias himself did not necessarily make that identification.⁠⁵⁹

Richard Bauckham, in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Eerdmans, 2nd ed. 2017), made this observation the foundation of one of the book’s central historiographic arguments. The premise of Bauckham’s book is that the Gospels are eyewitness testimony preserved through specific, named eyewitness chains rather than through anonymous community transmission. Papias is the standout exhibit: bishop of Hierapolis, contemporary of John, claimant of direct contact with apostolic eyewitnesses. The chain of sources Papias names is therefore historiographically priceless — provided we identify the sources correctly. Bauckham observes that Papias’s source-tradition for “Philip’s daughters” most plausibly identifies the four-daughter Philip of Acts 21:8–9, the Evangelist of the Seven, rather than the apostle Philip of the Twelve. Bauckham writes: “Papias knew the daughters of Philip the evangelist, one of the Seven (Acts 21:8–9). Eusebius mistakes this Philip for the Philip who was a member of the Twelve.”⁠⁶⁰

Bauckham is one of the most prominent recent defenders of the tradition-reliability of the Gospel sources. If even he — writing precisely to argue that Gospel tradition flows through named apostolic eyewitnesses — concludes that the Hierapolitan Philip is the Evangelist of the Seven and not the Apostle of the Twelve, the cumulative evidentiary weight of the conflation hypothesis is unusually heavy.

Modern scholarly consensus

McGiffert in 1890, Bauckham in 2006/2017, and a long line of major Acts and Johannine commentators in between have settled into substantively the same position. Raymond E. Brown’s Anchor Bible commentary on the Fourth Gospel (vols. 29 and 29A, Doubleday 1966 and 1970) reads the apostle Philip strictly within the Johannine narrative and treats the Hierapolitan tradition as evidence about Philip the Evangelist, not the Apostle.⁠⁶¹ Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., in the Anchor Bible commentary on Acts (vol. 31, Doubleday 1998), makes the disambiguation explicit at Acts 21:8 and identifies the four-daughter Philip with the Acts 6:5 Hellenist deacon.⁠⁶² F. F. Bruce’s NICNT The Book of the Acts (Eerdmans, rev. ed. 1988) takes the same position, treating “Philip the evangelist” of Acts 21:8 as the Hellenist deacon and the Hierapolitan tradition as belonging to him.⁠⁶³ C. K. Barrett in the two-volume ICC Acts (T&T Clark, 1994 and 1998) reaches the same conclusion.⁠⁶⁴ Eckhard Schnabel’s Early Christian Mission (IVP Academic, 2004) follows the consensus.⁠⁶⁵ Ute Eisen’s Women Officeholders in Early Christianity (Liturgical Press, 2000) treats the conflation as evidence of how the church’s memory of female prophecy worked.⁠⁶⁶

The most exhaustive scholarly monograph specifically on the disambiguation problem is Christopher R. Matthews’s Philip: Apostle and Evangelist — Configurations of a Tradition (Brill, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 105, 2002). Matthews argues at book length that the Hierapolitan tradition was originally about Philip the Evangelist, that the apostolic identification is a second-century development, and that the conflation is traceable through the patristic chain. Matthews’s reconstruction is the most ambitious recent argument on the question and is the standard reference work for serious engagement with it.⁠⁶⁷

The honorable minority report is J. B. Lightfoot’s note on the question in his Cambridge Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians and to Philemon (Macmillan, 1875; rev. 1879). Lightfoot, the great Cambridge patristic scholar whose three-volume edition of the Apostolic Fathers (Macmillan, 1885) is still cited, took the view that Polycrates was probably correct and that the Hierapolitan Philip was indeed the Apostle. His reasons, as McGiffert candidly characterized them, were largely from the antiquity and quality of Polycrates as a witness rather than from the resolution of the numerical discrepancy. McGiffert called the reasons “trivial.” Lightfoot has not had many followers.⁠⁶⁸

What the Catholic reader should make of all this

The honest scholarly position is that the Hierapolitan tradition originally attached to Philip the Evangelist of Acts 21:8–9 and only later — through the propagation of Polycrates’s identification — was reassigned to Philip the Apostle of the Twelve. That is the position Brown, Fitzmyer, Bruce, Barrett, Schnabel, Eisen, Matthews, Bauckham, and McGiffert all hold. It is not a fringe scholarly position, nor a position motivated by Protestant skepticism of Catholic tradition; the strongest Catholic-critical scholars on Acts (Fitzmyer) and the strongest pro-tradition Anglican scholar on apostolic memory (Bauckham) both hold it.

The Catholic Church’s liturgical and devotional tradition has nonetheless preserved the conflated reading. The Roman calendar commemorates Philip the Apostle on May 3 (joint feast with James, son of Alphaeus). The Roman Martyrology gives the same Apostle the traditional Hierapolitan death-narrative (cross, stoning). The Byzantine calendar commemorates Philip the Apostle on November 14, with the Acts of Philip’s serpent-slaying and upside-down crucifixion in the Synaxarion entry. The 2011 D’Andria archaeological identification of the Hierapolitan tomb has been received enthusiastically in Catholic devotional press as the discovery of “the Tomb of Saint Philip the Apostle.” None of this is going away.

Is the Catholic Church wrong to preserve the conflated tradition? The answer is no, and the reason is that the Catholic liturgical commemoration is not equivalent to a source-critical historiographic claim. Lex orandi preserves apostolic memory at a different level of granularity than historia critica operates at. The Catholic Church’s veneration of Philip the Apostle does not depend on the historicity of every hagiographic detail traditionally attributed to him. It depends on his having been one of the Twelve, on his apostolic preaching of the Gospel after Pentecost, on his having borne witness to Christ to the point of death (whether by spear, stone, cross, or some other manner the church no longer remembers precisely). The traditional martyrdom narrative at Hierapolis may belong, in critical history, to Philip the Evangelist rather than Philip the Apostle — but both Philips are saints; both are commemorated in the Roman Martyrology; both witnessed to Christ to the end of their lives in service of the Gospel. The Catholic Church’s veneration is not weakened by the historical reassignment.

What the Catholic reader should not do is pretend the disambiguation problem does not exist, or imply that the Polycrates-Eusebius chain stands as straightforward apostolic testimony. The chain is real; the data are what they are; the most economical reading places the four-daughter Philip with his daughters at Hierapolis and identifies him as the Acts 21 Evangelist rather than the John 14 Apostle. Catholic writing on Philip ought to be honest about where the patristic memory breaks and where the church’s veneration nonetheless rightly continues. The model is Benedict XVI’s careful “is said to have died” in the 2006 catechesis: the magisterium does not commit itself to the historicity of every hagiographic detail, but it also does not abandon the apostolic veneration. That is the right posture.

The Hierapolis Tradition and Its Archaeological Verification

The Acts of Philip (c. 350–400)

The narrative substance of “Philip’s martyrdom at Hierapolis” comes not from Polycrates, Proclus, or Papias — none of whom describes a martyrdom; all three only attest the burial — but from the apocryphal Acts of Philip, a 4th-century cycle whose various recensions tell a vivid serpent-slaying-and-upside-down-crucifixion story. The work is preserved in two manuscript families. The traditional recension is edited in Maximilian Bonnet’s Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha (Leipzig, 1903) and translated in M. R. James’s The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford, 1924), which is in the public domain by age and the standard English entry-point. The expanded Athos recension, preserved in Xenophontos manuscript 32 and discovered by François Bovon in 1974, is edited in Bovon, Bertrand Bouvier, and Frédéric Amsler’s Acta Philippi, Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 11–12 (Brepols, 1999), with full English translation by Bovon and Christopher R. Matthews, The Acts of Philip: A New Translation (Baylor University Press, 2012).⁠⁶⁹

The work is late, probably dating to the second half of the 4th century, and probably originating in Phrygian or Asia Minor Encratite circles. Its narrative shape is broadly that of late-antique Greek romance crossed with hagiographic apocrypha: Philip preaches across the Greek-speaking East, travels in company with his sister Mariamne and the apostle Bartholomew, accompanied by a converted leopard and a kid (yes, an actual goat-kid), and eventually arrives at the city of “Ophioryme” — Greek “Snake-Street” — which the text identifies as Hierapolis of Asia. The Hierapolitans worship a giant viper as a god. Philip confronts the cult, heals the proconsul’s wife Nicanora of leprosy, and is arrested. The proconsul orders Philip and Bartholomew bound and stripped, scourged, and crucified head-down. As they hang, Philip in wrath calls down an earthquake that swallows seven thousand of the Hierapolitan men. Jesus appears and rebukes Philip for his unforgiveness; Philip will be admitted to paradise only after forty days outside its gates. He dies hanging upside-down, explicitly invoking Peter: “Be not grieved that I hang thus, for I bear the form (type) of the first man, who was brought upon earth head downwards, and again by the tree of the cross made alive from the death of his transgression.” A vine springs from his blood. Bartholomew is sent to Lycaonia, where he will later be crucified. Mariamne goes to the Jordan to die. Stachys becomes the first bishop of the church built where Philip died.⁠⁷⁰

This is not history. It is the standard late-antique Christian apocryphal-romance genre: vivid, edifying, sometimes heretical, often delightful, never to be confused with the canonical record. M. R. James’s introduction to the Acts of Philip in The Apocryphal New Testament names the genre frankly: the work is “the latest and most fantastic” of the major apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, and its Hierapolitan martyrdom narrative is most plausibly an etiological story constructed to anchor a local cult center.⁠⁷¹

What the Acts of Philip does contribute durably to Catholic memory is the iconography. The upside-down cross or Tau cross of Philip in Western iconography, the basket of loaves, the serpent or dragon at his feet, the pairing with Bartholomew — all of these derive from the Acts of Philip narrative rather than from the canonical Gospel scenes. The Roman calendar’s May 3 Gospel reading is canonical (John 14:6–14); the May 3 hagiographic iconography on Catholic church windows and statuary is largely Acta Philippi. The two streams have flowed together in Catholic devotion since at least the late 4th century.

The 2011 D’Andria announcement

Francesco D’Andria, professor of classical archaeology at the University of Salento, has directed the Italian Archaeological Mission at Hierapolis since 2000. The mission has worked at the site continuously since 1957 under the founding directorship of Paolo Verzone (Politecnico di Torino). Verzone identified and excavated the octagonal Martyrium church on the hill above the city — a fifth-century centrally planned structure that mirrors the architecture of the Holy Sepulchre rotunda and the Anastasis at Constantinople, with eight chapels surrounding a domed central space. Verzone always believed the Martyrium was the Martyrium of Saint Philip, but excavation never produced a tomb at its center, and the identification rested on textual continuity with the Polycrates-Proclus-Papias chain rather than on physical-archaeological grounds.

D’Andria’s announcement of 26 July 2011, made in the field at Hierapolis to the Italian press and amplified through international press releases over the subsequent days, reported a discovery in a previously unstudied basilica approximately forty meters from the octagonal Martyrium. D’Andria’s team, working through 2010 and 2011, had cleared and excavated this previously known but uncatalogued basilica and identified at its center a first-century Roman cella-tomb in cut-stone construction, of the typical Hierapolitan tomb-type attested elsewhere in the city’s necropolis. The basilica built around the tomb was dated by D’Andria to the fifth century on the basis of a marble architrave bearing a monogram he reads as that of the emperor Theodosius (possibly Theodosius II, r. 408–450, possibly Theodosius I, r. 379–395). An inscription elsewhere in the necropolis is reported by D’Andria to allude to a church dedicated to Saint Philip; no inscription on the tomb itself names Philip directly.⁠⁷²

D’Andria formally presented the discovery to the Pontifical Academy of Roman Archaeology on 24 November 2011. He gave an extended interview to Zenit / EWTN in May 2012 in which he laid out the case in detail.⁠⁷³ As D’Andria himself recounted in the Zenit interview, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople celebrated the Divine Liturgy at the newly excavated tomb on 14 November 2011 — the Byzantine feast of Saint Philip the Apostle — in what was the first liturgical celebration on the site since the late Byzantine period.

D’Andria’s evidentiary case rests on five linked elements. First, the first-century date of the tomb, established by typological comparison with the Hierapolitan necropolis and the cut-stone construction common in the early Roman imperial period at this site. Second, the fifth-century basilica built deliberately around the tomb, datable to the late fourth or early fifth century by the architrave monogram. Third, the iconographic evidence from a sixth-century bronze pilgrim bread-stamp held by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond (Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund), which depicts Saint Philip standing between two churches on a staircase — D’Andria identifies the two churches as the octagonal Martyrium and the newly excavated basilica, with the physical staircase that connects them on the Hierapolis hilltop. Fourth, the pilgrim-wear pattern on the marble steps of the tomb platform, polished smooth by centuries of use. Fifth, the textual continuity with the Polycrates-Proclus-Papias chain that locates Philip at Hierapolis from the late second century onward.⁠⁷⁴

What the tomb does and does not prove

The archaeological case is good. But what it establishes is, with rigor, a fifth-century-and-later cult of Saint Philip at Hierapolis, centered on a first-century Roman tomb whose original occupant the late-antique Hierapolitan church identified as Philip and around which it built a major pilgrimage complex. What the case does not establish, even on D’Andria’s own terms, is the identity of the first-century occupant of the tomb. No inscription on the tomb itself names Philip. No bones or relics survive in situ — D’Andria proposes that they were translated to Constantinople in the late sixth or seventh century, possibly to the Roman Basilica of the Twelve Holy Apostles under Pope Pelagius I (r. 556–561), where the Catholic tradition has located them in the modern era. The case is inferential identification: the late-antique church identified its 1st-c. tomb as Philip’s, and D’Andria has established beyond reasonable doubt that they did identify it as such, and that the identification was institutionally durable enough to generate a major pilgrimage complex with bread-stamps in circulation across the Mediterranean by the sixth century. The case has not established — and at this point cannot establish, absent inscriptional evidence — that the original first-century occupant of the tomb was Philip the Apostle in particular, or even Philip the Evangelist, or any other identifiable historical figure.⁠⁷⁵

The conflation problem upstream of the tomb compounds the difficulty. If McGiffert, Bauckham, Brown, and the modern critical consensus are right that the Hierapolitan textual tradition originally attached to Philip the Evangelist and was only later transferred to Philip the Apostle, then even if D’Andria’s tomb identification is correct on archaeological grounds, the Philip in the tomb may be the wrong Philip — that is, the Acts 21 Philip rather than the John 14 Philip. The bread-stamp iconography, the Theodosian basilica, and the fifth-century pilgrim cult all post-date the conflation by centuries; they reflect the conflated tradition, not the underlying disambiguation. From the standpoint of late-antique Hierapolitan veneration, the question of “which Philip” had ceased to be live by the time the basilica was built. The cult attached to “Philip” without further specification, and the apostolic identification operated as background assumption rather than active discrimination.

The honest Catholic phrasing for D’Andria’s discovery is therefore: “the tomb traditionally identified by D’Andria’s team as the burial place of Saint Philip” rather than “the Tomb of Saint Philip the Apostle.” The first version is true and well-evidenced; the second version assumes the resolution of a disambiguation problem the archaeology cannot itself resolve.

Philip in Catholic Worship and Devotion

The Roman calendar: May 3

The Roman calendar commemorates Saint Philip the Apostle on May 3 as a Feast of the General Roman Calendar, joint with Saint James, Son of Alphaeus. The joint feast goes back to the 6th century. Pope Pelagius I (r. 556–561) began the translation of relics of both apostles to Rome and the construction of the church that would become the Basilica of the Holy Twelve Apostles (Santi XII Apostoli) on the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli; his successor Pope John III (r. 561–574) completed and dedicated the church in their joint name, and the joint commemoration followed.

The date of the feast has shifted three times in the modern Roman calendar. The pre-1955 Tridentine calendar commemorated Philip and James together on May 1, the traditional anniversary of the dedication of the basilica. Pope Pius XII transferred the feast to May 11 in the 1955 calendar reform, when he established May 1 as the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker. The 1960 calendar of Pope John XXIII retained the May 11 date. Pope Paul VI’s 1969 calendar reform, embodied in the motu proprio Mysterii Paschalis of 14 February 1969, moved the joint feast of Philip and James to May 3, where it has remained.⁠⁷⁶

The Roman lectionary’s Gospel reading on May 3 is John 14:6–14, encompassing Philip’s question and Jesus’s answer. The reading is liturgically pointed: of the four scenes the Fourth Gospel gives Philip, the church has elected to hear, on his feast day, the one that culminates in the Christological revelation of the Father-Son consubstantiality. The Communion Antiphon for the Mass of the day is taken from the same pericope: “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us. Whoever has seen me, Philip, has seen the Father also, alleluia.” The Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours assigns Augustine’s seventieth Tractate on John — Augustine’s commentary on the Philip pericope — as the second reading.⁠⁷⁷

The 2004 Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera, contains two distinct Philip entries: the May 3 entry on Saints Philip and James, with the apostolic and Hierapolitan hagiography for Philip, and the October 11 entry on Saint Philip the Deacon, the Acts 6 Evangelist of the Seven, who died at Caesarea Maritima. The two-entry structure is the Roman Church’s formal liturgical acknowledgment that the two Philips of the New Testament are two distinct men — even as the May 3 entry preserves the conflated hagiography that the critical-historical record would reassign to the Evangelist.⁠⁷⁸

Iconography

Philip the Apostle’s iconographic attributes derive primarily from the Acts of Philip narrative and secondarily from the four Johannine scenes. The Catholic Encyclopedia entry of 1911 (Johann Peter Kirsch, “St. Philip”) cites the standard attributes:⁠⁷⁹

The cross-staff or Tau cross, often shown inverted, represents the upside-down crucifixion at Hierapolis described in the Acts of Philip. The Tau (Greek capital T) reflects an older tradition that Philip’s cross was T-shaped, perhaps reflecting the crux commissa form documented in late-antique iconography. The inversion (head-down crucifixion) is the Acts of Philip’s explicit narrative: Philip “bears the form of the first man, who was brought upon earth head downwards.” The Petrine parallel is the conceptual model; the Acts of Philip extends the Petrine type to a second apostle.

The basket of loaves (sometimes two or three loaves on a tray, sometimes a basket with the small boy of John 6:9 beside it) recalls the feeding of the five thousand and Philip’s two-hundred-denarii calculation. The basket is the most distinctively Johannine of Philip’s iconographic attributes.

The dragon or serpent, sometimes pierced by Philip’s staff and sometimes lying defeated at his feet, recalls the Acts of Philip’s serpent-slaying at the city of “Snake-Street” Hierapolis. The dragon/serpent attribute is especially common in late medieval Western iconography (the 15th-century Western European tradition uses it heavily; the Byzantine East is more reserved).

Pairing with Bartholomew in iconographic ensembles recalls the Acts of Philip’s travel-companion narrative. Pairing with Andrew in some Catholic ensembles recalls the John 12 Greeks-at-the-feast pericope; pairing with James the Less is liturgical, reflecting the joint May 3 feast.

The Catholic Encyclopedia entry of 1911 also notes the patronages traditionally associated with Philip: hatters (no obvious narrative basis; possibly via the medieval guild tradition), pastry chefs (via the basket of loaves), Luxembourg (national patron) and Uruguay (national patron through the Catholic missionary tradition).⁠⁸⁰

Eastern reception: November 14 and Philip’s Fast

The Byzantine and Eastern Orthodox calendars commemorate Philip the Apostle on November 14. The date is the day before the start of the Nativity Fast — the forty-day pre-Christmas fast that begins on November 15 and runs through Christmas Eve. The fast is traditionally called “Philip’s Fast” (Greek: τοῦ ἁγίου Φιλίππου, “of Saint Philip”; Ukrainian: Pylypivka / Пилипівка; Bulgarian: Filipov post) because it begins the day after Philip’s feast.⁠⁸¹

The folk-legendary connection between Philip and the fast itself derives from a tradition extending the Acts of Philip’s closing narrative: Philip, denied paradise for forty days because of his uncharitable rage in calling down the Hierapolitan earthquake, asks the other apostles to fast on his behalf during the forty days of his exclusion. The pre-Christmas fast is thereby etiologized as the apostolic Church’s continuing fast for Philip’s purification. This is not history. It is folk-hagiography of a piece with the Acts of Philip genre. But it has shaped Slavic Orthodox piety for centuries, and the Nativity Fast in the Russian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Serbian Orthodox traditions is widely known as Pylypivka / Philip’s Fast.

The Orthodox Church in America’s entry on Philip for November 14 captures the standard Byzantine hagiographic narrative:

The Holy and All-praised Apostle Philip was a native of the city of Bethsaida in Galilee. He had a profound depth of knowledge of the Holy Scripture, and rightly discerning the meaning of the Old Testament prophecies, he awaited the coming of the Messiah. Through the call of the Savior (John 1:43), Philip followed Him…. Then the Apostle Philip arrived in the city of Phrygian Hieropolis, where there were many pagan temples. There was also a pagan temple where people worshiped an enormous serpent as a god. The Apostle Philip by the power of prayer killed the serpent and healed many bitten by snakes. At the urging of the pagan priests of the temple of the serpent, Amphipatos ordered the holy Apostles Philip and Bartholomew to be crucified.⁠⁸²

The Byzantine and Slavic narrative is essentially the Acts of Philip narrative absorbed into the Synaxarion entry, with the conflated apostle-evangelist identification taken for granted.

The Coptic Orthodox calendar commemorates Philip on 18 Hatour, which corresponds approximately to November 27 in the modern Gregorian calendar (with the Coptic-Julian alignment producing variations across centuries). The Coptic Synaxarium entry follows the same Acts of Philip / Synaxarion of Constantinople line, with Philip’s mission to Africa and the surrounding regions and his death at Hierapolis.⁠⁸³

Benedict XVI’s catechesis as Catholic magisterial template

Pope Benedict XVI dedicated his Wednesday general audience of 6 September 2006 to Philip the Apostle, as part of the catechetical cycle on the Twelve that occupied his Wednesday audiences from spring 2006 through winter 2007. The catechesis is the most accessible recent Catholic magisterial treatment of Philip and the template the rest of this post tries to follow.

Benedict opens with the apostle list placement and the Greek name. He proceeds through the four Johannine scenes in turn — the call at John 1, the feeding at John 6, the Greeks at the feast in John 12, and the Last Supper question at John 14. His treatment of the John 14 pericope is the theological centerpiece of the catechesis, the sentence about God giving himself a human face becoming the Face of Jesus. He closes the catechesis with the Hierapolis death tradition:

The Evangelist does not tell us whether Philip grasped the full meaning of Jesus’ sentence. There is no doubt that he dedicated his whole life entirely to him. According to certain later accounts (Acts of Philip and others), our Apostle is said to have evangelized first Greece and then Frisia [Phrygia], where he is supposed to have died, in Hierapolis, by a torture described variously as crucifixion or stoning.⁠⁸⁴

(The official Vatican English translation reads “Frisia” — a translation slip; the Italian original is “Frigia,” that is, Phrygia. Hierapolis is in Phrygia. Frisia is in the Low Countries.⁠⁸⁵)

The catechesis closes:

Let us conclude our reflection by recalling the aim to which our whole life must aspire: to encounter Jesus as Philip encountered him, seeking to perceive in him God himself, the heavenly Father. If this commitment were lacking, we would be reflected back to ourselves as in a mirror and become more and more lonely! Philip teaches us instead to let ourselves be won over by Jesus, to be with him and also to invite others to share in this indispensable company; and in seeing, finding God, to find true life.⁠⁸⁶

Three features of the catechesis are worth noting as a magisterial template for Catholic engagement with the apostle. First, Benedict carefully sources the substantive biography to John’s Gospel — every concrete claim about Philip’s character, his role in the apostolic college, his prestige among the Greeks, his question about the Father — is grounded in the canonical text. Second, Benedict treats the Hierapolitan death tradition with explicit modal qualifications (“according to certain later accounts,” “is said to have evangelized,” “is supposed to have died,” “described variously”). The magisterium does not commit itself to the historicity of the Acts of Philip narrative; it acknowledges the tradition without endorsing its details. Third, Benedict does not mention the apostle-evangelist disambiguation problem at all. The catechesis is pastoral, not source-critical; the audience is the universal Church, not a scholarly journal. But the careful hedging in the death-narrative paragraph signals that the Catholic Church reserves judgment on the question — neither asserting the Hierapolitan martyrdom as historical fact nor denying it, neither resolving the conflation nor pronouncing on its origin. This is the right magisterial posture, and it is the posture this post tries to follow throughout.

What Philip Gives the Church

The four Johannine scenes are not biographical color. Each gives the Catholic Church a theological substance that has shaped Catholic doctrine, liturgy, and devotional life for two millennia.

Vocation and ostension (John 1)

Philip is the apostle whose call shows the Catholic shape of vocation. Christ summons directly; the disciple immediately becomes a mediator for others. The pattern reproduces itself across the apostolic Church: Christ calls Peter, Peter preaches at Pentecost, three thousand are converted; Christ calls Paul, Paul preaches across the Mediterranean, the Gentile mission unfolds; Christ calls Philip, Philip brings Nathanael. The unbroken chain of apostolic mediation that the Catholic Church traces from Christ to the present operates on the model the first Johannine scene displays in concentrated form.

“Come and see” is the irreducibly Catholic invitation because the Catholic confession of Christ has never been reducible to propositional content. The Catholic Church teaches that the encounter with Christ is sacramental, embodied, ecclesial: not first a doctrine to be agreed with but a Person to be met, and the meeting takes place in the eucharistic assembly of the Church. Philip’s two words to Nathanael — Ἔρχου καὶ ἴδε — are the Catholic Church’s two-word invitation to every soul. Come to the eucharistic celebration, the catechumenate, the sacraments, the company of the saints. See what Christ has made of his Church. The doctrine will follow.

Eucharistic prefiguration (John 6)

Philip’s two-hundred-denarii calculation is the figure of every age’s failure to reckon Eucharistically. The Church teaches that the bread of the Eucharist is the body of Christ — that the natural insufficiency of bread and wine to feed the human soul is overcome by the miracle of transubstantiation that makes them the body and blood of the Risen Lord. The bread that does not run out is the bread that Christ takes, blesses, breaks, and distributes — at the multiplication of the loaves on the Galilean hillside, at the Last Supper in the Upper Room, and at every Mass since.

Philip’s natural-arithmetic response — “two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread” — is the response of the natural reason that has not yet been opened to the eucharistic mystery. The Catechism cites the multiplication directly as the Eucharistic prefiguration: the eucharistic gift superabounds the natural insufficiency, just as the multiplied loaves on the hillside superabounded the disciples’ five barley loaves and two fish. Philip’s failure of imagination is the testing ground that prepares his faith — and the reader’s faith — for what Christ is about to do.

Catholicity (John 12)

The Greek-named Bethsaida apostle who serves as the intermediary between the Gentile pilgrims and the Christ is the Johannine figure of catholicity — the universal apostolic mission that the Catholic Church inherits as its constitutive task. The Greek pilgrims at the feast cannot bypass apostolic mediation to reach Christ; they come to Christ through Philip and through Andrew, and Philip and Andrew together come to Christ. The Catholic Church teaches that this mediated structure — Christ encountered through the apostolic Church, the apostolic Church received from the apostles through the bishops in apostolic succession — is not an accidental feature of how the Gospel happens to be transmitted but is the structure Christ himself established.

The Catechism’s treatment of the universal Catholic missionary mandate at §849–§851 grounds the missionary task in this Johannine pattern. The Catholic Church is missionary “by its very nature” (CCC 850, quoting Ad Gentes 2) because the universal mission flows from the inner life of the Triune God who sends his Son into the world for the salvation of all. Philip is the Johannine figure of the apostolic mediation by which that mission reaches the Greeks at the feast and the Greeks beyond the feast and the nations beyond the Greeks. Every Catholic missionary, from the first Christian century to the present, walks the road Philip walked from his fellow Greek pilgrims to Andrew to Jesus. The intermediary is essential; the mediation is the mission.

The Christological taproot (John 14)

Philip’s request and Jesus’s answer constitute one of the central self-revelations of the Fourth Gospel, and the Catholic Church has built two thousand years of Christological doctrine on the foundation laid in this brief exchange. The Father is not seen except in the Son. The Son is the perfect, consubstantial, personal image (Imago consubstantialis) of the Father. Christ is vere Deus, vere homo — true God of true God, become true man without ceasing to be true God — and the human face Christ shows is the face of God himself, because the divine person of the Son who has assumed human nature without confusion or change communicates the divine ways of the Trinity through that assumed human nature.

The Catholic Church teaches this doctrine because the Catholic Church reads John 14:9 as the New Testament’s clearest scriptural ground for it. Aquinas in Summa Theologiae I, q. 35, a. 2 cites the verse as the warrant for Imago as a personal name proper to the Son.⁠⁸⁷ The Catechism cites it at §151 (Jesus is the unique definitive object of Christian faith), §470 (the Christology of the human nature of Christ as expression of the divine person), and §516 (“Christ’s whole earthly life is Revelation of the Father”).⁠⁸⁸ The Nicene Creed’s homoousion (“of one substance with the Father”) and the Chalcedonian definition of one person in two natures both presuppose the Johannine self-revelation Philip’s question elicits.

In a real sense, Philip asks the question whose answer is the whole of the Catholic confession of Christ. The Church reads his voice into its prayer on his feast day because his single question stands at the source of the entire Christological tradition.

Further reading

The standard modern Catholic commentary on the Johannine Philip scenes is Raymond E. Brown’s two-volume The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible 29 and 29A (Doubleday, 1966 and 1970). On each Philip pericope (1:43–46, 6:5–7, 12:20–22, 14:8–9), Brown is the indispensable Catholic-critical voice. Francis J. Moloney’s The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Liturgical Press, 1998), is the closest current Catholic counterpart. The most useful modern non-Catholic commentaries are D. A. Carson’s The Gospel According to John, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 1991), and Andreas Köstenberger’s John, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2004).

For the disambiguation problem, the indispensable monograph is Christopher R. Matthews’s Philip: Apostle and Evangelist — Configurations of a Tradition, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 105 (Brill, 2002). It is the only book-length scholarly treatment specifically of the Two Philips problem. Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Eerdmans, 2017), Chapter 2 on Papias, treats the same problem within the broader argument about apostolic eyewitness chains. Joseph A. Fitzmyer’s The Acts of the Apostles, Anchor Bible 31 (Doubleday, 1998), treats Acts 21:8 and the disambiguation explicitly. Ute Eisen’s Women Officeholders in Early Christianity, trans. Linda Maloney (Liturgical Press, 2000), treats the four prophetic daughters and their reception in patristic memory.

On the Acts of Philip, the standard PD English entry-point is M. R. James’s The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924; corrected 2nd ed. 1953), available at archive.org. The current critical edition is François Bovon, Bertrand Bouvier, and Frédéric Amsler, Acta Philippi, Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 11–12 (Brepols, 1999). The current English critical translation is Bovon and Christopher R. Matthews, The Acts of Philip: A New Translation (Baylor University Press, 2012).

On the Hierapolis archaeology, Francesco D’Andria’s interview with Zenit / EWTN of 2 May 2012 (“How I Discovered the Tomb of the Apostle Philip”) is the most accessible English-language summary by the discoverer. The Biblical Archaeology Society’s “Strata” column in Biblical Archaeology Review, January/February 2012, summarized the announcement for the American Catholic and biblical-archaeology audience. D’Andria’s scholarly publications appear in the Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia: Rendiconti (vol. 84, 2011–2012) and in the Hierapolis di Frigia monograph series published by Ege Yayinlari, Istanbul.

The Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Philip the Apostle by Johann Peter Kirsch (1911), available at newadvent.org/cathen/11799a.htm, remains the most accessible PD synthesis in English of the Polycrates-Proclus-Papias chain, the patristic tradition, the iconography, and the liturgical commemoration. Pope Benedict XVI’s general audience of 6 September 2006, available at vatican.va, is the most accessible modern magisterial reading.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Saint Philip the Apostle?

Philip was one of the Twelve apostles whom Jesus called, fifth in every New Testament apostle list (Matthew 10:3, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:14, Acts 1:13). He was from Bethsaida in Galilee, the same Hellenized fishing town as Andrew and Peter, and his Greek name (Φίλιππος, “lover of horses”) marks him as part of the more culturally Greek-oriented wing of the apostolic college. The Fourth Gospel gives him four substantive scenes — his call and his outreach to Nathanael at John 1:43–46, his testing by Jesus at the feeding of the five thousand at John 6:5–7, his mediating role for the Greek pilgrims at the feast at John 12:20–22, and his Last Supper question “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us” at John 14:8–9. Outside these four scenes the canonical text gives him no individual voice. After Acts 1:13, where he is present in the Upper Room at Pentecost, the New Testament says nothing more about him. Catholic tradition, following the late second-century witness of Polycrates of Ephesus quoted by Eusebius, locates his apostolic ministry and death at Hierapolis in Phrygia (modern Pamukkale, Turkey).

How is Philip the Apostle different from Philip the Evangelist?

They are two distinct men whom Luke deliberately disambiguates in the Acts of the Apostles. Philip the Apostle is one of the Twelve, named in every apostle list, present in the Upper Room at Pentecost (Acts 1:13). Philip the Evangelist is one of the Seven chosen at Acts 6:5 to serve the Hellenist widows; he preaches in Samaria at Acts 8:5–25, baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch at Acts 8:26–40, and is found resident in Caesarea Maritima with “four virgin daughters gifted with prophecy” when Paul stays at his house in Acts 21:8–9. The NABRE footnote at Acts 6:2–4 describes the Seven as “the Hellenist counterpart of the Twelve” — the Greek-speaking parallel to the predominantly Aramaic-speaking apostolic band, with distinct ministries that overlap in proclamation but differ in office. Luke himself at Acts 21:8 uses the precise disambiguating epithet “Philip the evangelist, who was one of the Seven” to distinguish this Philip from the apostle of the same name. The 2004 Roman Martyrology preserves the distinction: Philip the Apostle is commemorated on May 3, Philip the Evangelist/Deacon on October 11.

Did Philip the Apostle really die at Hierapolis?

The honest answer is: the Catholic Church’s liturgical tradition holds that he did, but modern critical scholarship is divided. The Hierapolitan tradition is preserved through three second-century witnesses quoted by Eusebius: Polycrates of Ephesus c. 190 (Eusebius HE 5.24), Proclus the Montanist c. 200 (HE 3.31), and Papias of Hierapolis c. 110–130 (HE 3.39). The numbers do not match across these witnesses: Polycrates says three daughters (two virgin at Hierapolis, one at Ephesus); Proclus says four prophetesses, all at Hierapolis; and Acts 21:8–9 says Philip the Evangelist (not the Apostle) had four virgin prophetic daughters. The modern critical consensus, following Arthur McGiffert’s 1890 NPNF2-1 footnote and developed by Brown, Fitzmyer, Bruce, Barrett, Schnabel, Eisen, Matthews, and Bauckham, is that the Hierapolitan tradition originally attached to Philip the Evangelist and was only later — through Polycrates’s identification, propagated through Eusebius — transferred to Philip the Apostle. Pope Benedict XVI in 2006 treated the Hierapolitan death tradition with explicit modal hedging (“according to certain later accounts,” “is said to have died,” “described variously as crucifixion or stoning”), neither asserting it as historical fact nor denying it. The Catholic Church’s veneration of Philip the Apostle does not depend on the historical accuracy of the Hierapolitan death narrative.

What did Francesco D’Andria find at Hierapolis in 2011?

D’Andria, director of the Italian Archaeological Mission at Hierapolis, announced on 26 July 2011 the discovery of a first-century Roman tomb at the center of a fifth-century basilica he and his team had excavated about forty meters from the previously known octagonal Martyrium church. The fifth-century basilica had been built deliberately around the first-century tomb, and a marble architrave bearing a monogram D’Andria reads as belonging to the emperor Theodosius dates the basilica to the late fourth or early fifth century. A sixth-century bronze pilgrim bread-stamp at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond depicts Saint Philip standing between two churches on a staircase — D’Andria identifies the two churches as the octagonal Martyrium and the newly excavated basilica, with the physical staircase that physically connects them on the Hierapolis hilltop. The tomb is empty; D’Andria proposes that the relics were translated to Constantinople in the late sixth or seventh century. The archaeological case establishes with rigor that a major fifth-century-and-later Hierapolitan cult of Philip was centered on this tomb. It does not establish — and absent an inscription on the tomb itself cannot establish — the historical identity of the first-century occupant. The conflation problem upstream of the tomb compounds the difficulty: even if the late-antique church correctly identified the tomb as Philip’s, the Philip in question may be the Acts 21 Evangelist rather than the John 14 Apostle.

What does “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us” mean theologically?

Philip’s request at John 14:8 is a request for a theophany — for the vision of God that the Hebrew Bible promises and partially delivers. Moses on Sinai asks the same thing at Exodus 33:18 (“Show me your glory”) and receives only a glimpse of God’s back. Philip is asking, on the night before Jesus dies, for the unveiled vision of the Father that the prophets longed for and never fully received. Jesus’s answer collapses the request into his own person: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (14:9). The Catholic theological tradition has read this verse since the patristic age as the Johannine taproot of the doctrine of Christ as the perfect, consubstantial, personal image of the Father — the Imago consubstantialis of Aquinas’s Summa I, q. 35, a. 2, the homoousios of the Nicene Creed, the dyophysite-yet-one-person Christology of Chalcedon. The Father is not seen except in the Son, because the Son is the perfect Image of the Father; whoever sees the human face of Jesus sees, in the very act of vision, the divine person of the eternal Word who has become flesh. The Catechism of the Catholic Church cites the verse at §151, §470, and §516. Pope Benedict XVI in his 2006 catechesis on Philip gave the most concise modern Catholic formulation: “God gave himself a human face, the Face of Jesus, and consequently, from now on, if we truly want to know the Face of God, all we have to do is to contemplate the Face of Jesus!”

When is the feast of Saint Philip the Apostle?

In the post-1969 Roman calendar, the joint Feast of Saints Philip and James the Less is celebrated on May 3. The pre-1955 Tridentine calendar had it on May 1 (until 1955, when the day became the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker), and the 1960 calendar of Pope John XXIII had it on May 11; Pope Paul VI’s 1969 Mysterii Paschalis fixed the current May 3 date. The Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Byzantine churches celebrate Saint Philip on November 14, the day before the start of the forty-day Nativity Fast (also known as “Philip’s Fast” or Pylypivka in Ukrainian usage, Philipov post in Bulgarian). The Coptic Orthodox Church commemorates Philip on 18 Hatour (approximately November 27 in the modern Gregorian calendar). The 2004 Roman Martyrology commemorates Philip the Apostle on May 3 and the distinct Philip the Evangelist/Deacon on October 11.

Why does Catholic iconography show Philip with a cross, loaves of bread, and a dragon?

The three primary iconographic attributes of Saint Philip the Apostle derive from different sources. The cross (often a Tau cross, often shown inverted) derives from the Acts of Philip, a fourth-century apocryphal cycle that narrates his upside-down crucifixion at Hierapolis. The cross is not from the canonical Gospels — the New Testament tells us nothing about how or whether Philip was martyred — but from the late-antique hagiographic tradition the Catholic Church has carried forward as part of his liturgical commemoration. The basket of loaves (or two or three loaves on a tray) derives from the canonical John 6:5–7 feeding-of-the-five-thousand pericope where Jesus tests Philip by asking where they could buy bread for the crowd; Philip’s answer that two hundred denarii would not be enough sets the stage for the eucharistic miracle that follows. The dragon or serpent, sometimes pierced by Philip’s staff and sometimes lying defeated at his feet, derives from the Acts of Philip’s narrative of the apostle’s confrontation with the serpent-worshipping pagan cult at the city of “Snake-Street” Hierapolis. The three attributes together — Tau cross from the Acts of Philip martyrdom, loaves from John 6, dragon from the Acts of Philip serpent narrative — give a Catholic faithful both the canonical and the hagiographic Philip in one iconographic ensemble.

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Footnotes

1. 1. John 14:9 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) is the canonical English Catholic translation of Scripture used in the United States.

2. 2. Acts 1:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

3. 3. Eusebius of Caesarea, Historia Ecclesiastica 5.24.2, trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1890), CCEL.

4. 4. Eusebius, HE 3.31.4, trans. McGiffert (above, n. 3), CCEL.

5. 5. Eusebius, HE 3.39.9, trans. McGiffert (above, n. 3), CCEL. McGiffert’s editorial footnote on this passage explicitly flags that the “Philip the apostle” framing is Eusebius’s editorial gloss; the underlying Papias fragment names only “Philip,” without further specification.

6. 6. Acts 21:8–9 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

7. 7. The modern critical consensus on the Two Philips is articulated in Arthur Cushman McGiffert’s editorial footnote 858 in his 1890 NPNF2-1 edition of Eusebius (above, n. 3); developed in Christopher R. Matthews, Philip: Apostle and Evangelist: Configurations of a Tradition, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 105 (Leiden: Brill, 2002); confirmed in Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i–xii), Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), ad John 1:43–46 and 6:5–7; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., The Acts of the Apostles, Anchor Bible 31 (New York: Doubleday, 1998), ISBN 978-0-385-46880-0, ad Acts 21:8; F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, NICNT, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), ISBN 978-0-8028-2505-6; C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994–1998); Eckhard J. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 2 vols. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004), ISBN 978-0-8308-2790-9; Ute E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000), ISBN 978-0-8146-5950-2; and Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), ISBN 978-0-8028-7431-3.

8. 8. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006, Philip the Apostle, vatican.va.

9. 9. Matthew 10:2–4 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

10. 10. Mark 3:18 (NABRE) in context of Mk 3:16–19, bible.usccb.org.

11. 11. Luke 6:14–16 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

12. 12. Acts 1:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

13. 13. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

14. 14. John 1:44 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

15. 15. On the Bethsaida site identification debate, see Rami Arav and Richard A. Freund, eds., Bethsaida: A City by the North Shore of the Sea of Galilee, 4 vols. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 1995–2009); and on the el-Araj proposal Mordechai Aviam, R. Steven Notley, and Dina Avshalom-Gorni, “The El-Araj Excavation Project: First Five Seasons,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 82 (2020): 207–239.

16. 16. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

17. 17. John 1:43 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

18. 18. John 1:35–46 (NABRE) for the seven-fold occurrence of “find” (εὑρίσκει) through the call narrative. Greek text from Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th rev. ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012), ISBN 978-3-438-05140-0, verified via biblehub.com.

19. 19. John 1:45–46 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

20. 20. John 1:38–39 (NABRE) and John 4:29 (NABRE) for the recurring “Come, and you will see”/“Come and see” formula across the Fourth Gospel’s witness-and-invitation scenes.

21. 21. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

22. 22. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 20, §1, trans. Charles Marriott, in NPNF First Series, vol. 14, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1889), newadvent.org.

23. 23. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John (i–xii), Anchor Bible 29 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 105–106 on the seven-day structure of the opening narrative, and pp. 79–83 ad John 1:43–46. ISBN 0-385-01517-0.

24. 24. John 6:5–7 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

25. 25. On the πειράζων (“testing”) pedagogical reading see Brown (above, n. 23), pp. 232–234 ad Jn 6:5–7; D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), ISBN 978-0-8028-3683-0, ad loc.; and Andreas J. Köstenberger, John, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004), ISBN 978-0-8010-2644-7, ad loc. The denarius wage standard is documented in Matthew 20:2 (NABRE).

26. 26. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 42, §1, trans. Marriott (above, n. 22), newadvent.org.

27. 27. Augustine of Hippo, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 24, §3, trans. John Gibb, in NPNF First Series, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing, 1888), newadvent.org.

28. 28. See Brown (above, n. 23), pp. 246–252 on the eucharistic resonances of John 6:1–15 against the Synoptic and Pauline institution narratives (Mark 14:22, Matthew 26:26, Luke 22:19, 1 Corinthians 11:23–26).

29. 29. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1335, at vatican.va.

30. 30. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

31. 31. John 12:20–22 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

32. 32. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

33. 33. Brown (above, n. 23), pp. 466–471 ad John 12:20–36; Francis J. Moloney, S.D.B., The Gospel of John, Sacra Pagina 4 (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1998), ISBN 978-0-8146-5806-2, ad loc.; Carson (above, n. 25), ad loc.; Köstenberger (above, n. 25), ad loc.

34. 34. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 66, §2, trans. Marriott (above, n. 22), newadvent.org. The reference is to Matthew 10:5–6, where Jesus restricts the Twelve’s initial mission “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

35. 35. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 51, §8, trans. Gibb (above, n. 27), newadvent.org.

36. 36. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§849–851, at vatican.va; citing Ad Gentes 2 (Second Vatican Council, Decree on the Missionary Activity of the Church, 1965), at vatican.va.

37. 37. John 14:8. The NABRE at bible.usccb.org translates the vocative Κύριε at this verse as “Master”: “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” The post follows the traditional Catholic English rendering “Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us” — the rendering used in the current Roman Lectionary’s Mass formulary for the Feast of Saints Philip and James (May 3), the Communion Antiphon for the same Mass, and the Vatican English text of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2006 catechesis on Philip. Either rendering is exegetically defensible. bible.usccb.org.

38. 38. NABRE footnote on John 14:8, at bible.usccb.org: “Show us the Father: Philip is pictured asking for a theophany like Ex 24:9–10; 33:18.”

39. 39. John 14:9–11 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

40. 40. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of John, Homily 74, §§1–2, trans. Marriott (above, n. 22), newadvent.org.

41. 41. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, Tractate 70, §2, trans. Gibb (above, n. 27), newadvent.org.

42. 42. Cyril of Alexandria, Commentary on the Gospel of John, Book 9, on John 14:8–11. English translation: Commentary on the Gospel According to S. John, trans. Philip E. Pusey and Thomas Randell, Library of Fathers of the Holy Catholic Church (Oxford: James Parker, 1885), 2 vols. The Pusey-Randell translation is in the public domain and available at archive.org. For the modern critical edition see Cyril of Alexandria, In D. Joannis Evangelium, ed. P. E. Pusey, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1872).

43. 43. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 35, a. 2, on whether the name “Image” is proper to the Son. English translation: Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 5 vols. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1911–1925; reprint Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), at newadvent.org.

44. 44. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

45. 45. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §151 at vatican.va; §470 at vatican.va; §516 at vatican.va.

46. 46. Liturgia Horarum, Office of Readings for the Feast of Saints Philip and James, Apostles (3 May), second reading from Augustine, Tractatus in Iohannem 70. Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2002), Mass for the Feast of Saints Philip and James, with Gospel reading from John 14:6–14.

47. 47. Acts 6:5 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

48. 48. NABRE footnote on Acts 6:2–4, at bible.usccb.org.

49. 49. Acts 8:4–7 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

50. 50. Acts 8:26–27, 38–40 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

51. 51. Acts 21:8–9 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

52. 52. NABRE footnote on Acts 21:8, at bible.usccb.org.

53. 53. Eusebius, HE 5.24.2, trans. McGiffert (above, n. 3).

54. 54. Eusebius, HE 3.31.2–3, trans. McGiffert (above, n. 4).

55. 55. Eusebius, HE 3.31.4, trans. McGiffert (above, n. 4). The Proclus quoted here is to be distinguished from Patriarch Proclus of Constantinople (d. 446) and from the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus of Athens (d. 485). On the Gaius–Proclus dialogue, see Eusebius HE 2.25.6 and 3.28.1.

56. 56. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, editorial footnote 858 to Eusebius HE 3.31.3, in NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1 (above, n. 4). Lightfoot’s defense of the apostolic identification appears in J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London: Macmillan, 1875; rev. ed. 1879), p. 45.

57. 57. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, editorial footnote 866 to Eusebius HE 3.31.4, in NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1 (above, n. 4).

58. 58. Eusebius, HE 3.39.9, trans. McGiffert (above, n. 5).

59. 59. McGiffert, editorial footnote 953 to Eusebius HE 3.39.9, in NPNF, Second Series, vol. 1 (above, n. 5), referring back to footnote 858 (above, n. 56).

60. 60. Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), ISBN 978-0-8028-7431-3, Chapter 2 (“Papias on the Eyewitnesses”).

61. 61. Raymond E. Brown, The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible 29 (1966) and 29A (1970), Garden City, NY: Doubleday. ISBN (vol. 29) 0-385-01517-0; ISBN (vol. 29A) 0-385-03761-1.

62. 62. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., The Acts of the Apostles, Anchor Bible 31 (New York: Doubleday, 1998), ISBN 978-0-385-46880-0, ad Acts 21:8.

63. 63. F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, NICNT, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), ISBN 978-0-8028-2505-6, ad Acts 21:8.

64. 64. C. K. Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, ICC, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994–1998). ISBN (vol. 1) 0-567-09653-X; ISBN (vol. 2) 0-567-08542-2. Treatment of Acts 21:8 is in vol. 2.

65. 65. Eckhard J. Schnabel, Early Christian Mission, 2 vols. (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2004), ISBN 978-0-8308-2790-9.

66. 66. Ute E. Eisen, Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies, trans. Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2000), ISBN 978-0-8146-5950-2, preface by Gary Macy.

67. 67. Christopher R. Matthews, Philip: Apostle and Evangelist: Configurations of a Tradition, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 105 (Leiden: Brill, 2002), ISBN 978-90-04-12054-6.

68. 68. J. B. Lightfoot, Saint Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon (London: Macmillan, 1875; rev. ed. 1879), p. 45. Lightfoot’s edition of The Apostolic Fathers, 5 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1885–1890), remains the standard scholarly reference for the Polycrates fragment in Greek.

69. 69. Maximilian Bonnet, ed., Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha, vol. II.2 (Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1903); M. R. James, trans., The Apocryphal New Testament (Oxford: Clarendon, 1924; corrected 2nd ed. 1953), pp. 439–453, at gnosis.org; François Bovon, Bertrand Bouvier, and Frédéric Amsler, eds., Acta Philippi: Textus and Acta Philippi: Commentarius, Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum 11–12 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), ISBN 978-2-503-41111-8 and 978-2-503-41121-7; François Bovon and Christopher R. Matthews, The Acts of Philip: A New Translation (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012), ISBN 978-1-60258-655-0.

70. 70. Summary of the narrative shape from M. R. James (above, n. 69), pp. 439–453. The upside-down crucifixion narrative appears in the closing Martyrdom section (the surviving Acts XV).

71. 71. M. R. James (above, n. 69), introduction to the Acts of Philip, p. 439.

72. 72. Biblical Archaeology Society, “Tomb of Apostle Philip Found,” Strata column, Biblical Archaeology Review 38, no. 1 (January/February 2012), at biblicalarchaeology.org.

73. 73. Francesco D’Andria, “How I Discovered the Tomb of the Apostle Philip,” interview with Zenit, reproduced at ewtn.com, 2 May 2012. For the scholarly publication see Francesco D’Andria, “Il santuario e la tomba dell’apostolo Filippo a Hierapolis di Frigia,” in Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia: Rendiconti, vol. 84 (2011–2012).

74. 74. The Richmond bread-stamp is held by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, accession 67-22, Adolph D. and Wilkins C. Williams Fund. The piece is published in Gary Vikan, Byzantine Pilgrimage Art, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications 5 (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, rev. ed. 2010), ISBN 978-0-88402-336-1.

75. 75. On the limits of the inferential identification and the broader question of late-antique cult sites and their archaeological substantiation see Charles Pietri and Luce Pietri, eds., Prosopographie chrétienne du Bas-Empire, 2 vols. (Rome: École française de Rome, 1982–1999); and Robert Wiśniewski, The Beginnings of the Cult of Relics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), ISBN 978-0-19-882765-1.

76. 76. Paul VI, motu proprio Mysterii Paschalis, 14 February 1969, at vatican.va; Calendarium Romanum (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969).

77. 77. Missale Romanum, editio typica tertia (above, n. 46); Liturgia Horarum, second reading for 3 May (above, n. 46).

78. 78. Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004), ISBN 88-209-7210-7, May 3 and October 11 entries.

79. 79. Johann Peter Kirsch, “St. Philip the Apostle,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11, ed. Charles Herbermann (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911), at newadvent.org.

80. 80. Kirsch (above, n. 79). The patronage of Luxembourg is documented in standard liturgical reference; the patronage of Uruguay derives from the Catholic missionary tradition during the colonial and post-colonial period.

81. 81. On the Byzantine November 14 feast and the Nativity Fast / Philip’s Fast see Robert F. Taft, S.J., The Byzantine Rite: A Short History, American Essays in Liturgy (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1992), ISBN 978-0-8146-2163-9; and Orthodox Church in America, “Holy and All-praised Apostle Philip,” 14 November, at oca.org.

82. 82. Orthodox Church in America (above, n. 81).

83. 83. Coptic Orthodox Church, Synaxarium, 18 Hatour, at st-takla.org; and copticchurch.net.

84. 84. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8). The English text on vatican.va reads “Frisia” in this paragraph; the Italian original reads “Frigia” (Phrygia). Hierapolis is in Phrygia, not in Frisia (the Low-Countries region encompassing parts of the Netherlands and Germany).

85. 85. On the “Frisia/Phrygia” translation oddity in the official Vatican English text of the 2006 catechesis, see the Italian original at vatican.va for confirmation that the original reads “Frigia.”

86. 86. Benedict XVI, General Audience of 6 September 2006 (above, n. 8).

87. 87. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 35, a. 2 (above, n. 43).

88. 88. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§151, 470, 516 (above, n. 45).