St. Philip the Apostle
He did not argue. When Nathanael asked whether anything good could come out of Nazareth, Philip did not defend the answer — he said “Come and see”, and let Jesus do the rest. He did the same thing later for the Greeks who wanted to meet him.
Canonized
No year of birth or death appears in any document held. Nothing offers one: the Gospels give him four scenes and no dates, and everything after that is a tradition the encyclopedia treats with suspicion. The feast is shared — the calendar keeps 3 May for Philip and James together — and the encyclopedia, written in 1911, gives the older Roman date of 1 May alongside 14 November in the Greek Church.
Philip came from Bethsaida on Lake Genesareth, the same town as Peter and Andrew, and he was there when John the Baptist pointed Jesus out. Jesus met him the next day and said two words to him: follow me.
The first thing he did was go and get somebody else. He found Nathanael and told him they had found the one Moses and the prophets wrote about — Jesus of Nazareth. Nathanael asked whether anything good could come out of Nazareth. Philip did not argue the point. He said: come and see.
His name stands fifth in each of the three lists of the Twelve — Matthew’s, Mark’s and Luke’s — and John gives him three more moments. Before the feeding of the crowd, Jesus asked him where they could buy bread, and Philip did the arithmetic out loud: “Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” When some Greeks in Jerusalem asked to see Jesus, they came to Philip, and he fetched Andrew and the two of them took the message. Benedict XVI thinks he probably spoke Greek and was acting as an interpreter.
The last is at the Last Supper. Jesus had just said that whoever knew him knew the Father, and Philip asked to be shown the Father anyway. He got an answer that has been read ever since: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”
After that the record runs into a problem. There was a second Philip in the first generation — a deacon, the one who baptizes the Ethiopian — and the old accounts of where each of them went, and where each is buried, have been mixed together since the second century. The Church keeps his feast on 3 May, with James.
What they carried
He asked the question that got him corrected. At the Last Supper, after Jesus had said that to know him was to know the Father, Philip asked to be shown the Father anyway, and Jesus answered “Have I been with you so long, and yet you do not know me, Philip?” Benedict XVI calls it a gentle rebuke.
State of life
apostle
Themes
friendship · preaching · questions and study · travel
Benedict XVI on Philip the Apostle (General Audience, 6 September 2006)
- Two documents carry this life: the Catholic Encyclopedia article “St. Philip the Apostle”, which the index calls a brief article on this figure “in Scripture and Christian tradition”, and Benedict XVI’s General Audience of 6 September 2006, from his catechesis on the Apostles. Both editions of the audience, English and Italian, were read against each other.
- THERE ARE TWO PHILIPS AND THIS RECORD IS ABOUT THE APOSTLE. The other is the deacon of Acts, the one who baptizes the Ethiopian, and the encyclopedia is explicit that the traditions have run together: the second-century material about the Apostle is uncertain “inasmuch as a similar tradition is recorded concerning Philip the Deacon and Evangelist — a phenomenon which must be the result of confusion caused by the existence of the two Philips”. It names the tangle exactly. Bishop Polycrates of Ephesus, writing about 189-98, has “Philip, one of the Twelve Apostles, who is buried in Hieropolis with his two daughters, who grew old as virgins”, and a third daughter at Ephesus. Proclus, quoted in the Dialogue of Caius, has “four prophetesses, the daughters of Philip, at Hieropolis”. And Acts gives four prophetess daughters to the DEACON. The article weighs Polycrates as carrying “more authority” and then declines to conclude: “it is difficult to decide which of the two, the Apostle or the deacon, was buried in Hieropolis. Many modern historians believe that it was the deacon.” THIS RECORD DOES NOT CLAIM HIEROPOLIS AS HIS, and does not give him daughters.
- THE ENGLISH EDITION OF THE 2006 AUDIENCE PUTS HIM IN THE WRONG COUNTRY, AND CONTRADICTS ITSELF IN THE SAME SENTENCE. It has him evangelizing “first Greece and then Frisia, where he is supposed to have died, in Hierapolis”. Frisia is the North Sea coast of the Netherlands and Germany; Hierapolis is in Phrygia, in Asia Minor, so the English names a city and then places it two thousand miles from where it is. The Italian edition has it right — “prima la Grecia e poi la Frigia e là avrebbe affrontato la morte, a Gerapoli”. Phrygia, and Gerapoli within it. This record follows the Italian and says Phrygia nowhere the English would have said Frisia.
- HOW HE DIED IS REPORTED WITH EVERY HEDGE ITS SOURCES PUT ON IT, AND HE IS NOT LISTED AS A MARTYR. Benedict XVI introduces the whole account at two removes, and the hedges are his own words: “According to certain later accounts (Acts of Philip and others), our Apostle is said to have evangelized first Greece and then Frisia, where he is supposed to have died, in Hierapolis, by a torture described variously as crucifixion or stoning.” IS SAID, and then IS SUPPOSED, in one sentence — and the manner of death is left open inside it. The encyclopedia is harder on the same source: the apocryphal Acts of Philip are “purely legendary and a tissue of fables”. A list of what someone was cannot rest on that.
- The feast is 3 May, and it is shared. The universal calendar for May lists “Ss Philip and James, Apostles” against 3 and grades it “feast”, and the United States bishops’ calendar for 2027 prints “Saints Philip and James, Apostles” on the same day. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA GIVES AN OLDER DATE AND IT IS NOT USED: written in 1911, it says the feast “is celebrated in the Roman Church on 1 May (together with that of James the Younger), and in the Greek Church on 14 November”. The Roman date has moved since; the Greek date is the article’s own and is reported here as its.
- NO PATRONAGE IS RECORDED, AND THE SILENCE HERE IS COMPLETE. The word “patron” does not occur in any of the three documents held for him, in either language. The Holy See’s own search was then run over vatican.va, in ASCII. The queries were the claimed titles themselves — “patron of Uruguay”, “patron of hatters” and “patron of pastry chefs” in English. The Italian was searched for “patrono dell’Uruguay”. Every one of them returned nothing. There is no declaring act, no papal use of a title, and no reference work describing a devotion — less than is held for any of the four apostles written before him.
- WHAT THE GOSPELS GIVE HIM, AND IT IS MORE THAN MOST OF THE TWELVE. His name “stands in the fifth place in the three lists”, which the encyclopedia notes puts him straight after the two pairs of brothers, Peter and Andrew, James and John. John supplies the rest: the call at Bethsaida, Nathanael and “Come and see”, the answer about the loaves — “Two hundred penny-worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may take a little” — the Greeks who asked to see Jesus, and “Lord, shew us the Father, and it is enough for us”. The encyclopedia reads those scenes as “a consistent character-sketch of Philip as a naïve, somewhat shy, sober-minded man”; Benedict XVI reads the same scenes for his practicality and his readiness to bring people to Jesus. This record follows the second, because it is about what he did rather than what he was like.