HistoricalChristian.Faith

Did Andrew found the church of Byzantium?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — that Andrew founded the church of Byzantium and ordained Stachys as its first bishop is a late accretion: it is unknown before the end of the eighth century, absent from a seventh-century source that names Stachys yet knows nothing of it, and its first bishop is harmonised with a name in Romans. Two questions must be kept apart. That Andrew passed through Byzantium on the way from Pontus to Achaia is the older and more defensible tradition — it has a geographic logic and a sixth-century witness, though it too rests on legendary Acts. That he planted the see and consecrated its first bishop — the claim this page weighs — does not hold on the evidence.

The claim

The claim: the apostle Andrew came to Byzantium — the town Constantine would later refound as Constantinople — built a church on the acropolis, and consecrated Stachys (the “Stachys my beloved” greeted in Romans 16:9) as its first bishop at Argyropolis, making the church of the imperial capital an apostolic foundation in its own right, and (in the polemical use it later served) one older than Rome's, since Andrew was called before his brother Peter.

Who advances it

The Byzantium–Stachys foundation appears in the late apostle-list literature and the related Greek Story of Andrew: the sermon in Scythia is joined to a mission in Pontus and Bithynia and to the appointment of Stachys as bishop at Argyropolis, a suburb of Byzantium. In the datable lists this is an eighth–ninth-century layer — the list of Pseudo-Epiphanius (eighth century) and that of Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre (ninth), whose formula runs: “Stachys, whom the Apostle also mentions in the epistle to the Romans; whom also Andrew… in Argyropolis of Thrace appointed bishop of Byzantium.” The standard study of the legend, Francis Dvornik's The Idea of Apostolicity in Byzantium and the Legend of the Apostle Andrew (1958), traces the foundation-belief spreading only from the end of the eighth century and not generally accepted until the tenth; it is later elaborated by Byzantine chroniclers such as Nicephorus Callistus and becomes the charter of the see. It is independently advocated — a positive foundation-claim with real proponents and a proof-text (Romans 16:9) — which is why it earns its own page rather than a fold-in.¹

What can be said for it

The strongest form of the tradition is not the foundation-claim but the itinerary behind it, and it is worth stating fairly. The oldest “division of the world” genuinely placed Andrew on the Black Sea (Origen's Scythia), and Byzantium sits at that sea's threshold: an apostle bound for Scythia, or returning to Achaia, would naturally pass the Bosphorus, so a stop there is not geographically absurd. And this is more than a modern inference — the older Acts of Andrew, in Gregory of Tours' Latin epitome (c. 593), already carries Andrew “from Pontus by way of Amasia, Sinope, Nicaea, Nicomedia, Byzantium, Thrace, Perinthus, Philippi, and Thessalonica to Patras.” So a passage through Byzantium is attested a century and more before the foundation-lists. Finally, Andrew's relics were translated to Constantinople — carried to the Church of the Holy Apostles in 357 under Constantius II — so the city had an early and real Andrean cult onto which a foundation-legend could fasten, and the first bishop is identified with a man Paul actually greets.²

Adversarial assessment

What holds. Andrew's association with the Black Sea region is old; a passage through Byzantium is geographically natural and appears already in the sixth-century epitome of the Acts; and the 357 translation of his relics is a genuine early datum. Nothing forbids an apostle having passed through the town, and the city's later devotion to him is real, not invented.

Where it fails. None of that reaches the specific claim — a founded see and an ordained first bishop. That element is the late accretion, and three things tell against it. First, its silence where it should be loudest. The seventh-century Chronicon Paschale names Stachys and treats Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria as apostolic foundations, yet says nothing of Andrew founding Byzantium — the foundation-legend was not yet in circulation. Second, a better early tradition. The historically defensible notice makes the early Byzantine church a suffragan of Heraclea in Thrace at the beginning of the third century — a dependent see, not a self-standing apostolic foundation; and the Stachys ordination reads as a pious harmonisation with Romans 16, not as evidence of a first-century Byzantine episcopate. Third, the motive is real but later and secondary. Constantinople's claim to apostolic standing did not begin with Andrew: it rested first on the city's inheritance of Ephesus and the Apostle John, and the Andrew–Stachys foundation spread only from the end of the eighth century, being pressed into the argument against Roman primacy later still — in the 860s dispute with Pope Nicholas I no one yet adduced it, and the anti-Roman tract that leans on it, ascribed to Photius, is spurious. The lateness and dependence of the witnesses, not a motive read back into their origin, are what tell against the claim as history.³

Assessment

Weak — scoped to the foundation-and-ordination claim this page weighs. That Andrew passed through Byzantium is the older and more defensible tradition, with a geographic logic and a sixth-century witness, though it too rests on the legendary Acts; taken only as itinerary it is not absurd. But that he founded the see and consecrated Stachys its first bishop is unknown before the end of the eighth century, is contradicted by the seventh-century silence and by the older Heraclea tradition, and harmonises its first bishop with a name in Romans. Its worth is as church memory and ecclesiastical charter — a monument to how Constantinople claimed its apostle — not as history.

Sources