HistoricalChristian.Faith

Philip

Philip was a fisherman’s town-fellow of Andrew and Peter, of Bethsaida, one of the first Jesus called and, in John’s Gospel, the man who fetched Nathanael and later voiced the disciples’ bafflement at the loaves and at the Greeks who came seeking Jesus. The New Testament names him in all four lists of the Twelve and then, as with most of the apostles, tells nothing of where he went or how he died. What the church came to “know” grew up afterward — and Philip’s case carries a complication all its own: the earliest sources that place him in Asia may have confused him with a different Philip, the deacon and evangelist of Acts, whose four prophesying daughters look suspiciously like the daughters the Asian tradition remembered. This page is not a life of Philip so much as a history of what was remembered and claimed about him — his home at Hierapolis, his daughters, and his martyr’s cross — set out earliest source first, so that the spare Gospel notices, the early but tangled Asian tradition, the late apocryphal romance, and the modern spade can each be weighed on its own date. This is a biographical tradition-timeline: its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on Philip, and the contested questions — which Philip settled at Hierapolis? was he crucified head-downward? — are weighed on their own argument pages below rather than settled by assertion. For the shared ladder of sources and how far to trust each rung, see the apostles hub.

Related doctrines: The apostles — see also the apostles (overview) · Simon Peter · Andrew · James, son of Zebedee · John, son of Zebedee · Bartholomew · Thomas · Matthew · James, son of Alphaeus · Thaddaeus / Jude · Simon the Zealot · Judas Iscariot · Matthias · Paul

Timeline

The New Testament (c. 30–90)

The New Testament gives Philip a clear but modest place. He is of Bethsaida, “the city of Andrew and Peter,” one of the first Jesus calls with the plain word “Follow me,” and at once he finds Nathanael: “We have found him, of whom Moses in the law, and the prophets, did write.” He appears three times more, all in John — tested by Jesus before the feeding of the five thousand (“Whence shall we buy bread?”), approached by the enquiring Greeks, and answered at the Last Supper when he asks, “Lord, shew us the Father” (“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”) — and he is named in all four lists of the Twelve. Of his mission or death the New Testament says nothing. It also names a second Philip — Philip the evangelist, one of the seven deacons, who preaches in Samaria, baptizes the Ethiopian eunuch, and settles at Caesarea with “four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy.” Keeping the two Philips apart is the key to the tradition that follows.¹

Papias of Hierapolis, preserved by Eusebius (c. 110–130)

Papias, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia and a collector of the oldest apostolic memory, is the earliest witness to a Philip at Hierapolis. Eusebius reports that Papias “received a wonderful narrative from the daughters of Philip” — his neighbours — among them the raising of a dead man and the story of Justus Barsabas surviving a draught of poison. Eusebius calls this figure “the Apostle Philip,” and this notice is the root of the whole Asian tradition. But Papias’s own words (as Eusebius gives them) speak only of “Philip” and his daughters — and daughters at Hierapolis are exactly what Acts attaches to the evangelist. Here, at the very first link, the identity is already in question.²

Polycrates of Ephesus and the Dialogue of Gaius, preserved by Eusebius (c. 190–210)

Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, writing to Victor of Rome in the Quartodeciman controversy, lists the “great lights” buried in Asia and names first “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.” A generation later the anti-Montanist Dialogue of Gaius, quoting the Montanists’ own appeal, points to “four prophetesses, the daughters of Philip, at Hierapolis… their tomb is there and the tomb of their father.” These two early, independent Asian witnesses fix Philip’s home, grave, and daughters at Hierapolis — and disagree on their number and character (Polycrates’ three, two of them buried virgins; Gaius’ four prophetesses, the very phrase Acts uses of the evangelist). Notably, Polycrates records a grave, not a killing — he says Philip “sleeps” (κεκοίμηται), but that is simply the Christian word for death, which he uses of Thraseas and Sagaris, whom he calls in the same breath “bishop and martyr,” so it neither affirms nor denies a martyrdom.³

The Acts of Philip (4th–5th c.)

The apocryphal Acts of Philip — a late romance in which Philip journeys with Bartholomew and his sister Mariamne (accompanied by a talking leopard and kid) to “Ophiorymos,” the “city of the serpent,” identified with Hierapolis — supplies the martyrdom the earlier sources lack. Philip converts the proconsul’s wife Nicanora, is arrested, and is executed by being hung head-downward: the soldiers “pierced Philip’s ankles… put the cords through his ankles, and hung him head downwards on a tree,” from which he preaches and, in some manuscripts, calls down destruction on his persecutors until Christ rebukes him. It is hagiographical romance of low biographical value, but it is the wellspring of Philip’s inverted cross and of the manner — if not the fact — of his death.⁴

Modern archaeology at Hierapolis (2011)

The tradition’s one physical anchor is the great octagonal martyrium of St Philip on the hill above Hierapolis (modern Pamukkale, Turkey), a fifth-century pilgrimage shrine long known to excavators. In 2011 the Italian archaeologist Francesco D’Andria announced that, some forty metres from the martyrium, he had uncovered a fifth-century church built around a first-century Roman tomb — which he identified as Philip’s original grave, emptied when the relics were carried (he suggests) to Constantinople and then Rome. The find confirms what the texts already showed — that by the fourth century a Philip was venerated as a martyr and buried at Hierapolis — but a tomb cannot say which Philip lay in it, nor whether he was martyred at all: the early witnesses attest a grave and (later) a cult, not a killing.⁵

Arguments

Which Philip dwelt and died at Hierapolis — the apostle or the evangelist? (assessment: contested)

The two-Philips question is the crux of the whole tradition. Two early Asian witnesses — Papias, resident at Hierapolis, and Polycrates of Ephesus — place a Philip and his daughters there and call him one of the Twelve; but the “four prophesying daughters” are the signature of Philip the evangelist of Acts 21, and the ancient notices blur the two. The steelman for the evangelist (the daughters are his, verbatim from Luke) is strong; the steelman for the apostle (two independent local witnesses expressly say “of the twelve apostles”) is real. No clean resolution survives the evidence. Contested — a genuine and unresolved confusion in the sources.⁶

Was Philip crucified head-downward at Hierapolis? (assessment: weak)

The martyrdom-by-crucifixion must be kept apart from the firm, early fact of a Philip buried at Hierapolis. The manner — hung head-downward by pierced ankles — appears only in the fourth-to-fifth-century Acts of Philip, and is visibly patterned on Peter’s inverted cross; the early witnesses report a grave, daughters, and (later) a martyr’s cult, but no killing. (“Sleeps,” the word Polycrates uses, is the neutral Christian term for death — he applies it even to men he calls “bishop and martyr” — so it neither proves nor disproves one.) Weak — a vivid late legend resting on no early testimony to the death.⁷

Sources