Official feasts used to be an important part of the human community. People would gather together to remember something sacred, express their faith and hope for the future, and / or just be together formally, recognizing each other as being part of a shared community. Few things express a desire for shared companionship and social intimacy more than dining together. Sadly, the gathering together for feasting is increasingly a relic of the past – at least here in the West.
It need not be so! Today we will remember the ancient feasts.
The Feast Day of St. Bartholomew, the Apostle
This is a Christian religious celebration of St. Bartholomew, one of the twelve Apostles of Jesus Christ. Scholars commonly identify him with Nathanael. According to tradition, after the Ascension, Bartholomew preached the Gospel in India, Parthia, Mesopotamia, and greater Armenia.
Tradition says (though some other accounts vary) that Bartholomew’s martyrdom in Armenia was accomplished by his being flayed alive.
Eusebius of Caesarea‘s Ecclesiastical History (5:10) states that after the Ascension, Bartholomew went on a missionary tour to India, where he left behind a copy of the Gospel of Matthew. Tradition narrates that he served as a missionary in Mesopotamia and Parthia, as well as Lycaonia and Ethiopia in other accounts. Popular traditions say that Bartholomew preached the Gospel in India and then went to Greater Armenia.
Mission to India
Two ancient testimonies exist about the mission of Saint Bartholomew in India. These are by Eusebius of Caesarea (early 4th century) and by Saint Jerome (late 4th century). Both of these refer to this tradition while speaking of the reported visit of Saint Pantaenus to India in the 2nd century. The studies of Fr A.C. Perumalil SJ and Moraes hold that the Bombay region on the Konkan coast, a region which may also have been known as the ancient city Kalyan, was the field of Saint Bartholomew’s missionary activities. Previously the consensus among scholars was at least skeptical about an apostolate of Saint Bartholomew in India. Stallings (1703), Neander (1853), Hunter (1886), Rae (1892), Zaleski (1915) supported it, while scholars such as Sollerius (1669), Carpentier (1822), Harnack (1903), Medlycott (1905), Mingana (1926), Thurston (1933), Attwater (1935), etc. do not. The main argument is that the India that Eusebius and Jerome refer to should be identified as Ethiopia or Arabia Felix.
Along with his fellow apostle Jude “Thaddeus”, Bartholomew is reputed to have brought Christianity to Armenia in the 1st century; as a result, in 301 the Armenian kingdom became the first state in history to embrace Christianity officially. Thus, both saints are considered the patron saints of the Armenian Apostolic Church. According to these traditions, Bartholomew is the second Catholicos-Patriarch of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
Christian tradition offers three accounts of Bartholomew’s death: “One speaks of his being kidnapped, beaten unconscious, and cast into the sea to drown.”
In the Hellenic tradition, Bartholomew was executed in Albanopolis in Armenia, where he was martyred for having converted Polymius, the local king, to Christianity. Enraged by the monarch’s conversion, and fearing a Roman backlash, King Polymius’s brother, Prince Astyages, ordered Bartholomew’s torture and execution. However, this version of the story appears ahistorical, as there are no records of any Armenian king of the Arsacid dynasty of Armenia with the name “Polymius”. Other accounts of his martyrdom name the king as either Agrippa (identified with Tigranes VI), or Sanatruk, king of Armenia.
The 13th-century Saint Bartholomew Monastery was a prominent Armenian monastery constructed at the presumed site of Bartholomew’s martyrdom in Vaspurakan, Greater Armenia (now in southeastern Turkey).
Azerbaijani Christians hold the position that Apostle Bartholomew was the first person to bring Christianity to the lands of modern Azerbaijan and believe that he preached there. Saint Bartholomew Church (Baku) was built in 1892 with donations from the local Christian population on the site where the Apostle Bartholomew was believed to have been martyred. Azerbaijani Christians believe that in the area near the Maiden Tower, the apostle Bartholomew was crucified and killed by pagans around 71 AD. The church continued to operate until 1936, when it was demolished as a part of the Soviet campaign against religion.
The Eastern Orthodox Church venerates Bartholomew on June 11. Bartholomew is also venerated on August 25 in commemoration of the transfer of Bartholomew’s relics. He is also venerated as one of the twelve apostles on June 30.
Altar of San Bartolomeo Basilica in Benevento, Italy, containing the relics of Bartholomew
The 6th-century writer Theodorus Lector averred that in about 507, the Byzantine emperor Anastasius I Dicorus gave the body of Bartholomew to the city of Daras, in Mesopotamia, which he had recently refounded. The existence of relics at Lipari, a small island off the coast of Sicily, in the part of Italy controlled from Constantinople, was explained by Gregory of Tours by his body having miraculously washed up there. A large piece of his skin and many bones that were kept in the Cathedral of St. Bartholomew in Lipari, were translated to Benevento in 838, where they are still kept in the Basilica San Bartolomeo. A portion of the relics was given in 983 by Otto II, Holy Roman Emperor, to Rome, where it is conserved at San Bartolomeo all’Isola, which was founded on the site of the temple of Asclepius, in pagan times an important Roman medical centre. This association with medicine caused Bartholomew’s name to become associated in course of time with hospitals. A part of Bartholomew’s alleged skull was transferred to the Frankfurt Cathedral, while an arm was venerated in Canterbury Cathedral. In 2003, Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople brought some of the remains of St. Bartholomew to Baku as a gift to Azerbaijani Christians, and these remains are now kept in the Holy Myrrhbearers Cathedral.
Saint Bartholomew has been credited with several miracles.
Art and literature
In artistic depictions, Bartholomew is most commonly depicted holding his flayed skin and the knife with which he was skinned. Of this a well known example is featured in Michelangelo‘s Last Judgement.
Not rarely, Bartholomew is shown draping his own skin around his body. Moreover, representations of Bartholomew with a chained demon are common in Spanish painting.
St. Bartholomew is the most prominent flayed Christian martyr; During the 16th century, images of the flaying of Bartholomew were popular and this detail came to become a virtual constant of iconography. An echo of concentration on these details is found in medieval heraldry regarding Bartholomew, which depicts “flaying knives with silver blades and gold handles, on a red field.”
Saint Bartholomew is often depicted in lavish medieval manuscripts. Bearing in mind that manuscripts are in fact made from flayed and manipulated skin, they hold a strong visual and cognitive association with the saint during the medieval period.
Florentine artist Pacino di Bonaguida, depicts his martyrdom in a complex and striking composition in his Laudario of Sant’Agnese, a book of Italian Hymns produced for the Compagnia di Sant’Agnese c. 1340. In the five-scene, narrative-based image, three torturers flay Bartholomew’s legs and arms as he is immobilised and chained to a gate. On the right, the saint wears his own skin tied around his neck while he kneels in prayer before a rock, his severed head lying on the ground.
A further depiction is that of the Flaying of St. Bartholomew in the Luttrell Psalter c. 1325–1340. There, Bartholomew is depicted lying on a surgical table, surrounded by tormentors while he is flayed with golden knives.
Reliquary shutters with the Martyrdoms of St. Francis, St. Claire, St. Bartholomew, and St. Catherine of Alexandria by Guido da Siena
Due to the nature of his martyrdom, Bartholomew is the patron saint of tanners, plasterers, tailors, leatherworkers, bookbinders, farmers, housepainters, butchers, and glove makers. In works of art the saint has been depicted being skinned by tanners, as in Guido da Siena‘s reliquary shutters with the Martyrdoms of St. Francis, St. Claire, St. Bartholomew, and St. Catherine of Alexandria. Popular in Florence and other areas in Tuscany, the saint also came to be associated with salt, oil, and cheese merchants.
The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew (1634) by Jusepe de Ribera depicts Bartholomew’s final moments before being flayed alive. The viewer is meant to empathize with Bartholomew, whose body seemingly bursts through the surface of the canvas, and whose outstretched arms embrace a mystical light that illuminates his flesh. His piercing eyes, open mouth, and petitioning left hand bespeak an intense communion with the divine; yet this same hand draws our attention to the instruments of his torture, symbolically positioned in the shape of a cross. Transfixed by Bartholomew’s active faith, the executioner seems to have stopped short in his actions, and his furrowed brow and partially illuminated face suggest a moment of doubt, with the possibility of conversion. The representation of Bartholomew’s demise in the National Gallery painting differs significantly from all other depictions by Ribera. By limiting the number of participants to the main protagonists of the story (the saint, his executioner, one of the priests who condemned him, and one of the soldiers who captured him), and presenting them half-length and filling the picture space, the artist rejected an active, movemented composition for one of intense psychological drama. The cusping along all four edges shows that the painting has not been cut down: Ribera intended the composition to be just such a tight, restricted presentation, with the figures cut off and pressed together.
Although Bartholomew’s death is commonly depicted in artworks of a religious nature, his story has also been used to represent anatomical depictions of the human body devoid of flesh. An example of this can be seen in Marco d’Agrate‘s St Bartholomew Flayed (1562) where Bartholomew is depicted wrapped in his own skin with every muscle, vein and tendon clearly visible, acting as a clear description of the muscles and structure of the human body.
This idea has influenced some contemporary artists to create an artwork depicting an anatomical study of a human body is found amongst with Gunther Von Hagens‘s The Skin Man (2002) and Damien Hirst‘s Exquisite Pain (2006). Within Gunther Von Hagens’s body of work called Body Worlds a figure reminiscent of Bartholomew holds up his skin. This figure is depicted in actual human tissues (made possible by Hagens’s plastination process) to educate the public about the inner workings of the human body and to show the effects of healthy and unhealthy lifestyles. In Exquisite Pain 2006, Damien Hirst depicts St Bartholomew with a high level of anatomical detail with his flayed skin draped over his right arm, a scalpel in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. The inclusion of scissors was inspired by Tim Burton‘s film Edward Scissorhands (1990).
Bartholomew plays a part in Francis Bacon‘s Utopian tale New Atlantis, about a mythical isolated land, Bensalem, populated by a people dedicated to reason and natural philosophy. Some twenty years after the ascension of Christ the people of Bensalem find an ark floating off their shore. The ark contains a letter as well as the books of the Old and New Testaments. The letter is from Bartholomew the Apostle and declares that an angel told him to set the ark and its contents afloat. Thus the scientists of Bensalem receive the revelation of the Word of God.
St Bartholomew’s Street Fair is held in Crewkerne, Somerset, annually at the start of September. The fair dates back to Saxon times and the major traders’ market was recorded in the Domesday Book. St Bartholomew’s Street Fair, Crewkerne is reputed to have been granted its charter in the time of Henry III (1207–1272). The earliest surviving court record was made in 1280, which can be found in the British Library.
Quoting Ibn Ishaq, the Andalusian scholar al-Qurtubi gives the following details concerning the mission of the disciples of Jesus Christ: He sent Peter and Paul to the Roman lands; Andrew and Matthew to Cannibals; Thomas to Babylon; Philip to Africa; John to Damascus the town of the seven-sleeper; Jacob to Jerusalem; Ibn Talma (i.e., Bartholomew) to the Arab world; Simon to the Berbers; Yehuda and Bard to Alexandria. Allah aided them with points of right argument and they prevailed.
What is something you can eat to celebrate the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew, the Apostle?
I came across some really good ideas via ashleytumlinwallace.com that I wanted to share here. As a result, you will get TWO recipes for this saint.
Gingerbread / Bartlemas Beef
Make gingerbread.
During the middle ages in England, gingerbread was often the special cake served on feast days. The saint’s image was usually stamped on the cake. Gingerbread, with the image of Bartholomew, was served at Bartholomew Fairs that were held across the land. We are making Gingerbread Cake from one of my favorite seasonal cookbooks, Honey and Jam by Hannah Queen. (See recipe at the bottom of the post)
Have a race and eat a currant bun.
In Sandwich, Kent, England, villagers hold a St. Bartholomew’s Bun Race. The children of the village race around the chapel of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and are rewarded with a currant bun for their efforts.
Make Bartlemas Beef.
St. Bartholomew is the patron saint of butchers since he was skinned alive. Yikes! Traditionally, the beef served on this day was known as Bartlemas Beef (“Bartlemas” means the mass of St. Bartholomew). The following recipe is given in “Cook’s Guide” from 1664.
Take a fat Brisket piece of beef and bone it, put it into so much water as will cover it, shifting it three times a day for three dayes together, then put it into as much white wine and vinegar as will cover it,and when it hath lyen twenty-four hours take it out and drye it in a cloth, then take nutmeg, ginger, cinnamon, cloves and mace, of each a like quantity, beaten small and mingled with a good handful of salt, strew both sides of the Beef with this, and roul it up as you do Brawn, tye it as close as you can; then put it into an earthen pot, and cover it with some paste; set it in the Oven with household bread, and when it is cold, eat it with mustard and sugar.
Let me know if you make this, especially what you decide to use as “some paste”!
Eat watermelon and make lanterns out of watermelon.
In Italy and Spain, it was traditional to eat watermelon since watermelon was at the height of its season during this time. A watermelon festival was thrown on St. Bartholomew’s Day and everyone gathered to celebrate the saint and enjoy the fruit. On Tiber Island, in the middle of the Tiber River running through Rome, there is a cathedral dedicated to St. Bartholomew known as San Bartolomeo all’Isola. Villagers gathered there for the celebrations. A watermelon festival and market were held, with vendors displaying whole or sliced watermelons. The villagers would attend mass and then eat watermelon and hold races to celebrate the day. On the Spanish island of Majorca, children made lanterns out of the watermelons and paraded through the village.
Gingerbread Cake for the Feast of St. Bartholomew
Ingredients
Gingerbread Cake
1 cup strong brewed coffee
1 cup dark unsulfured molasses
½ teaspoon baking soda
2 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
½ teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
1 Tablespoon ground ginger
1 ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg
¼ teaspoon ground cloves
¾ cup vegetable oil
3 large eggs
2 cups packed dark brown sugar
Powdered sugar for dusting
Instructions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 10-inch Bundt pan.
In a large saucepan, combine the coffee and molasses, bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, then remove the pan from the heat. Whisk in the baking soda (the mixture will foam). Allow the syrup to cool.
In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt, baking powder, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
In a large bowl, whisk together the oil, eggs, sugar, and molasses mixture. Add the flour mixture and stir until just combined.
Pour the batter into the pan. Bake until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean, about 50 minutes. Allow the cake to cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then invert it on a wire rack and cool completely. Dust with powdered sugar.
What is a prayer to say for the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew, the Apostle?
Lord, sustain us with the faith which made Saint Bartholomew ever loyal to Christ. Let your Church be the sign of salvation for all the nations of the world.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
When is the Feast Day of St. Bartholomew the Apostle celebrated?
The feast day is celebrated annually on the following days:
24 August in Western Christianity 11 June (along with St. Barnabas) in Eastern Christianity 25 August (translation of relics, with Saint Titus) (Eastern Christianity) 29 August (Syriac Orthodox)
I hope that everyone who celebrates has a wonderful day!
