Philip

Philip appears in all four lists of the twelve, but only the Gospel of John gives him anything to say or do. There he is from Bethsaida, Andrew and Peter's town; he is called with the words follow me and at once brings Nathanael, answering his doubt with come and see. At the feeding of the five thousand it is Philip whom Jesus tests, where are we to buy bread?, and it is Philip, with Andrew, through whom certain Greeks ask to see Jesus. At the last supper he asks Lord, show us the Father, drawing one of the Gospel's central sayings in reply.

A persistent confusion attaches to him. The Acts of the Apostles features a different Philip, one of the seven deacons appointed to serve the Greek-speaking widows, the evangelist who preaches in Samaria and baptizes the Ethiopian official. The New Testament keeps the apostle and the deacon distinct, but from early times the two were run together, and much of the later legend of the apostle borrows episodes that Acts assigns to the evangelist. His Greek name, like Andrew's, reflects the mixed culture of Galilee, where a Jewish fisherman might bear the name of a Macedonian king.

The strongest later tradition sends the apostle Philip to Hierapolis in Phrygia, in what is now western Turkey, and has him martyred and buried there. Eusebius, quoting an early source, places a Philip with his daughters at Hierapolis, though the source may again blur the apostle with the evangelist, whose daughters were known as prophets.

The apocryphal Acts of Philip, a work of perhaps the fourth or fifth century, supplies a fuller and more colourful death, with a talking leopard and a mass conversion, and has him crucified head downward. Like the apocryphal acts of the other apostles, it is a devotional romance rather than a record.

What gives the Hierapolis tradition unusual interest is archaeology. In 2011 an Italian excavation on the hill above the ancient city identified a first-century Roman tomb at the centre of a later octagonal martyrium, a purpose-built shrine of pilgrimage, and its excavators announced it as the long-venerated tomb of the apostle. The identification cannot be proved, a shrine attests a cult, not the man, but it shows how early and how firmly the memory of Philip had fixed itself to that place. He is invoked as a patron of Hierapolis and, in the Western calendar, is commemorated together with James the son of Alphaeus.