The three Synoptic Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles name Bartholomew among the Twelve, always near Philip; John never uses the name but tells of Nathanael, whom Philip brings to Jesus. From that pairing the Christian tradition has commonly identified the two, and the Gospel of the feast is the Johannine scene: Nathanael's blunt question, "Can anything good come from Nazareth?", Philip's reply, "Come and see," and the Lord's greeting, "Here is a true Israelite. There is no duplicity in him." Nathanael then confesses him as Son of God and King of Israel and is promised the sight of heaven opened. The first reading is taken from the Book of Revelation, where the wall of the holy city has twelve courses of stones as its foundation, on which are inscribed the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb — an image the Church applies to all the apostolic feasts. Red vestments are worn, with the Gloria and the Preface of the Apostles. Later accounts, none of them in Scripture, describe Bartholomew's preaching in Armenia and his martyrdom by flaying, which is why art gives him a knife and, most famously in Michelangelo's Last Judgment, his own skin. The Armenian Apostolic Church venerates him as one of its founders. His relics have been honored since the tenth century in the basilica on the Tiber Island in Rome, which in recent decades has become a memorial of the martyrs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — a fitting continuity for an apostle whose own witness ended in blood.

Feast

feast

August 24

feast