According to tradition, Andrew the Apostle, who was the brother of Peter and one of the first followers of Christ, preached the Gospel north of the Black Sea and in various parts of Greece. After that, he was crucified by Aegeas, the governor of the region of the time.

So is this story true? The earliest written record of the martyrdom of Andrew comes from the Acts of Andrew, which was written around 150-250 AD. You can read the full story here, but I am just going to summarize it in this post.

The Acts of Andrew contains some embellishment in the text such as Andrew calming a great storm, stopping an army, and other extravagant things, but it seems likely that this story is connected to a reliable early church tradition according to Sean McDowell, who wrote this Ph.D. thesis on the apostle’s martyrdoms. This adds to the probability of the martyrdom of Andrew.

Many other accounts which were written later talk about the death of Andrew, but they all trace through the Acts of Andrew. The account Hippolytus on the Twelve, which was written in the third century may contain an independent tradition when it describes Andrew as being crucified and suspended on an olive tree, but there is no solid conclusion on this question.

So the martyrdom of Andrew doesn’t have any first-century evidence, but when you put the clues together, I think that the sources are still early enough to say he was martyred more likely than not.

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