St. Andrew in the Old English Homiletic Tradition

Abstract

St Andrew the Apostle, seldom cited in the Canonical Gospels, is the main character of a large apocryphal tradition that probably spreads from his topic image as a former fisherman. A recent critical approach by MacDonald even considers the second-century apocryphal books Acta Andreae and Acta Andreae et Mathiae as rewritings of Homer’s epic, with St. Andrew playing the part of a Christian Ulysses (and sometimes of a Christian Socrates). This interpretation has been hardly accepted as a whole, but there is no doubt that St Andrew soon became a legendary character, hero of bizarre adventures of Hellenistic taste. In this paper, I discuss the tradition that gave life to the corpus of Old English homilies related to the cult of St Andrew, focusing on the image of the sea as a common background motif.