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St. Philip the Apostle
00:18:53
Dr. James Prothro and Taylor Kemp reflect upon St. Philip the Apostle. St. Philip often brought others to Jesus Christ. His feast day is May 3. Jesus shows Philip that by following Himself, he will see God the Father, and that we can be bold in our evangelization and intercession in praying for others.
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Podcast Host
You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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Taylor Kemp
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Catholic Saints. I am Taylor Kemp, the director of Formed, and with me today is Dr. James Prothero, a professor here at the graduate school. Dr. Prothero, it's good to have you.
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Dr. James Prothero
Great to be here.
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Taylor Kemp
Thank you for being here. Could you, Dr. Perther, tell us, what do you teach here at the graduate school?
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Dr. James Prothero
I teach theology and sacred Scripture. Mostly I work on the New Testament and teach biblical languages.
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Taylor Kemp
That's perfect, because today we are talking about someone who we primarily know through the New Testament, namely St. Philip. So, Dr. Pother, where to begin? What do we know about St. Philip?
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah, St. Philip. His feast day is May 3rd in the revised Western calendar. We know a few things about St. Philip, mostly actually from the Gospel of John. Okay, so in Matthew and Mark and Luke, he's named in the list of the 12 apostles, but he doesn't do anything else by name where we can say, okay, we know this is something that Philip is doing or saying as opposed to the other people. Otherwise, he just does the things that the twelve apostles do. In the Gospel of John, we get a whole lot more information about him, and we can kind of get a profile from the things that he does. So I'll just read like, a little bit of the beginning of the Gospel of John.
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Taylor Kemp
Sounds good.
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Dr. James Prothero
So in John 1:43, the next day, Jesus decided to go to Galilee and he found Philip and said to him, follow me. Now, normally Jesus says, follow me. People just drop their stuff and they follow him. And Philip does. But he does something else too. It says, now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter, who Jesus has already met. And Philip found Nathanael and said to him, we found the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote, Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth. Now, this is the very beginning of Philip's call, right? And surely in the other Gospels, when it says Jesus said, follow me, and then they followed him, other things happen. They talk to each other, they drop their stuff. They say, bye, dad. Right? They have to swim out of the boat to come follow him. But here Jesus tells Philip, and John goes out of his way to tell us, Philip grabbed somebody else that he knew from his town and then brought him to follow Jesus. And so Nathanael also joins them as one of the 12. And we'll see that throughout. The things that Philip does, the things that we see Philip doing in the Gospel Of John, he has a real evangelical kind of role. He's got a missionary kind of heart to want to bring people together. He's somebody that people seek to bring them to Jesus or talk to Jesus. He's one who's always responding to Jesus and inviting other people in some way to see him. And he himself longs to know God the Father. So we can see that as we walk through the different episodes in John.
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Taylor Kemp
He sounds kind of like a sanguine.
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah, he does. Yeah. Philip strikes me as an extrovert,
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Taylor Kemp
but that is beautiful. Yeah. His immediate reaction to meeting the Lord is, let me go find someone else who needs to meet him as well.
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. He's not into keeping any of these things for himself. If we go on a little bit more in John's Gospel, we can see Jesus pose a question to him in John 6, when there's no. When there's not enough food to feed the 5,000 people. And Jesus says, hey, well, what food do you have? Philip's like, well, we don't have enough money to feed all the people. He's concerned about all the people who are following. And then Jesus said, well, bring me what you have. And Andrew, Philip's friend, finds the little boy with the loaves and the fish. And then Jesus feeds everyone miraculously. So Philip there voices what a lot of us would voice.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, he speaks for the people.
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah, he speaks for the people saying, like, how are we going to feed them, Jesus? There's not enough food and we don't have enough money to go buy food for them. So what should we do? We meet him again in John 12, 20, 26. And it's another one of these encounter moments. So it says among those who went up to worship at the festival, so they're in Jerusalem, Jesus and the 12 are there for a feast. Says there were some Greeks who had come up to worship at the festival too. So they clearly want to know and worship the one God of Israel. But they're not Jewish ethnically. Right. They're Greeks. They're former pagans. And they came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said, sir, we wish to see Jesus. And then Philip went and told Andrew, and then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. So we can see here some people find Philip and can see that he's somebody that they want to be an intermediary between them and Jesus. And Philip goes and gets Andrew, tells him, and then brings him along. And so the two of them can Go talk to Jesus together on behalf of these Greeks who've come. So you can see Philip continuing to play this kind of a role. And then later on In John chapter 14, we can see Philip's desire to know the Father. And he gets a bit of a short rebuke from Jesus, but he clearly learns the teaching that Jesus has for him. So in John 14, Thomas says. Jesus says, I'm going away and you'll follow me. And Thomas says, we don't know where you're going. How can we know the way? And Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one knows the Father. No one comes to the Father except through me. And then Philip says in John 14:8, Lord, show us the Father and that'll be enough. Just show us the Father. And Jesus says, have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you don't know me? Whoever's seen me has seen the Father. Now we don't get to hear Philip's response, because that's not really the point that the Gospel is trying to get us to understand. The gospel wants us to hear the same words that the apostles heard. They want us to hear Jesus answer because that's where the real. That's where the good stuff is. But Philip asks a question that hopefully is something that's in everybody's heart, right? It's a desire to know and see God the Father, but it's a desire that is satisfied and fulfilled through Jesus. And that's the further faith that Jesus invites Philip to have. Not just to want to see the Father and to know and follow Jesus, but to realize that. That by following Jesus, we are seeing the Father. And that at the end, when we're purified, we will see the Father face to face. We'll know Jesus. We'll know God as he is through Christ.
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Taylor Kemp
I love how there's kind of a boldness to him. Like, you know, Christ says, follow me. As you pointed out that, you know, all the other callings in the Gospel people do, they just drop and they follow him. And his first response was to go get somewhere. We don't exactly know exactly, like, what that interaction was, but there's a boldness of, like, okay, I got to go do this and bring these people along, is a very evangelical impulse. He's willing to ask the question, show us the Father. And there's almost like a great lesson in our prayer lives. I feel like for that, of. Of we should be very, like, bold with the Lord, knowing our own kind of ignorance and weakness. And that The Lord knows that more than we do, and that that's perfectly fine. And then having that ability to be corrected and guided by the Lord.
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah, that's right. And you notice Philip goes both directions, right? When he goes off to get Nathanael after Jesus has called him, Jesus calls him to follow him, and then he goes to get Nathaniel to bring him to Jesus. And then when other people ask Philip, he just goes straight to Jesus and says, jesus, come to them. And there's a beautiful kind of intermediary role that he plays both ways that I think we can take up ourselves, both to imitate him in evangelism, right. And sharing our faith and talking to others and saying, I want to go bring you. Right. Like, he went to go get Nathaniel. I want to go get you and invite you to know this person that I know. And yet, at the same time, when other people have needs that we're aware of, right, for us to intercede for them, to bring those needs to God and to be bold, both in our evangelism, but also in our intercession, to pray for people and to say, you know, like, if Jesus goes to get Andrew and says, hey, work with me to bring these other people to Jesus or bring Jesus to these other people that we can, in our own prayer, bring people to Jesus, and we can also grab other saints, just like Philip grabs Andrew and say, hey, you also please pray for these people that I know, right? So that they can be introduced to Jesus or that they can be helped. And it really. That's. I mean, Philip is this sort of great, you know, door, door, both directions, right? For. For to bring Jesus to people. And to bring people to Jesus.
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Taylor Kemp
Yep. He's kind of this. I don't think he actually is this. But patron saint of evangelization. Like, he's. He's kind of one of the earliest examples that we have of going out. But, yeah, that is a. That is a beautiful model of the charity of Christ. Should compel us to go out and find those who don't know him and introduce him to them. And then also that kind of interior aspect of maybe that's not possible or for whatever reason, and then to bring that into an intercessory kind of prayer capacity. But I've never thought about him. I've thought about him somewhat as an intermediary in his, like, physical sense of. He's like this middleman that's helping kind of like, connect with, hey, they don't have any food. We don't have enough food. Or, here, Nathaniel, come. But I haven't thought about, like, he's also this great model of the interior life of. We're able to step into this kind of intermediary role of bringing people's petitions or whatever is needed to the Lord on their behalf, which is a really beautiful thing. So thank you for that. Okay, what else do we know about him?
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Dr. James Prothero
Well, so our knowledge after this is limited. So in the book of Acts, all of the 12 are of course there with Mary and some other relatives of Jesus when the Holy Spirit comes down at Pentecost. So Philip's there and he does other things that the 12 do, but he doesn't really get named. We do have a Philip in Acts, but he's Philip the deacon who gets appointed when the apostles say we're overworked and we can't manage serving the tables.
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Taylor Kemp
Presumably those are different people.
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Dr. James Prothero
Presumably, yeah. You wouldn't expect the 12 to say, we need to keep working on our ministry as apostles. Ministry of the word, they call it. So let's deputize the deacons to do the ministry of tables. That's where the word deacon comes from, is the ministry. It means minister, but like table server. So it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense for the 12 to say, let's appoint some people to do work so that we can do this other work and then make one of the 12 one of the people.
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Taylor Kemp
It doesn't make sense at all.
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah. So Philip doesn't look like he's any of the Philips that are mentioned in Acts. So we don't have anything more to go on from that. A major non biblical source that is questionable, but it preserves traditions about Philip. Different miracles that he's done tells of him being crucified upside down, like we talk about with Peter. And the story is that he's in a city called Hierapolis in modern Turkey near a city called Denizli. Denizli. I don't know if I'm saying that right.
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Taylor Kemp
I don't either.
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Dr. James Prothero
Come on.
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Taylor Kemp
I'm sorry.
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Dr. James Prothero
You're supposed to. How's your Turkish?
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Taylor Kemp
I'll have it next time. Oh, man, I got you.
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Dr. James Prothero
Anyway, and that he preaches and he ends up converting the Pro, the Roman proconsul's wife there. And so she converts, but the proconsul gets really angry and then has Philip and his companions tortured. And then Philip gets crucified and is crucified upside down. There's other reports even in the same document about other kinds of ways that he may have died, though. So there's not Absolute certainty about that. From the. Were they all martyrdom, talking about it? Yeah, all of them are martyrdoms. So one of them says that he got beheaded. Right. There's others, but it seems that he died in Turkey. And there's actually a tomb in Hierapolis, Right. In that exact place that he was said to have died that was uncovered in the last 15 years or so that a couple of scholars have argued really, really strongly is and must be the burial place of Philip. Now, there's always questions about that. There's a lot of things you can't prove. And it's not a location that's necessarily come down to us from antiquity. Right. Like. Like places where people have said since the 2002, this is where Paul was buried. This is where Paul was buried. And it's just sort of. People have kept saying it all throughout. So again, it's, you know, it's a question mark. It's a question mark for faith and then also for reason. But what we do know, right, is that St. Philip was this person that we know from the Gospels and still is that person in heaven as martyr and as one of the 12 who intercedes for us and can inspire us to the exact same kind of personality that he had.
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Taylor Kemp
Yep. And there's all. I've always found. There's a powerful lesson. I got this from St. John. Henry Newman has a reflection, and I think it's on Andrew, St Andrew. So it's not on St Philip, but the lesson still applies. But it's essentially on the somewhat anonymous level of the apostles. So when you look at the apostles, there are these men specifically chosen by Christ, and we have their list of names, but we actually don't know a lot about a lot of them. But there's something really beautiful in that. In that, like the service that we offer to the Lord. You know, we have the great saints who we have extensive writings from and memories of, and. And that's great. And in the Lord's providence, that was what was meant to be preserved. But the vast majority of saints, much of their legacy is. Is lost in history, preserved in heaven. And that's like a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I. It's always just fascinating to me whenever we come to a feast of any of the apostles where it's basically like, we know a little, but barely anything. And you're like, that's awesome. Like, right. Because it pulls on the heartstrings of all of us that are. That suffer from. From pride at various levels and that the Lord's call is one of absolute humility and that we are completely meant to completely offer the whole of our lives to the Lord and then he can work within us as he wills. But that much of that will be incredibly impactful, but not necessarily like remembered in some legacy that passes down in that sense. But he's alive in heaven, so I've always loved that. Whenever we come, I find myself reflecting on St. John Henry Newman's reflection on Andrew. It's just a beautiful thing to think about.
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Dr. James Prothero
Yeah, that really is. That's. You know, we can. Jesus talks about receiving your reward from God as opposed to posted from people and working for that reward that doesn't fade and can't be stolen or anything like that. But sometimes we only take it halfway where we say, see, in her life or in his life, we know that she was. Or he was unloved or unappreciated, and nobody understood it. But now we all honor this person greatly and we know all the great things that they did and everything like that. But there's other ones even more where it's like, well, we know their name and a couple of things that they did. But even the other kinds of trappings that we would hope would of worldly glory after death on earth that we would hope would be there, aren't there. But that really brings you to the crux of it to say, yeah, there's lots of great people that we don't know and hold on and stay with Jesus and you'll get to meet him someday.
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Taylor Kemp
Yeah, right. And then all will be unveiled. But I've always just loved that about the apostles, and that is certainly true of St. Philip. Is there anything else you want to leave us with? Is there anything else we can know about him?
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Dr. James Prothero
No, just to spend time. If you're celebrating, if you're thinking about this or hearing this, on St. Philip's Day, which is again May 3rd, Find a couple of these passages to meditate on. If you get out of concordance and you look up Philip, don't look for the ones in Acts because it's a different guy. But look in the Gospels and you'll see lots of quiet ways that he is wonderfully imitable and inspiring. When we have these feast days, we get to read passages where you might not actually focus on that person as much because of course, they're talking with Jesus and that's the main point. But you get to shine the spotlight on their feast day on them and thinking of yourself in their shoes and thinking about ways that you can imitate them or learn from what they learned. And that's really beautiful. And there's a lot to meditate on with Philip's character and the way that he brings Jesus to people and brings people to Jesus.
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Taylor Kemp
Agreed. That is beautiful. Well, thank you, Dr. Prothero. Thank you, St. Philip.
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Dr. James Prothero
Pray for us.
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Podcast Host
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