Why Is Saint Andrew on Scotland's Flag? The First Called and the X-Shaped Cross

Cold open

Picture a flag. A white diagonal cross on a blue field. You'll see it on rugby shirts, castle walls, and the painted faces of very loud people at Murrayfield.

It's Scotland's flag. And that X... is meant to be the cross on which an apostle of Jesus died. Andrew. Brother of Peter. The man the Eastern churches still call the First Called.

Now here's the thing. The Bible never tells us how Andrew died. Not where, not when, not on what. And that X-shaped cross? It turns up in pictures of him something like a thousand years after his death.

So who was Andrew, really? Was he actually the first to follow Jesus? And how did a fisherman from Galilee end up on the flag of a country that no source says he ever visited?

As always, I'll tell you where every piece comes from. The Bible. Early church tradition. Modern scholarship. And legend... of which, today, there is rather a lot.

Let's begin.

The man who came first

Scripture

Our story starts with another preacher: John the Baptist, out by the Jordan.

John's Gospel tells us that one day the Baptist was standing with two of his own disciples. Jesus walked past, and John said: "Look, here is the Lamb of God!"

And the two disciples... followed Jesus.

Jesus turns round and asks them a wonderfully simple question. "What are you looking for?"

And they answer with... another question. "Rabbi, where are you staying?"

"Come and see," says Jesus. So they do, and they stay with him the rest of the day. John's Gospel even gives the time: about the tenth hour, which many translations make around four in the afternoon. A curiously precise detail.

Then the Gospel names one of the two: Andrew, Simon Peter's brother. And the first thing Andrew does is go and find Simon, and tell him: "We have found the Messiah." And he brings his brother to Jesus.

So in John's telling, the most famous of the Twelve is introduced to Jesus... by his brother.

Speculation

And the other disciple, the second of the two? The Gospel never says. Many readers have guessed it was John, the son of Zebedee. It's a popular guess, but a guess. The text leaves him nameless, so we will too.

Scholarship

And notice his name. "Andrew" isn't Hebrew or Aramaic. It's Greek: Andreas, from the Greek word for "man". Roughly, "manly". A lot to live up to. If he had a Hebrew name too, we're never told it.

And it's this scene that the Eastern churches point to when they give Andrew his title: Protokletos. The First Called.

Or was he?

But hold on. Because if you read Mark's Gospel instead, you get a different scene.

Scripture

In Mark, there's no John the Baptist pointing, no "come and see". Jesus is walking beside the Sea of Galilee, and he sees two brothers, Simon and Andrew, casting a net into the sea... "for they were fishermen," Mark adds helpfully.

And Jesus says, "Follow me and I will make you fish for people." And immediately they leave their nets and follow him.

Matthew tells it the same way. And here, notice: Simon and Andrew are called together, in a single moment.

Luke tells a fishing story too, with a miraculous catch. But in Luke's call scene, Andrew isn't even named.

So which is it? Andrew finding Jesus first, then his brother? Or the two called side by side?

Some readers stitch the two together: met Jesus first by the Jordan, called properly later in Galilee. Maybe. But no Gospel says so.

There's even a little puzzle about where Andrew lived. John's Gospel says Philip was from Bethsaida, "the city of Andrew and Peter." Mark, meanwhile, takes Jesus to "the house of Simon and Andrew" in Capernaum, a few miles along the shore. Hometown? Later home? The texts don't say, and I'm not going to pretend they do.

A few small scenes

Scripture

Andrew is in every list of the Twelve. In Matthew and Luke, he's second, straight after his brother. In Mark and Acts, he's fourth, with Peter, James and John ahead of him.

In the Gospels, he's close to the centre... but rarely in the spotlight. Peter, James and John get the Transfiguration. They get the garden of Gethsemane. Andrew isn't mentioned at either.

But he does get one moment with them. On the Mount of Olives, facing the Temple, Mark says four disciples came to Jesus privately with a question: "Tell us, when will this be?" Peter, James, John... and Andrew.

And then John's Gospel gives him two more little scenes.

Scene one: a hillside, and a hungry crowd. About five thousand men, John's Gospel says. Philip is busy doing the maths, and the numbers don't look good. Then Andrew pipes up: "There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish." Then he adds: "But what are they among so many people?"

Not exactly a ringing vote of confidence. But he's the one who mentions the boy.

Scene two: Jerusalem, at Passover. Some Greeks, who'd come up to worship at the festival, approach Philip. "Sir, we wish to see Jesus." And Philip... goes and tells Andrew. Then Andrew and Philip go together and tell Jesus.

Scholarship

So, three scenes in John. His brother. A boy with a packed lunch. A group of Greek visitors, passed along by Philip. Many readers see a pattern here: Andrew, again and again, connecting people with Jesus. The Gospel never spells that out; it's a reading, not a line in the text.

Scripture

After that, the trail runs out. His last appearance by name is in the Book of Acts, in an upstairs room in Jerusalem, listed among the eleven. And then... silence.

Where did he go?

Tradition

For the next clue we have to jump forward a long way. Our earliest datable witness is Origen, in the two hundreds, and we know his words through Eusebius, writing nearly three hundred years after Andrew. In his Church History, Eusebius records a tradition that the apostles were each allotted a region. Thomas got Parthia. John got Asia. And Andrew? Scythia.

How much of it is Origen's own words is debated.

Scholarship

Now, "Scythia" is a gloriously vague word. For Greeks and Romans it meant the steppe lands north of the Black Sea and beyond: horse nomads, cold winters, the edge of the map. It's not a place you can put a pin in. It's a direction.

Romania's Orthodox Church reads it as Scythia Minor, on the lower Danube. Russia and Ukraine look to the steppe and Crimea. Eusebius just says "Scythia".

Later Tradition

Later still, Andrew was credited with founding the church of Byzantium, the future Constantinople. That gave Constantinople an apostle of its own, to set beside Rome and Peter. The claim first surfaces around the year 700, and the historian Francis Dvornik concluded it was only fully written up in the eight hundreds.

The cross at Patras

So how did he die? The New Testament is silent. For the famous version, we need a very different kind of book.

Legend

It's called the Acts of Andrew. Most scholars date it to the second century, perhaps into the third. It never became part of any Bible, and it survives only in pieces: fragments, later rewritings, and a Latin summary usually credited to Gregory of Tours, in the five hundreds. And Eusebius lumped it with books he called "absurd and impious".

But the story is quite something. Andrew is in Patras, in southern Greece. The wife of the Roman governor, a woman called Maximilla, becomes his follower, and decides she will no longer share her husband's bed. The governor, Aegeates, does not take this well.

So Andrew is arrested, flogged, and crucified. And here's the detail that matters: he's tied to the cross, not nailed, so he'll suffer longer.

Andrew hangs there for days... preaching from the cross. The crowd demands his release, and the governor finally offers to cut him down. Andrew refuses, and dies on the cross.

Notice what this book does not say. As far as scholars can tell, none of the early texts says the cross was X-shaped. Tied, yes. Patras, yes. An X? No.

X marks the spot

Scholarship

So where does the X come from? From art.

Art historians still argue about the very first example. But the earliest carving we can securely date is a capital on a church column in France, from the early eleven hundreds. And it took centuries more, into the sixteen hundreds by some reckonings, before the X became the standard way to show him.

Earlier, a Byzantine manuscript made for the emperor Basil the Second, around the year 1000, shows Andrew on an ordinary cross. And around 1607, Caravaggio painted the crucifixion of Saint Andrew... with him tied to an ordinary upright cross. So much for the X.

Legend

So how did this X end up on Scotland's flag? Two stories, both written down long after the events.

The first is about bones. A foundation legend from St Andrews says that relics of Andrew were carried to the coast of Fife by a holy man called Regulus, or Rule, and welcomed by a Pictish king named Óengus, or Angus. Even that story has a timing problem: one version sets the voyage in the three hundreds, but the Pictish kings called Óengus reigned in the seven and eight hundreds.

Scholarship

Historians suspect the real route was humbler: that relics came north from England in the seven hundreds, possibly with Acca, a bishop of Hexham who left, or was driven from, his see in the early 730s, for reasons nobody recorded. That's a theory, not a certainty. Either way, a church dedicated to Andrew grew up there, and the town took his name.

Legend

The second story is the famous one. In the popular version, before a battle against the Angles, King Angus sees a white X against the blue sky. He wins, and Scotland gets its flag.

Scholarship

Lovely story. And here's the twist: the oldest version of the St Andrews legend does have a cross in the sky. A voice tells the king to behold "the cross of Christ", which will go before him against his enemies. But no shape is given. In the 1440s, the chronicler Walter Bower supplies the date of the battle: 832. In 1527, Hector Boece says the cross looked like Andrew's own. And by the 1580s, George Buchanan makes it a white saltire. An X.

What we can date is this. By around 1180, seals from St Andrews show Andrew on an X. By 1286, so did the seal of the Guardians of Scotland. And in 1385, the Scottish Parliament ordered soldiers to wear a white Saint Andrew's cross.

And in 1320, in the Declaration of Arbroath, the barons of Scotland wrote to the Pope that Christ had wanted their people confirmed in the faith by "the first of His Apostles by calling, though second or third in rank... the most gentle Saint Andrew, the Blessed Peter's brother."

The first by calling. The title that rests on John chapter one, turning up in medieval Scotland.

Bones on the move

Tradition

If Andrew's life is thin on evidence, his afterlife is busy. According to Saint Jerome, writing in the late three hundreds, Andrew's remains were moved to Constantinople in the twentieth year of the emperor Constantius, around the year 357, along with the bones of Saint Luke.

Scholarship

From here we're on firmer ground: for the journeys, at least, if not for whose bones they really are. In 1204, crusaders sacked Constantinople. A papal legate, Cardinal Peter of Capua, brought relics of Andrew home to his native Amalfi, in southern Italy, where they arrived in 1208. They're still in the crypt of Amalfi Cathedral.

What was said to be Andrew's head had stayed in Patras. When the Ottomans advanced, its Byzantine ruler, Thomas Palaiologos, brother of the last emperor, took it into exile, and in 1462 Pope Pius the Second met it outside Rome, at the Milvian Bridge.

Five hundred years later, a moving footnote. In 1964, Pope Paul the Sixth sent the head back to Patras. Five years later, he gave a relic of Andrew to Scotland's new cardinal, Gordon Gray, with the words: "Peter greets his brother Andrew."

Legend

And Scythia? The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kyiv in the early eleven hundreds, says Andrew sailed up the River Dnieper, stopped beneath some hills, blessed them, set up a cross, and told his disciples that on this spot a great city would rise, with many churches. That city, the Chronicle says, is Kyiv.

Then he carried on north to where Novgorod now stands, and was astonished by the locals' bath-houses, where people got the place scorching hot, then whipped themselves with young branches until they were barely alive... and then threw cold water over themselves, and came back to life. And when he got to Rome, he told everyone about it. An apostle's first review of the Slavic bath-house.

Historians see no evidence the journey happened, and some think the Novgorod section was added later. A legend, written down a thousand years after Andrew.

Close

So let's go back to that flag.

Here's what the texts actually give us. Andrew was a fisherman from Galilee, with a Greek name and a famous brother. John's Gospel says he was among the very first to follow Jesus. Mark and Matthew say he was called alongside his brother. And in John's three little scenes, he helps bring someone, or something, to Jesus' attention: his brother, a boy's five loaves, and, with Philip, some Greek visitors.

Everything after that is tradition and legend. And yet he ended up as a symbol. On flags, and shirts, and painted faces.

Not bad, for a man so rarely in the Gospel spotlight.

Next time: the beloved disciple. Was he John? Who wrote the Gospel that carries John's name? And who was the John on Patmos? It's a lot of Johns. John.