The Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals

Introduction

There is a category of ancient Christian literature that has always existed in the shadows — not quite scripture, not quite legend, not quite history, yet somehow more vivid and more urgently alive than any of these categories alone. These are the apocryphal acts, the adventurous, miraculous, and sometimes deeply strange narratives that circulated among early Christian communities hungry for stories about the apostles who had walked with Jesus, breathed the same dusty air of Galilee, and then scattered to the far corners of the known world to carry a message that would change everything. Among these remarkable texts, few are as arresting, as viscerally dramatic, or as theologically rich as the ancient narrative that you are about to read — a story set at the very edge of the civilized world, in a city where strangers do not leave alive, where darkness is not merely metaphorical, and where two of Christ's closest followers find themselves tested beyond any ordinary measure of human endurance.

To approach this text with fresh eyes in the twenty-first century is to experience something genuinely rare: the sensation of encountering a story that is simultaneously ancient and immediate, foreign and deeply familiar. The world it describes is remote — geographically, culturally, temporally — and yet the fears it engages, the hopes it articulates, and the questions it raises about divine presence in moments of absolute human vulnerability are questions that have never gone away. They are, in fact, the questions that keep people awake at three in the morning in every century, in every language, in every corner of the earth. What happens when we are utterly powerless? Where is God in the darkness? Can faith survive the worst that human cruelty can devise? This text answers those questions not with theological argument but with story — raw, propulsive, sometimes shocking story — and that is precisely what makes it so extraordinary.

The narrative belongs to a family of texts known collectively as the Acts of Andrew, a body of early Christian literature associated with the apostle Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, who according to tradition was among the very first to follow Jesus and who ultimately died a martyr's death on an X-shaped cross in the Greek city of Patras. Andrew is, in many respects, the apostle of the margins — not as famous as Peter, not as theologically towering as Paul, not as beloved as John, yet consistently present at the most significant moments, consistently willing to go where others would not. That quality of adventurous faithfulness makes him the perfect protagonist for a story set at the uttermost edge of the world, in a place that most people of the ancient Mediterranean would have regarded as beyond the boundary of civilization itself.

The other apostle at the center of this drama is Matthias — not to be confused with Matthew the tax collector and evangelist, but the Matthias who was chosen by lot to replace Judas Iscariot among the Twelve after the betrayal and crucifixion of Jesus. Matthias is, in the canonical New Testament, almost a ghost — present at the election, named, and then never mentioned again. The apocryphal tradition, however, had no intention of leaving him in that silence. In this text, Matthias becomes a figure of extraordinary courage and suffering, a man who walks into the darkest place imaginable not because he does not know what awaits him there, but because he does — and goes anyway. His story, and the story of the rescue that follows, is one of the most dramatically compelling sequences in all of early Christian literature.

It is worth pausing here to say something about what apocryphal texts are, and what they are not, because misunderstanding on this point can prevent readers from engaging with them in the way they deserve. The word 'apocryphal' comes from the Greek apokryphos, meaning 'hidden' or 'concealed,' and it has acquired over the centuries a somewhat unfortunate set of associations — with forgery, with heresy, with texts that were suppressed because they contained dangerous or embarrassing truths. This picture is, at best, a dramatic oversimplification. The apocryphal acts of the apostles were not, for the most part, composed as deliberate deceptions or as underground resistance literature. They were written by Christians who loved the apostles, who wanted to know more about them than the canonical texts provided, and who used the storytelling conventions of their time — including the conventions of the ancient novel, with its sea voyages, miraculous escapes, dramatic reversals of fortune, and exotic settings — to imagine what the apostolic mission might have looked like at its most extreme.

The early church's relationship with these texts was complicated and nuanced. Some church fathers quoted from them approvingly. Others expressed reservations about specific theological claims while acknowledging their popularity and their pastoral usefulness. The bishop and historian Eusebius of Caesarea, writing in the fourth century, placed the Acts of Andrew among texts that were disputed but widely known. The great theologian Origen apparently knew the text and did not dismiss it. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the early fifth century, acknowledged that the Manichaeans — a rival religious movement — were fond of the apocryphal acts, and this association contributed to a certain ecclesiastical wariness. But wariness is not the same as condemnation, and the continued copying and circulation of these texts through the medieval period testifies to their enduring hold on the Christian imagination.

What the apocryphal acts provided that the canonical New Testament deliberately did not provide was narrative satisfaction of a very particular kind. The four Gospels are theological documents organized around the death and resurrection of Jesus; the Acts of the Apostles is a carefully structured historical narrative that follows the expansion of the early church from Jerusalem to Rome. Both are shaped by purposes that are explicitly theological and ecclesial. The apocryphal acts, by contrast, are shaped by the purposes of storytelling — by the desire to entertain, to astonish, to move, and to inspire. They are full of the things that great stories are always full of: danger and rescue, loyalty and betrayal, suffering and transformation, moments of almost unbearable tension followed by moments of almost overwhelming relief. They are, in the best possible sense, page-turners.

The specific text you are about to encounter is known to scholars by a variety of names — the Acts of Andrew and Matthias, the Acts of Andrew and Matthias among the Anthropophagi, or sometimes simply the Cannibals' Acts — and it survives in multiple ancient languages, including Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Ethiopic, and Old English, a distribution that testifies to the extraordinary geographical range of its influence. The Old English version, composed in the Anglo-Saxon period, is among the most celebrated of all Old English poems, known as Andreas, and it stands as evidence that this story was still gripping readers and listeners with tremendous force nearly a thousand years after it was first composed. When a story survives in that many languages and maintains that kind of hold on the imagination across that many centuries, it is telling us something important about its own quality.

The setting of the narrative is a place called Myrmidonia in the Greek tradition — a name that would have carried resonances for ancient readers familiar with the Myrmidons of Homer's Iliad, the fierce warriors who followed Achilles. Other versions of the story call the city by different names, but the essential description remains constant: it is a city at the very edge of the known world, inhabited by people who practice cannibalism — who eat the strangers who arrive among them. In the ancient world, cannibalism was the ultimate marker of the Other, the absolute sign that a people had placed themselves outside the boundaries of human civilization and human morality. To be a cannibal was to have refused the most fundamental social contract, the one that says we do not eat each other. The city in this story is, in other words, a symbolic as much as a geographical location — it is the place where humanity has descended as far as it can go, where darkness is not merely present but is the organizing principle of an entire society.

Into this place, one apostle goes first — not by choice, but by assignment, drawn by the mysterious workings of divine providence. Into this same place, the second apostle must travel to effect a rescue that seems, by any rational calculation, to be impossible. The journey that follows is one of the great adventure narratives of the ancient world, involving a sea voyage of supernatural character, a series of encounters that test the traveler's faith and endurance, and a climax that transforms not only the individuals at the center of the story but the entire city that has been the scene of so much darkness. It is a story about what it costs to go where you are sent, about what it means to trust when trust seems irrational, and about the possibility — perhaps the certainty — that even the darkest human communities contain within them the seeds of transformation.

Reading this text today, in an era saturated with information and entertainment, requires a certain deliberate openness — a willingness to meet the story on its own terms rather than measuring it against the conventions of contemporary fiction or the standards of modern historical scholarship. The narrative does not behave the way a modern novel behaves. It is not interested in psychological realism in the contemporary sense, though it is deeply interested in the interior lives of its protagonists. It is not interested in historical accuracy in the modern sense, though it is deeply interested in historical figures. It operates according to a different logic — the logic of typology, of symbolic resonance, of what the ancient world called mimesis in its broadest sense: the imitation and re-presentation of truth through story. When you read it in that spirit, something remarkable happens. The story comes alive in a way that no amount of scholarly apparatus can fully explain or replicate.

The World That Made This Story

To truly appreciate the text that follows, it helps enormously to have some sense of the world in which it was composed — a world that was, in many respects, utterly unlike our own, and yet in certain fundamental respects disturbingly similar. The early Christian movement emerged in the first century of the common era in a corner of the Roman Empire, and within three centuries it had spread across the entire Mediterranean world and beyond, carried by missionaries, merchants, soldiers, slaves, and travelers of every description. By the time the apocryphal acts were being composed — probably in the second and third centuries, though the dating of individual texts remains a matter of scholarly debate — Christianity was no longer a tiny sect huddled in upper rooms but a diverse, contentious, geographically expansive movement that was beginning to grapple seriously with its own identity and boundaries.

The Roman Empire, which provided the political and infrastructural framework within which early Christianity spread, was a world of extraordinary cultural diversity held together by roads, trade routes, a common administrative language, and the ever-present reality of military power. It was also a world in which travel was genuinely dangerous — not merely uncomfortable, but life-threatening. The sea voyages that feature so prominently in the apocryphal acts were not literary conventions invented for dramatic effect; they were the actual means by which people moved around the ancient Mediterranean world, and they were genuinely terrifying. Storms, pirates, navigational errors, and the simple structural limitations of ancient shipbuilding meant that every sea voyage was a gamble with death. When the apostles in these narratives face the dangers of the sea, they are facing something that their original audiences understood from personal experience or from the experience of people they knew.

Beyond the borders of the Roman Empire lay a world that was, for most inhabitants of the Mediterranean, largely unknown and therefore available for imaginative projection. The ancient geographical tradition had long populated the edges of the known world with monstrous peoples and impossible phenomena — dog-headed men, people who lived on the smell of flowers, races without mouths, societies organized on principles entirely alien to Mediterranean norms. These were not simply the products of ignorance or credulity; they were expressions of a deep human need to map the moral universe onto the physical one, to locate virtue and vice, civilization and barbarism, in geographical space. The cannibal city of this narrative belongs to this tradition, and understanding that tradition helps us read the story with the sophistication it deserves. The cannibals are not merely a colorful plot device; they are a symbol of everything that stands in opposition to the Christian vision of human community — a vision in which every person, regardless of origin or history, is capable of transformation and worthy of the effort that transformation requires.

The literary culture in which the apocryphal acts were composed was one that took storytelling with great seriousness. The ancient novel — represented by surviving works like Apuleius's Golden Ass, Petronius's Satyricon, and the Greek romances of Longus, Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius — was a sophisticated literary form that explored questions of identity, love, adventure, and divine providence through narratives of remarkable complexity and psychological depth. The apocryphal acts drew on this tradition while transforming it for Christian purposes. Where the ancient novel typically ended with the reunion of separated lovers, the apocryphal acts ended with the triumph of faith over death. Where the ancient novel explored the workings of Tyche — blind Fortune — the apocryphal acts explored the workings of divine providence, a force that was anything but blind. The borrowing was conscious and creative, and recognizing it helps us see the apocryphal acts not as naive or primitive texts but as sophisticated literary productions that engaged seriously with the cultural forms of their time.

The question of authorship, for texts of this kind, is one that modern readers often find puzzling. We are accustomed to thinking of texts as having individual authors — specific people who sat down at specific moments and composed specific works with specific intentions. The apocryphal acts do not fit neatly into this model. They were composed, revised, expanded, translated, and adapted by many hands over many centuries, and the 'original' version of any given text is often impossible to reconstruct with confidence. This is not a deficiency; it is a feature. It means that these texts are, in a very real sense, communal productions — the accumulated imaginative effort of communities of faith across time and space. They represent not one person's vision of the apostolic mission but many people's visions, layered and interwoven in ways that are sometimes harmonious and sometimes productively contradictory. Reading them is like listening to a conversation that has been going on for centuries.

The specific question of when and where the narrative you are about to read was first composed is one that scholars have debated extensively without reaching definitive conclusions. The Greek text, which is the basis for most modern translations, shows signs of having been composed or substantially revised in the third or fourth century, but it almost certainly draws on earlier traditions and possibly on earlier written sources. The geographical setting — the edge of the known world, the cannibal city — suggests a composition context in which the apostolic mission was understood as genuinely universal, as extending not merely to the civilized nations of the Mediterranean but to the very limits of human habitation. This is a theological claim as much as a narrative one: the good news, in this text's understanding, is not for the respectable and the already-converted but for the most extreme cases, the most hopeless situations, the darkest corners of the human world.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the text's transmission history is its journey into Old English literature. The poem Andreas, composed probably in the eighth or ninth century by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet of considerable skill, is an adaptation of the Latin version of this narrative, and it stands as one of the monuments of Old English literature. The Anglo-Saxon poet brought to the material a warrior's sensibility — the apostles in Andreas are heroic figures in the tradition of Germanic heroic poetry, their endurance in the face of suffering described in the same terms used to describe the courage of warriors in battle. This transformation is not a distortion; it is a creative engagement with the source material that reveals something important about the story's essential qualities. The courage it describes, the loyalty it celebrates, the endurance it demands — these are genuinely heroic virtues, and every culture that has encountered this text has recognized them as such and translated them into its own heroic idiom.

The theological concerns that animate the narrative are, at their core, concerns about the nature of divine care and human response. The God who appears in this story — sometimes directly, sometimes through angelic intermediaries, sometimes through the natural world itself — is a God who is intimately involved in the lives of the story's protagonists, who responds to prayer not as a distant cosmic administrator processing requests but as a present and active force in the immediate circumstances of human life. This is not a comfortable or predictable God; the divine will in this narrative sometimes leads people into situations of extreme danger and suffering, and the question of why a loving God would permit such things is one that the text raises without entirely resolving. But it is a God who is present, who does not abandon, who ultimately transforms even the most hopeless situations — and that presence is the story's deepest subject.

How to Read What Follows

There is a particular kind of reading that ancient texts reward, and it is worth describing it before you turn the page and begin. It is a reading that is simultaneously slower and more open than the kind of reading we typically bring to contemporary fiction — slower because the text rewards attention to detail, to the resonances of specific images and phrases, to the way a single scene echoes and amplifies scenes that came before it; more open because the text operates according to symbolic and typological logics that are different from the logics of realism, and resisting those logics will prevent you from experiencing what the text is actually doing.

Consider, for example, the role of water in this narrative. Water appears repeatedly, in multiple forms and contexts, and in each appearance it carries a freight of meaning that accumulates across the story. The sea voyage at the heart of the narrative is not merely a plot mechanism for getting a character from one place to another; it is a symbolic journey through the waters of chaos and death toward a destination that is, in the deepest sense, a place of resurrection. The baptismal resonances are not accidental — early Christian readers would have felt them immediately, would have understood the sea voyage as a kind of extended baptismal journey, a passage through death to new life. When you read with attention to these resonances, the narrative reveals dimensions that a purely surface reading would miss entirely.

Similarly, the darkness that pervades the cannibal city is not merely atmospheric description; it is a theological statement about the condition of a community that has turned away from everything that makes human life recognizably human. And the light that enters that darkness — gradually, painfully, at enormous cost — is not merely a narrative resolution; it is a statement about the nature of the divine mission that the apostles carry. Light and darkness, blindness and sight, imprisonment and freedom — these are the great symbolic polarities that organize the narrative's meaning, and tracking them as you read will give you a much richer experience of the text than you would have if you read it simply as an adventure story, however gripping that adventure story undeniably is.

The characters in this narrative are not psychological portraits in the modern sense — they do not have the kind of interiority that contemporary readers have been trained to expect from fictional protagonists. But they are not therefore flat or uninteresting. They are, rather, exemplary figures — people who embody certain qualities in their most concentrated and essential form. The apostle who must travel to the cannibal city embodies a kind of courage that is not the absence of fear but the decision to act despite fear, a courage grounded not in self-confidence but in trust. The apostle who has been captured and imprisoned embodies a kind of patient endurance that is not passive resignation but active faithfulness — the decision to remain who you are even when everything around you is designed to make you into something else. These are not small themes. They are among the largest themes that human beings have ever grappled with, and the fact that they are embodied in story rather than argued in propositions is precisely what gives them their power.

The miracles in this narrative deserve special attention, because they are among the elements most likely to create difficulty for modern readers. We live in a world shaped by scientific materialism, in which the miraculous is, by definition, impossible — or at least requires extraordinary evidence before it can be credited. The world of this text operates according to entirely different assumptions. For the text's original audience, miracles were not violations of natural law but manifestations of divine power that was always already present in the natural world — a power that became visible in particular circumstances, through particular people, for particular purposes. Reading the miracles in this spirit — not as claims that require our credulity but as narrative expressions of a theological conviction about the nature of divine power and presence — allows them to function as they were intended to function: as moments of dramatic revelation, points in the story where the hidden becomes visible and the impossible becomes actual.

It is also worth noting that this text has a sense of humor — not the broad comedy of farce, but the more subtle humor of a narrative that is aware of its own dramatic conventions and occasionally plays with them. There are moments of irony, moments where the gap between what characters expect and what actually happens is exploited for gentle comic effect. There are moments where the sheer audacity of what is being described seems to acknowledge its own outrageousness with a kind of narrative wink. These moments are easy to miss if you read with too much solemnity, and missing them means missing part of the text's personality. The early Christians who composed and circulated these stories were not humorless people; they were people who had found, in their faith, a source of joy robust enough to survive even the darkest circumstances, and that joy occasionally surfaces in the narrative as something very close to delight.

The question of what this text means for readers today — readers who may or may not share the theological commitments of its original audience — is one that each reader will ultimately have to answer for themselves. But it is worth suggesting that the text's power does not depend entirely on theological agreement. The story it tells is, at its most fundamental level, a story about the possibility of going to the darkest place you can imagine and finding there not only survival but transformation — not only for yourself but for the place itself. That is a story with implications that extend far beyond any particular theological framework. It speaks to anyone who has ever been asked to go somewhere they did not want to go, to do something that seemed impossible, to trust when trust seemed irrational, to persist when persistence seemed futile. It speaks, in other words, to the human condition in its most essential form.

The translation and presentation you hold in your hands has been prepared with the conviction that this ancient text deserves to be read widely — not only by scholars and specialists, but by anyone who loves great storytelling, who is curious about the origins of the Christian tradition, who wants to understand how ancient people thought about faith and courage and the possibility of transformation, or who simply wants to read a story that will hold them from beginning to end with a grip that has not loosened in nearly two thousand years. The text has been made as accessible as possible without sacrificing the qualities that make it distinctive — its strangeness, its intensity, its occasional darkness, its ultimate radiance.

What you are about to read is not a comfortable text. It does not traffic in easy reassurances or tidy moral lessons. It takes its characters — and by implication its readers — to places of genuine extremity, and it does not pretend that the journey is without cost. But it is, finally, a text animated by an enormous and unquenchable hope — the hope that even the darkest city can be illuminated, that even the most lost person can be found, that even the most impossible mission can be accomplished when the one who sends you does not abandon you in the sending. That hope is what has kept this story alive across two millennia, across dozens of languages, across the full range of human cultural diversity. And that hope is what waits for you on the other side of this page.

Turn it, and begin.

The Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals

Chapter 1

After our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ ascended into heaven, the apostles were gathered together and cast lots among themselves to determine where each of them should go. The blessed Matthew received by lot the city of Marmadonia. The people of that city ate no bread and drank no water, but fed on human flesh and drank human blood. Whenever a stranger came into the city, they would immediately seize him, put out his eyes, and give him a potion to drink that was mixed with powerful sorcery. When he drank it, his heart would come undone and his mind would be overturned.

The blessed Matthew entered the city, and they quickly put out his eyes. They gave him the potion to drink and threw him into prison, ordering him to eat what was set before him. He would not eat it, and so his heart was not undone nor his mind overturned. Instead he prayed continually to the Lord with many tears, saying, "My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we gave up our families and followed you, placing all our trust and faith in you. Look now and see how these men are treating your servant. I ask you, Lord, restore the sight of my eyes, so that I may see those in this city who have begun to inflict the worst torments on me. Do not forsake me, my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and do not deliver me over to this most bitter death."

When the blessed Matthew had finished this prayer, a great light and brightness filled the prison, and the voice of the Lord spoke out of the light, saying, "Matthew, my beloved, look at me." Matthew looked up and saw the Lord Jesus Christ. Again the Lord's voice spoke: "Matthew, be strong and do not be afraid, for I will never forsake you. I will deliver you from all your troubles — and not you alone, but all your brothers and all who believe in me, in every age, forever. Stay here for twenty-seven days, and after that I will send your brother Andrew to you, and he will lead you and all who are here with you out of this prison." And when he had said this, the Lord said to him once more, "Peace be with you, Matthew."

Matthew remained in the prison, praying and singing praises to the Lord. The wicked men came into the prison to bring out the prisoners and prepare them as food. The blessed Matthew shut his eyes so that the jailers would not see that his sight had been restored. The jailers said to one another, "Three days remain before we kill him and make him into food."

When Matthew had completed twenty of those days, the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ spoke to his apostle Andrew, who was in the land of Achaia teaching his disciples. He said, "Go to the city of Marmadonia and bring Matthew out from there, for three days remain before they kill him and make him into food."

The holy Andrew answered him, saying, "My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, how can I possibly travel there in three days? It would be better to send your angel, who could travel far more swiftly. My Lord, you know that I am a man of flesh and blood. The journey is too long and I cannot make it in time."

The Lord said to him, "Andrew, hear me. I made you, and I have established and ordered all things. Go now to the seashore with your disciples, and there you will find a ship. Board it with your disciples."

The holy Andrew rose early in the morning and went down to the sea with his disciples. He saw a ship on the shore, and three men were sitting in it. He rejoiced greatly and called out to them, "Brothers, where are you sailing with this little ship?"

Now the Lord and Savior himself was on that ship, serving as the helmsman, and his two angels were with him, changed into the form of men. The Lord Jesus Christ answered him, "To the city of Marmadonia."

The holy Andrew answered him and said, "Brother, take us with you on that ship and carry us to that city."