Andreas of Caesarea

Andreas was archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey. The usual dating puts his working life around the turn of the seventh century; his commentary is normally placed in the early 600s, and he is thought to have died about 614. The record of his life is thin, no birth date, no family, almost no incident. What survives is the book.

That book solved a real problem. Revelation had a rough history in the Greek-speaking church. Many Eastern Christians doubted it belonged in the New Testament at all, and it is still the one New Testament book never read aloud in the Byzantine liturgy. There were Greek commentaries on almost every other book and next to nothing usable on this one.

Andreas wrote the commentary that filled the gap, and he wrote it in a way that made the book safe to read. He divided Revelation into twenty-four discourses and seventy-two chapters, twenty-four for the elders around the throne, and three chapters each because, he said, everything has a body, a soul, and a spirit. Then he read the whole book on three levels at once: the plain historical sense, the moral sense for the soul, and the spiritual sense pointing to things still to come.

He leaned hard on earlier writers, quoting Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Methodius, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Cyril of Alexandria. Some of what he quotes survives nowhere else, which makes his commentary a rescue vessel for lost second- and third-century material on the end of the age.

He took the millennium symbolically rather than literally, following the direction Greek theology had already gone, and he was cautious about pinning prophecy to current events. That caution is exactly why he was trusted.

The effect was enormous and quiet. For the next thousand years, if a Greek reader opened Revelation, the notes in the margin were usually Andreas's. His text is bound into a large share of the surviving Greek manuscripts of the book, and it shaped the Byzantine text of Revelation itself, one whole family of manuscripts is named after his commentary. Arethas of Caesarea, sitting in the same chair three centuries later, essentially revised and reissued him.

So an obscure Cappadocian bishop, about whom almost nothing personal is known, decided how the Eastern half of the church would hear the last book of the Bible.

Sources: Andreas of Caesarea, Commentary on the Apocalypse (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, vol. 106); Bruce M. Metzger, The Canon of the New Testament; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. IV.