Andrew meaning

Meaning

Manly, Manliness

Man Of Vows, Man Of Liberty

Etymology

From the Greek ανδρος (andros), of man, in turn from ανηρ (aner), man.

From the Hebrew נדר (nadar), to vow, and דרר (darar), to flow freely.

Related names

• Via ανηρ (aner): Alexander, Alexandra, Alexandria, Andronicus, Nicanor

• Via נדר (nadar): Adoraim, Damascus, Dor, En-dor, Hadoram, Hammoth-dor

The name Andrew is an Anglicized form of the Greek name Andreas, and that name occurs only as the name of the first-called disciple of Jesus Christ: Andrew the brother of Simon Peter. He is mentioned 13 times in the New Testament; see full concordance.

Andrew and Peter were from Bethsaida (John 1:44) and worked the Sea of Galilee as fishermen (Matthew 4:18). Andrew had previously belonged to the school of John the Baptist and was introduced to Jesus by John and even went to Jesus' house. Andrew went to find his brother and introduced him too to Jesus, explaining that he was the Messiah (John 1:35-40). Jesus rendered upon Simon the nickname Cephas, but it seems that after that the men went home.

At some point Jesus decided that he needed disciples, and famously called Andrew and Simon by referring to Jeremiah's paragraph on world-wide restoration and global understanding of Truth, saying that he would make them fishers of men (Matthew 4:19, Jeremiah 16:16).

Andrew became one of Jesus' twelve disciples but plays a surprisingly small role in the Bible. He is mentioned by name a mere six times in the gospel of John, four times in Mark, twice in Matthew, and only once in both Luke and Acts.

Tradition and various church fathers report that Andrew focused his ministry on Scythia (a region north of the Black Sea, stretching from eastern Europe to present day Kazakhstan) and that makes him still one of the most revered Christian heroes in that region. He is said to have been crucified in the Greek city of Patra(s), about 200 kilometers due west of Athens, on a saltire or X-shaped cross, which became aptly known as the Saint Andreas' Cross.

The name Andrew or Andreas derives from the familiar noun ανηρ (aner), meaning man:

More specifically, our name probably comes from an adaptation of the noun ανδρεια (andrea), which appears to be a word that was manufactured to fit the meter of a certain old poem. But it caught on and was used by several Greek poets of the old world. It means manliness or a manly spirit, as opposed to δειλια (deilia), meaning timidity or cowardice, and some innovators even used this word to describe courageous women. Negatively, this word may be used to mean hardihood or even insolence, and on occasion it refers to the membrum virile. When it occurs in plural it denotes brave deeds.

Much more fun, however, and this is fun certainly not lost on the authors of the gospels, is to relate our very Greek name Andrew to the very Hebrew verb נדר (nadar), meaning to vow, which in turn looks like a niphal (passive) version of the verb דרר (darar), to flow freely.

That would make Andrew also a jocular name, somewhat similar to the English name Bill (which comes from William and has nothing to do with a financial receipt, despite the many comedic TV sketches in which this is implied). Still, in the Hebrew literary tradition, the art of the joke-name was not a slapstick gimmick but rather a fully developed literary genre (see our articles on the names Amraphel, Tiglath-pileser, Carpus or Onesimus).

The Greek verb χεω (cheo) means to flow, from which derives the noun χοος (cho'os), loose dirt, from which comes the adjective χοικος (choikos), earthy, as used in 1 Corinthians 15:47: "The first man is of the earth, earthy":

The brothers Peter and Andrew came to personify the two great Christian realms, namely Catholicism (Peter) and Orthodoxy (Andrew) and although the theologies of these two realms are really not so very different, the ways they operate and are governed make them two entirely different creatures:

Catholicism is a centralized empire, in which all parishes are under the total and infallible control of the Pope. Orthodoxy is a confederation of decentralized republics, in which parishes are free but governed in an administrative sense by synods (senates) of equals, which in turn are headed by a patriarch (the "first" of the equals). Catholicism is all about obedience to a higher authority. Orthodoxy is all about providing a firm infrastructure for the free flow of ideas and thoughts. And neither is superior since any healthy mind needs both, although too much structure leads to mental desertification, and too much freedom makes the mind a swamp.

Protestantism famously broke away from imperial Catholicism and (whether consciously and willingly or not) tried to reinstate the republican structure of Orthodoxy. Probably the most successful of these attempts was the Presbyterian movement of Scotland, where Andrew became the Patron Saint; hence also the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, which is, with its lodges, of course also a manifestation of the Republic Ideal.

Protestantism at large gave the world the scientific revolution, and science is obviously based on the Republican Ideal rather than on an infallible central authority. Unfortunately, the Scottish academic ideal, which emphasized practical applicability and the unity of all knowledge, and which dominated the modern world until the late 19th century, lost out against the German academic ideal, which emphasized specialization and competition.

Despite their many and obvious faults, Catholicism and Orthodoxy both emphasized the unity of the entire global population, and subsequently focused their efforts mostly on the poor and less informed. Protestant science, freed from the old injunction to care for the widows and the orphans, the aliens and the strangers, and to strive single- and wholeheartedly to preserve the unity of all people, began to focus mostly on the advancement of scientific frontiers and take its directions mostly from the very rich. This is why modern science has managed to find money to fund rovers on Mars while much of our human population lives in squalor and neglect, and humanity's attentions are directed to commercials and billboards rather than the needs of neighbors and families. As Frank McCourt explained: we live in the house of a man who fails to feed his own in order to buy pints for perfect strangers in the pub. There's nothing wrong with a good pint but like all wealth, wisdom is first and foremost for saving the disenfranchised and preserving social cohesion, not for throwing parties on another planet.

Some extreme schools of Protestantism go so far as to claim that Jesus should be "one's personal Lord and Savior," which expresses the Protestant ideal of individual victory, but which completely misses the point that only damnation is a private and personal thing, whereas salvation is a collective thing. Jesus is the Word, and no word was ever spoken by anyone alone. For any kind of words or language to come about, massive amounts of people must continuously seek to fathom each other's minds, and by much trial and error, chisel away and the medium in which all Truth can be seen be everybody.

The other great gift of Protestantism to the world is capitalism. Like science, capitalism yielded a broad bouquet of undeniable blessings, but equally so, lacked the unitarian perspective to prevent its own evolution into a whole new low of imperial tyranny. And that's the tyranny against which blockchain technology recently insurrected. The staking pool structures of projects like Cardano are entirely republican and Andrean, and in the very near future, financial Rome will fall and the financial world will embrace Andrean self-governance. The last time this pattern unfolded it took humanity a thousand years to get on top of it. Now that we know what we're in for, it could perhaps be over quicker.

Christ had not two but twelve disciples, and they relate like colors to white. These twelve "colors" all left their legacies in our modern world and in order for our world to survive in any meaningful way, these twelve need to find each other and find what makes them one, and ultimately become the unity that makes them one. Christ was never actually divided, after all.

Christ is "entire consciousness", which is what happens when all separate conscious creatures are connected like neurons in a brain. When a single consciousness is complete, it will fit into the global consciousness, which in turn becomes complete. That means that the combined mind of the entire human population will be self-similar to a single one, and may perhaps someday be ready to join a universe of similarly conscious worlds. It may take some mental gymnastics to get around, but Christ was never limited to Christianity but rather has always described all of the whole of the entirety of creation — and see our articles on YHWH and Logos for more on that.

The disciples of Christ correspond to agents (any agents) that preserve and convey the Logos, which was originally preserved and conveyed by Moses and the Prophets. Liberty is the ultimately purpose of the gospel (Galatians 5:1) but liberty without an endoskeleton of sound knowledge and mental discipline will quickly disintegrate into polytheism first and nothingness soon after. Precisely that concern prompted Muhammad to plead for his people to return to Moses and the Prophets, to seek first the completeness of one's footing before embracing intellectual liberties.

The strength of intellectually disciplined Islam eventually overcame the weakness of intellectually liberal Orthodoxy, which in the Balkans is still remembered by the obvious synthetic account of the simultaneous deaths of Prince Lazar (Lazarus) and Sultan Murad (the rich man) at the battle of Kosovo in 1389 — the name Kosovo comes from the noun kos, blackbird, which in Hebrew is ערב ('oreb) from which comes the name Arabia (Luke 16:31). The resurrection of Orthodoxy is commemorated in the epic poem The Mountain Wreath, whose title reflects the foundational principle of Andrean self-governance, namely by an interwoven laurel of autonomous local assemblies.

The Greek name Andrew means Manly, Courageous or Brave and it seems to reflect the very command with which YHWH began his covenant with Abraham, of which Jesus Christ is the fulfilment (Genesis 15:1). This command also became the single most repeated command in the ministry of Jesus: Be not afraid! (Matthew 10:31, 14:27, 17:7, 28:5, 28:10, Mark 5:36, 6:50, Luke 1:13, 1:30, 2:10, 5:10, 8:50, 12:7, 12:32, John 6:20, 12:15, Acts 18:9, 27:24, Revelation 1:17, 2:10).

The Hebrew name Andrew means He'll Be Flowing Freely, or Man Of Liberty, and personifies a true democratic governance of the people by the people — a governance which serves only to secure the free exchange of thoughts, ideas, wisdoms, skills and technologies of the global community. The Greek equivalent of the Hebrew word נדר (nadar), vow, is επαγγελια (epaggelia), which derives from the verb αγγελω (aggelo), to message, from which we get our modern word "angel". This noun επαγγελια (epaggelia) occurs 52 times in the New Testament and nearly always emphasizes social cohesion: see full concordance.