Among the traditions of the Russian Orthodox Church, one reads the following (which I first heard as a young man from the Sanctorale of the Anglican Church):

"A fanciful pious legend?" you may ask. I reply by asking another question. How is it that St. Andrew, who indisputably journeyed through Asia Minor and beyond unto the shores of the Black Sea, became the patron saint of Scotland? How is it that Scotland's national flag bears the Cross of St. Andrew? Or that Scotland's principal university is St. Andrew's? In the midst of these questions, we encounter the beginnings of Christianity in the British Isles, which is to say, the foundation of the faith amongst all English-speaking Christians.

Nearly a thousand years before the founding of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy in Kiev, other Russian Christians — "proto-Russians" or Scythians — were migrating across southern Europe. Directly or indirectly, they would have been touched by the apostolate of St. Andrew. The New Testament records that they were evangelized by the Apostle Paul, known to him as the Galatians. As many scholars have asserted, these people were known as Galatians as they migrated to the north of Rome, as Gauls as they made their way to the west of Rome, and as Gaels as they sailed through the Pillars of Hercules, landing on the Atlantic coasts of Ireland and thence to Scotland.

An Apostle descending from the historic Kingdom of Israel, not known to have journeyed west of Asia Minor, was to become the patron saint of Scotland. His Apostolic heritage was kept as a sacred treasure passed down from one generation to the next. Eventually it would be enshrined in written form in a most-cherished Scottish national document, the "Declaration of Arbroath":

For centuries, linguists have been fascinated by an astonishing fact: that a large language group, dating back (perhaps) two thousand years, fronting the Atlantic, should speak a language more nearly akin to Sanskrit than to Germanic languages or to French (which are the constituent elements of English). Tracing the textual remains and living languages spoken along this route from the Black Sea to Western Ireland, a consensus view grew up that these people, known as Goidelic Celt, did in fact migrate from Scythia, or proto-Russia, including the area we now call Ukraine (a word that mean "outskirts [of Russia]").

Geneticists have attempted to close the circle by tracing those same language groups, not with tape recorders and philology, but with something far more durable and stable than the vestiges of ancient spoken languages. They have focused on DNA.

This genetic research in its earlier stages had been dismissed by Irish historians who resisted the idea that Christian proto-Russians were, in fact, their own ancestors: the Gaels, or the Celts. For what do you call Christians coming out of the historic territory of Russia, evangelized by the Apostles, and claiming the Apostolic authority of St. John the Theologian (as these people did)? You must call them Orthodox, specifically, proto-Russian Orthodox. "The jury is still out," wrote the preeminent Irish historian Daibhi O Croinin.

But in 2015, dissent was silenced with a paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA). A group of geneticists at Trinity College, Dublin and archaeologists at Queen's University, Belfast traced the migration of the Goidelic Celts by examining "Y" chromosomes. In the words of Dan Bradley, Professor of Population Genetics in Trinity College, who led the study,

You can hear that language today in Ireland and see it written upon its road signs.

In particular, the genetic mutation (marker) the team settled on "is so frequent in people of Irish descent that it is sometimes referred to as a Celtic disease."

The jury, then, had come in following its definitive deliberations. The Celtic people of Ireland and Scotland descend from ancestors living near to and beyond the Black Sea, even to Kiev, the traditional capital of Russia.

Let us define our terms. All Christians were Orthodox Christians before the Great Schism of 1054 .... though the Church of Rome began asserting its separate character and power centuries before this. Let us agree on this much, then. All Christians of the early centuries who were not influenced by the Roman Church must be styled Orthodox Christians.

The crucial detail that these Galatian-Gaulic-Gaelic Orthodox Christians eluded Roman influence is widely agreed upon by scholars in divergent fields.

You see the key point here is that these are Christians who are certainly not Roman Christians. These are Christians who show no signs of having been influenced by Roman culture. There are Christians from somewhere else, who must have taken great pains to avoid the Roman Legions and other aspects of Roman culture.

The oldest surviving remnant from any Psalter in Europe, said to be transcribed by St. Columba, one of the Apostles of Orthodox Ireland, evinces a script clearly demonstrating isolation from Roman culture and influence, writes Dr. Christopher De Hamel (A History of Illuminated Manuscripts (Oxford, 1986).

Pointing to the earliest annals and chronicles of these people, O Croinin wrote,

That is, amongst the documents in this enormous repository, among the most voluminous in Europe, there is no mention of reigning emperors or kings, making it one-of-a-kind. Their system for marking chronological delimiters is completely their own invention.

Moreover, O Croinin documents the remarkable fact that these people

There is, he says, no counterpart for this incredible fact anywhere in Europe. But how could this be so? He concludes,

O Croinin adds the additional, incredible fact that while these people bequeathed to posterity the largest repository of genealogical records of any European people, they left no titles recording title to private property. None. You see, if you delve into the annals of other nations, you will find prominently filed among them charters recording title to property. But in Ireland you will find none.

What do we call Christians from Kiev, who were never influenced by the Roman Church, who were evangelized by the Apostles, and who gathered in what we might call Johannine communities, practicing Apostolic life — rejecting money and eschewing private property? Property all held in common! Do we not call them the first Russian Orthodox Christians to be found anywhere on earth? Read the Acts of the Apostles: they are living this life .... these people from historic Russia.

A sobering fact, bringing new perspective to our understanding of the Western Rite in the Russian Orthodox Church, is that the Western Rite preceded the founding of the Russian Orthodox hierarchy in Kiev by perhaps six centuries or more. You see, the Western Rite is not a "Johnny-come-lately" joining the Russian Orthodox tradition, but it is the earliest instance of that tradition.

I do not refer to the Roman Catholic worship materials we find used so commonly among Orthodox converts. I mean the lifeworld that preceded the invasion of the Romans — first Roman Legions flooding into Britain, then Benedictine monks forcing all Christian worship to conform to Italian liturgies, and finally, the invasion of a Norman army, sailing and then marching under papal banners right after the Great Schism of 1054.

Today, we celebrate the feast day of the Apostle Andrew. Surely, the Christianity that proceeded from his lips and from his hand touched these, our ancestors. We do not know but that he baptized them and chrismated them and heard their confessions and fed them the Bread of Heaven and buried their dead.

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.