Nathanael was one of the original twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. Very little is written about him in the Gospels and the book of Acts . What we do learn about him comes primarily from an unusual encounter with Jesus Christ in which the Lord declared that Nathanael was a model Jew and a man of integrity open to the work of God. Nathanael was one of Jesus’ twelve disciples. He is only called Nathanael in the Gospel of John and is identified as Bartholomew in the rest of Scripture. Nathanael means “God has given” in Hebrew; Bartholomew describes him as the “son of Tolmai” and was probably his last name.