Apostles in the New Testament

• 1. Introduction

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  The apostles in the New Testament, and above all the Twelve, set out on their first mission with very strange travel instructions. They were told to "take nothing for their journey, except a staff only: no bread, no wallet, no money in their purse." In Christian theology, these men were the primary disciples of Jesus. During his ministry in the 1st century AD they were his closest followers. They then became the main teachers of his gospel message. The title reaches beyond the Twelve, though, and the New Testament does not always agree about who held it. Who were these men, and how were they chosen? Why do the lists of their names differ? Who else was called an apostle, and what became of them?

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• 2. Delegates, Not Messengers

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  The Greek word apóstolos is built from apó, meaning "from," and stéllō, meaning "I send" or "I depart." It originally meant messenger or envoy. Yet it is stronger than the plain word messenger and sits closer to the idea of a delegate. That sense shapes the first mission the Gospels describe. Jesus sent the Twelve out in pairs to towns in Galilee, with orders to heal the sick and drive out demons. If a town rejected them, they were to shake its dust from their feet as they left. Some scholars think this gesture was meant as a contemptuous threat. The Gospel of Luke, and only Luke, describes a larger group of emissaries, known as the seventy or seventy-two disciples. They too were appointed and sent out in pairs. Western Christianity usually calls them disciples, while Eastern Christianity calls them the Seventy Apostles. Both labels fit the Greek, since an apostle is one sent on a mission and a disciple is a student. Later passages in the Gospels widen the Twelve's task to preaching to "all the nations," Jew or Gentile. After his resurrection, Jesus repeated that reach in what is called the Great Commission, sending them to spread his teachings to every nation. Paul wrote that the household of God is "built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone." Paul himself was not one of the original Twelve.

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• 3. Fishermen and a Tax Collector

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  In the Gospel of John, the first two disciples Jesus called were Andrew and a second, unnamed man. Both had been followers of John the Baptist. When the Baptist pointed to Jesus as the "Lamb of God," the pair followed Jesus and spent the day with him. Tradition holds that the unnamed man was John. Because Andrew came first, the Eastern Orthodox Church honours him with the name Protokletos, which means "the first called." The other accounts describe fishermen who left their nets after only a brief request. Some readers see that instant response as a sign of divine power, though the text never says so. Another explanation is that some of them had heard of Jesus already. John states that Andrew was a disciple of the Baptist, and that he and his brother began following Jesus as soon as Jesus was baptized. Matthew then has Jesus meet James and John, who were also fishermen and brothers. Matthew and Mark name their father as Zebedee. Luke adds that the two worked as a team with Simon and Andrew. In Matthew they were repairing their nets, and their father was sitting in the boat they left behind. A commentator named Carter takes this to mean that Matthew's Jesus was rejecting a social order in which fathers commanded their children. Most scholars instead read it as a sign that Matthew wanted these two seen as more devoted than the first pair, or that Jesus expected the coming of the kingdom. Later in his ministry, according to the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus noticed a tax collector sitting in his booth. The man is called Matthew in one Gospel and Levi in the others. He accepted the invitation and then hosted Jesus at a meal with his friends. Tax collectors were seen as villains in Jewish society, so the Pharisees asked why Jesus ate with such people. His reply is now well known: "it is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." That tax collector's name appears in the formal lists of the Twelve.

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• 4. Four Lists, One Pattern

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  The New Testament gives four formal listings of the apostles, in Matthew, Mark, Luke and the book of Acts. Each one names only men, and Christian tradition holds that all of them were Jews. The lists are not identical. Luke has "Judas, the son of James" where the others have Thaddaeus. Yet a strict pattern runs underneath. The names fall into three groups of four, and the same four apostles always share a group. The same man always leads each group, although the order of the other three changes. Peter is therefore always listed first, Philip fifth, and James, son of Alphaeus ninth. Judas Iscariot is always last. The Gospel of John breaks the pattern. It speaks of "the Twelve" but gives no formal list and does not name them all. John also makes no distinction between the terms apostles and disciples, and he calls Peter both Simon Peter and Cephas. Family ties are another puzzle. The New Testament shows only two pairs of brothers among the Twelve. They are Peter and Andrew, the sons of Jonah, and James and John, the sons of Zebedee. The Eastern Orthodox tradition adds a third pair. Matthew and James, son of Alphaeus, share a father's name, Alphaeus, so they are taken to be brothers. The Catholic tradition, drawing on the writer Papias of Hierapolis, instead makes James, son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus brothers. Their father is called Alphaeus, also named Clopas, and their mother is Mary of Clopas, sister of the mother of Jesus. In the 13th century, Jacobus de Voragine compiled The Golden Legend, which adds Simon the Zealot to that family.

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• 5. The Inner Circle

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  In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus gave James and John the nickname Boanerges, which means "Sons of Thunder." Those two brothers, together with Peter, formed an informal trio inside the Twelve. Jesus invited only these three to be present on three notable occasions. They saw the raising of Jairus' daughter, the Transfiguration, and the Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Two of the three, Peter and John, were given further tasks. Jesus sent them into the city to prepare the final Passover meal, the Last Supper. Later the assembled apostles chose only these two to visit the newly converted believers in Samaria. If John is the disciple whom Jesus loved, then the pair also stand out in the days of the crucifixion. Only they followed behind Jesus after his capture in Gethsemane, and only they ran to the empty tomb once Mary Magdalene had borne witness to the resurrection. In the early Church a slightly different trio was recognized as the three Pillars: Peter, John, and James, the brother of Jesus. According to the Catholic tradition based on the writer Jerome, that James is the apostle James, son of Alphaeus.

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• 6. An Empty Seat

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  Two Gospel accounts describe how Judas Iscariot ended his life. One says he threw the silver he had received into the Temple and then hanged himself. The other says he bought a field, where he fell headlong and burst open. His death left the group short by one. Mark 16:14 and Luke 24:9 and 24:33 call the remaining followers "the eleven." Acts 1:26 says "the eleven apostles," and Matthew 28:16 says "the eleven disciples." After Jesus was taken up and before the day of Pentecost, Peter spoke to the brethren about the vacancy. He cited the book of Psalms, which says "Let another take his office." The replacement had to be one of the men who had accompanied them from the baptism of John until the day Jesus was taken up. He would become, with them, a witness to the resurrection. The apostles cast lots, a traditional Israelite way of discerning the will of God. The lot fell on Matthias, who became the twelfth apostle. The earliest historical mention of the Twelve may come from Paul in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. There he writes that Christ "appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve."

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• 7. Beyond the Twelve

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  According to Paul, the resurrected Jesus himself called him to apostleship on the road to Damascus. Paul, a Jew also named Saul, claimed a special commission as "the apostle of the Gentiles." He also claimed that he received his gospel directly through revelations from Jesus, not from the teaching of the Twelve. Because he had not known Jesus before the crucifixion, Paul often had to defend his authority. He admitted that he might be inferior to the others, since he had once persecuted Christ's followers. Yet he insisted he was in no way lacking compared with the "super-apostles." In his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul says that James, Peter and John in Jerusalem accepted the grace given to him. It was agreed that Paul and Barnabas would go to the Gentiles, who were not circumcised, while the three "pillars" would go to the circumcised. The Twelve did not confine themselves to Jews, however. Cornelius the Centurion is widely considered the first Gentile convert, and Peter converted him. The Great Commission, meanwhile, was aimed at "all nations," even though Matthew 10 had earlier sent the Twelve out more narrowly. Paul also used the word apostle for others. Acts 14:14 speaks of "the apostles Barnabas and Paul," and Paul calls Barnabas his mentor. In 1 Corinthians and Galatians, James the Just, the brother of Jesus, is also included. Galatians 1:19 reads: "But I did not see any other of the apostles except James, the Lord's brother." The most debated case is Romans 16:7, where Paul says that Andronicus and Junia were "of note among the apostles." That phrase can mean they were distinguished apostles, or it can mean they were well known to the apostles. The Greek form Iounian could name either Junia, a woman, or Junias, a man. Later manuscripts added accents that made it Junias. Yet Junia was a common name and Junias was not. Daniel Wallace and Michael Burer have defended the second reading from a scholarly angle.

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• 8. Martyrs, Relics and Succession

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  Christian tradition has generally held that every one of the Twelve, except John, died a martyr. John is said to have outlived all the others, dying of natural causes at Ephesus sometime after AD 98, under the emperor Trajan. The New Testament itself describes only one apostolic death, that of his brother James, around AD 44. The 18th-century historian Edward Gibbon wrote that early Christians, between the second half of the second century and the first half of the third, believed only Peter, Paul and James, son of Zebedee, had been martyred. Some argue that the other martyrdom claims rest on late legends rather than history. Sean McDowell, reviewing the accounts, finds that three of the Twelve likely died natural deaths: John, Matthew and Philip. He judges that the other nine were most likely martyrs, or that their martyrdom was as plausible as not. He also counts Paul and James, the brother of Jesus, as martyrs. Churches across Europe claim relics of the apostles. Andrew is said to rest in the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Patras, Greece. James the Great is said to lie in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral in Galicia, Spain. Matthias is claimed by St. Matthias' Abbey in Trier, Germany. Peter is buried in St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and his skull is kept in the Archbasilica of Saint John Lateran beside the skull of Paul. John has no relics at all. When his tomb in Ephesus was opened during the reign of Constantine the Great, it held no bones, which gave rise to a belief that his body was taken up into heaven. Thomas is buried either in the San Thome Basilica in Chennai, India, or in Ortona, Italy. Even Judas is placed at a site, Akeldama near Jerusalem. By the 2nd century AD, a link to the apostles was prized as proof of authority. Churches believed to have been founded by an apostle are called apostolic sees, and Paul's epistles were accepted as scripture. Two of the four canonical gospels were tied to apostles. The Didache and the Apostolic Constitutions were attributed to them, and the Apostles' Creed was said to be their own composition. Bishops traced their lines of succession back to individual apostles, who were said to have scattered from Jerusalem to found churches across great territories. The years of the apostles' lifetimes are called the Apostolic Age. Later Church Fathers linked with apostles, such as Pope Clement I with St. Peter, are known as the Apostolic Fathers.

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