The Twelve Apostles

Jesus chose twelve ordinary men — fishermen, tax collectors, zealots — and entrusted them with an extraordinary mission. This series examines each of the Twelve individually: what the Gospels and Acts tell us, what the Church Fathers preserved, and what modern archaeology and scholarship have uncovered about their lives, their ministries, and their deaths.

The series begins with Simon Peter, the apostle who appears first in every New Testament list, continues with his brother Andrew — the first-called who in the Fourth Gospel brings Peter to Jesus — turns to John the Beloved Disciple, the apostle to whom Mary was entrusted at the cross and the only one of the Twelve to die a natural death in old age, moves to James the Greater, John’s brother, the Boanerges fisherman who became the first of the Twelve to die a martyr’s death and whose long medieval afterlife runs from Jerusalem in spring AD 44 through twelve centuries of pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, to Thomas the Twin, the apostle whose three substantive Johannine scenes culminate in the highest Christological confession of the New Testament and whose Eastern mission carried him through Parthia to the Coromandel coast of India, where the Mar Thoma Christians of Kerala still venerate him as their apostolic father, to Philip the Apostle, the Greek-named Bethsaida fisherman whose four Johannine scenes give Catholic theology the irreducibly experiential invitation “come and see,” the eucharistic prefiguration of the two-hundred-denarii calculation, the Gentile bridge of the Greeks at the feast, and the Last Supper question whose answer — “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” — is the Johannine taproot of the entire Catholic doctrine of Christ as the perfect image of the Father, and now to Bartholomew the Apostle, the apostle of structural canonical silence whom the medieval Western tradition identified with Nathanael of Cana, the “true Israelite. There is no duplicity in him” of John 1:47, whose patristic biographical trail begins with the lone Eusebius–Pantaenus trace to a Christian community east of Egypt at Historia Ecclesiastica 5.10, runs through the Armenian Apostolic tradition that fixes his martyrdom at Albanopolis in Greater Armenia under the flaying knife, and culminates in the Basilica di San Bartolomeo all’Isola on Rome’s Tiber Island, where since 2000 his apostolic relics have stood under the same altar as the relics of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century martyrs of the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, and Protestant traditions, and now to Matthew the tax collector, the one member of the Twelve whose despised trade the Gospel tradition carved into his permanent title, whose call at the Capernaum customs post became the Church’s enduring image of mercy — from the Venerable Bede’s miserando atque eligendo to the motto of Pope Francis — and whose relics rest in the crypt of the cathedral of Salerno, and now to Jude Thaddaeus, the apostle of three names — “Thaddeus” in Matthew and Mark, “Judas the son of James” in Luke and Acts, “Judas, not the Iscariot” in the one Johannine scene that gives him a voice — whose single recorded question at the Last Supper drew the promise that the Father and the Son will come to those who love him and make their dwelling with them, and whom the inscrutable economy of modern devotion, from a Claretian parish on Chicago’s South Side in 1929 to a children’s research hospital in Memphis, made the patron saint of hopeless causes, and now to James the Less, the apostle son of Alphaeus whose very identity is the hardest question in the Twelve—whether the silent member of the apostolic lists is also James the brother of the Lord and first bishop of Jerusalem, the man the early Church called “the Just,” whose knees grew hard as a camel’s from kneeling in the temple and who, thrown from its parapet and clubbed to death by a fuller around AD 62, left the Church a single fierce letter and the doctrine that faith without works is dead. And the series turns to Simon the Zealot, the apostle who is only a name — “the Cananean” in Matthew and Mark, “the Zealot” in Luke and Acts, a single Aramaic word for burning zeal that Luke simply rendered into Greek — with no recorded saying or scene of his own, whose every later itinerary, from a martyrdom in Persia beside Jude to a crucifixion on the Black Sea to a peaceful death at one hundred and twenty in Jerusalem, belongs to legend rather than record, and whose saw, the emblem of a sawing the earliest texts never describe, marks him in art as the apostle of zeal turned from the sword to the Gospel. And the series closes where the Twelve themselves were broken, with Judas Iscariot, the apostle whose name became a synonym for betrayal, whose two divergent deaths the Gospels never reconcile, who alone among the Twelve was a Judean and not a Galilean, and over whose eternal fate the Church — declining to consign any soul by name to hell — keeps the reticence of Benedict XVI’s “it is not up to us to judge his gesture” and the mercy that Francis read in the Vézelay capital of the Good Shepherd stooping to carry the hanged man home.