Apostle Read online

  ALSO BY TOM BISSELL

  Chasing the Sea (2003)

  Speak, Commentary (with Jeff Alexander) (2003)

  God Lives in St. Petersburg and Other Stories (2005)

  The Father of All Things (2007)

  Extra Lives (2010)

  The Art and Design of Gears of War (2011)

  Magic Hours (2012)

  The Disaster Artist (with Greg Sestero) (2013)

  Copyright © 2016 by Thomas Carlisle Bissell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Portions of this work originally appeared, in different form, in The Lifted Brow, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Travel Writing 2010.

  The author gratefully acknowledges the American Academy in Rome, the Black Mountain Institute, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their support.

  Photos of Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ courtesy of Marco Ronchin; all other photos © Marie-Lan Nguyen/Wikimedia Commons

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bissell, Tom, [date]

  Apostle : travels among the tombs of the twelve / Tom Bissell.

  pages ; cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-375-42466-3 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 978-1-101-87097-6 (eBook).

  1. Apostles. 2. Church history—Primitive and early Church, ca. 30–600. 3. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages. 4. Bible—New Testament—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.

  BS2440.B57 2016 225.9’22—dc23 2015023269

  eBook ISBN 9781101870976

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover image: Madonna and Child with Angels, The Crucifixion, and Twelve Apostles or Saints (details), c. 1360, by Lorenzo Veneziano. San Diego Museum of Art, U.S.A./Gift of Anne R. and Amy Putnam/Bridgeman Images

  Cover design by Kelly Blair

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Tom Bissell

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note

  Judas Iscariot

  Bartholomew

  Historesai: On Paul

  Philip & James Son of Alphaeus

  Peter

  Andrew

  John

  Thomas

  Christos: On Jesus Christ

  Simon the Cananaean & Thaddaeus

  Matthew

  James Son of Zebedee

  Glossary of People and Terms

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Again and always for Trisha Miller,

  and for Heather Schroder

  An argument arose among them as to which one of them was the greatest.

  —LUKE 9:46

  Author’s Note

  My religion makes no sense

  and does not help me

  therefore I pursue it.

  —Anne Carson, “My Religion”

  I grew up Catholic in a moderately churchgoing household and was an enthusiastic altar boy until I was sixteen. Along with my Sunday Mass duties, I showed up two or three times a week for the impossibly early, poorly attended, and much shorter daily Mass, which priests otherwise performed alone. The enjoyment I received from being an active participant in the various rituals of Catholic observance—slipping the bone-white robe over my head, cinching a red rope belt around my waist, ferrying the chalices, pouring ablutions over sacerdotal hands—was real, and I have never once looked back on those years with anything but fondness.

  My loss of faith was nonetheless sudden and decisive. I will spare the reader any emotional archaeology of that event, other than to say that during my junior year of high school, while doing a report on a national newsweekly’s annual Easter-timed “Who Was Jesus?” cover story, I read a book that forced me to recognize that what I had previously accepted as an inviolate block of readily understandable scripture was the product of several cultures intergalactically different from my own. Moreover, these scriptures contained all manner of textual and translational difficulties, many of which grew more, not less, bewildering as new manuscripts and findings came historically to light. A true understanding of God via scripture suddenly seemed beyond the power of anyone I could imagine. I stopped attending Mass and soon enough abandoned Christian belief altogether. I realize that others have pondered the same quandaries and doubts and come to different conclusions; some of them have written books you will find in my bibliography. Est modus in rebus.

  I have few certainties about early Christianity; I hope nothing here serves to advance fringe theories fattened by scholarly table scraps. As often as possible, I try to summarize and quantify scholarly views, though I sometimes identify those that seem to me the most reasonable. One of my goals was to try to capture something of early Christianity’s doctrinal uncertainty and how it affected the first Christian storytellers. The earliest Christian stories were about Jesus, and at least some of those telling them were presumably related to his earliest followers. Tradition has assigned a term for the most elite circle of his earliest followers: “Twelve Apostles.” Soon enough, stories were being told about them.

  From 2007 to 2010, I traveled to the supposed tombs and resting places of the Twelve Apostles. In doing this, I visited nine countries (one of which I literally walked across) and more than fifty churches and spent many hours talking to the people I met at and around these sites. Most of the Twelve have more than one tomb or reliquary, but I decided early that I would limit myself, at least in narrative terms, to one site each. This book has no interest in determining which sites have the greatest claim to a given apostle’s remains. It is instead an effort to explore the legendary encrustation upon twelve lives about which little is known and even less can be historically verified.

  Popular understanding holds that after Jesus’s ascension to Heaven the Twelve Apostles, working initially out of Jerusalem, quickly moved to establish identifiably Christian churches throughout the Roman world and beyond. Eusebius, one of the earliest Christian writers to attempt a proper historical account of his faith, wrote that the “chief matter” of his history was to establish the “lines of succession from the holy apostles.” But Eusebius, who lived three centuries after the apostles themselves, “failed to find any clear footprints of those who have gone this way before me.” There are few facts about the apostles in Eusebius’s pages, and as often as not they come from outside the New Testament. Indeed, since the very beginning of Christian history, the Twelve Apostles have wandered a strange gloaming between history and belief.

  —

  After the gospels, the Twelve are featured prominently within the New Testament only in the first few chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, when “divided tongues, as of fire…rested on each of them.” These divine tongues apparently grant the apostles the ability to speak in other languages. The “amazed and perplexed” people of Jerusalem wonder if these unaccountably polyglot Galileans might not be “filled with new wine,” but Peter, their spokesman, assures the crowd that the apostles are not drunk, “for it is only nine o’clock in the morning.” The Twelve Apostles go on to perform many “signs and wonders” before the people of Jerusalem. With this, save for a few brief later appearances in which they referee interfaith disputes and supply general community guidance, the Twelve as a group sink from sight within the New Testament.

  How to account for the sudden disappearance of Jes
us’s specially privileged followers in the only extant primary source of Christianity’s rise? The church fathers, working off a strange passage in chapter 10 of Luke, seized on talk of Seventy Disciples*—unmentioned in the other gospels—who are chosen by Jesus to spread his word “to every town and place where he himself intended to go.” Jesus even claims to have “watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning” during their travels. According to Eusebius and other church fathers, the Seventy Disciples were Christianity’s chief proselytizers.

  The authors of the New Testament are not consistent in their use of the terms “disciple” and “apostle,” but in most cases they have clear differences in terms of theological responsibility. (Later use of the terms was looser. Irenaeus referred to the Seventy as apostles, and Jerome confidently bestowed the title of “apostle” upon the Jewish prophet Isaiah, who lived seven centuries before Jesus.) The term “disciple” occurs far more frequently in the gospel tradition, though it is usually unclear whether it is intended to describe followers of Jesus generally or a smaller, more privileged group within those followers. Among New Testament writers, only Paul and Luke seem to view the title “apostle” as applicable to those outside the Twelve, though Luke’s expansion of the term is fleeting. Paul had obvious self-interested reasons for seeing the title “apostle” extended to those outside the Twelve, because he himself was outside the Twelve and did not begin to follow Jesus until several years after his death.

  Most of the church fathers attempted to keep the Seventy Disciples separate from the Twelve Apostles, an effort that resulted in much confusion. Clement of Alexandria, for instance, seemed to number the apostle Thaddaeus among the Seventy. He also included among them a certain Cephas. This is Peter’s special nickname in the Gospel According to John, bestowed by Jesus himself, yet Clement appeared to argue that Cephas was, in fact, a different man from Peter. Eusebius, following Clement, wrote that Cephas was “one of the seventy disciples, who happened to have the same name as Peter the Apostle.” Paul mentions Cephas several times in his letters, and while it is highly probable Paul is actually discussing Peter, it is not certain. A few hundred years after his death, even the most famous member of the Twelve had moved beyond accountable certainty.

  Like the Seventy and much else that distinguished the beliefs and self-understanding of the first Christians, the notion of the Twelve is Jewish in origin and concerns one of Judaism’s first historical traumas: the capture, deportation, and “loss” of ten of Israel’s twelve tribes following the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE. In his time, Jesus would not have been unique if he believed that the tribes would one day reunite in Jerusalem upon Yahweh’s final victory over the forces of unrighteousness, whereupon a new Temple would be constructed, allowing all the nations of the world to worship him. But Jesus would certainly have been unique, and radical, if he foresaw his own followers sitting “on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel,” as he says in the Gospel According to Matthew. This suggestion that the Twelve will in some way rule some form of a somehow reconstituted Israel is as explicit as Jesus gets in the canonical gospels about the role of the Twelve.

  Most scholars believe the historical Jesus’s concerns were quite a bit more modest. They look to his stories, teachings, and parables—tales of dying beggars, angry sharecroppers, quarrelsome peasants, and hungry landowners ordering around their slaves—as indications of these more local concerns. “Jesus was not teaching some sort of new lifestyle to individuals,” the scholar Richard Horsley notes, “but addressing local communities about their disintegrating socio-economic relations.” While the precise nature of Jesus’s relationship to Judaism is a question that will never be resolved, it is difficult, nevertheless, to read the gospels without seeing the hand of the later Gentile church.

  In the Gospel According to Mark, for instance, we are told that Jesus is understood to have “declared all foods clean” by instructing his disciples, “It is what comes out of a person that defiles.” We can safely assume Jesus had some basic connection to his culture and religion, which means that his tacit endorsement of shellfish, pork, and improperly butchered meat is probably not the voice of a first-century Galilean speaking—especially when, in another gospel, that of Matthew, Jesus explicitly says he intends to abolish “not an iota, not a dot” from Jewish Law. In Acts, Peter is celestially prodded to “kill and eat” unclean beasts during a vision. Peter’s response: “I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” Not until the next day does the Peter of Acts realize his religion’s dietary laws have been divinely rendered void. The vision allows Peter a clear conscience as he makes his first non-Jewish convert: the Roman centurion Cornelius.

  Such seeming scriptural contradictions, especially those involving Judaic observance, are why the Twelve were, and continue to be, regarded as important to Christians. Whatever they believed must have been similar to what Jesus believed. The church fathers recognized that the Seventy might have played a more active role in spreading the faith, but the Twelve came to be seen and safeguarded as guarantors of legitimacy. This was a long process—in fact, its full realization took centuries—and became less a matter of learning what the apostles believed and more a matter of retroactively assigning to them the prevailing beliefs of a later time. Clement of Rome, in his supposed letter to the Corinthians, also known as 1 Clement and written around the turn of the first century, was the first to explicitly make the case of doctrinal purity based on succession from the Twelve. A few years later, Ignatius of Antioch argued that the apostles belonged on a spiritual plane above that of lowly bishops and deacons, who were intended merely to follow apostolic teachings rather than initiate their own. Thus, by the turn of the first century, Christian teachers such as Clement and Ignatius were already discussing the apostles as part of an honored era now concluded.

  —

  Who were the Twelve Apostles, and what, exactly, did they believe? Were they wanderers and preachers conscious of creating a new faith or largely observant Jews who stayed mostly around Galilee and Judaea? Or were they some combination of the two? The church fathers wondered over such matters themselves, and what the Acts of the Apostles told them was not always complimentary to what they wished to believe. Peter and John are shown in Acts to engage in some limited missionary work with non-Jews, but what we are clearly expected to understand as a typical day finds them “going up to the [Jewish] temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon.” When the apostles are depicted as operating together in Acts, it is often as men whom the people of Jerusalem hold “in high esteem.”

  Acts shows them riling the Jerusalem authorities, of course, much as Jesus had, but the Pharisee Gamaliel urges his outraged colleagues and co-religionists to “let [the apostles] alone, because if this plan or this undertaking is of human origin, it will fail; but if it is of God, you will not be able to overthrow them.” Gamaliel’s plea for mercy is accepted, and the apostles are not killed but rather suffer group flogging before the Sanhedrin; afterward, they are told “not to speak in the name of Jesus.” The apostles briefly withdraw, rejoice “that they were considered worthy to suffer dishonor,” and head right back to the Temple. Eusebius, noting such matters, wrote with evident discomfort that the apostles “were of Hebrew stock and therefore, in the Jewish manner, still retained most of their ancient customs.”

  The Greek word the New Testament gives us as apostolos (one who is sent) is the noun form of the then more commonly used compound verb apostellein (to send from). “Apostle” can mean one who is an “agent” or “envoy” of a particular message, though to Greek speakers the word might have had a militarily nautical overtone, as it was sometimes used in reference to naval forces dispatched on the errands of a city-state. Scholars debate whether the New Testament’s twelve envoys were actual historical figures, or were created by the authors of the Christian canon (written between 50 and 120 CE), or some combination thereof.
Paul, who again was not a member of the Twelve Apostles, writes in his first letter to the Corinthians that his resurrected Lord first appeared to “Cephas, then to the twelve.” This provides crucial evidence that some notion of twelve specially chosen followers existed from Christianity’s earliest days, though Paul appears to view the Twelve as separate from the apostles. Either way, it is the lone mention of the Twelve in any of Paul’s surviving letters. What cannot be denied is that the Twelve play an important role—one, moreover, that would have been difficult to insert after the fact—in three of the four gospel traditions. Most notably, the Twelve became the first to partake of the Eucharistic tradition during the Last Supper, which alone guaranteed their significance.

  And yet, amazingly, the New Testament lacks complete agreement about who the Twelve actually were. When Eusebius wrote, “The names of our Savior’s apostles are in the gospels for all to read,” he was passing over the fact that the gospels’ apostle lists have small but important variations. Mark, in all likelihood the first gospel to have been written, lists the Twelve as “Simon (to whom [Jesus] gave the name Peter); James son of Zebedee and John the brother of James (to whom he gave the name Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder); and Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.” Matthew gives a near identical list (though he mentions that Matthew was a “tax collector” and that Andrew was the brother of Peter), and Luke follows it closely but for adding “Judas of James,” dropping Thaddaeus, and giving “Simon the Cananaean” a new epithet: “Simon, who was called the Zealot.” John gives no list of the Twelve but mentions among Jesus’s inner circle one “Nathanael of Cana,” who appears nowhere else in the New Testament. An early Christian text known as The Epistle of the Apostles, which may date from the second century and was discovered only in 1895, gives this list, obviously influenced by John, of not twelve but eleven apostles: John, Thomas, Peter, Andrew, James, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Nathanael, Judas Zelotes, and (interestingly distinct from Peter) Cephas. Such inconsistencies both undermine and support the Twelve’s basis in history. As one scholar writes, “That the lists preserve the names of some of the companions of Jesus during his ministry is beyond doubt. But the fluctuation in the names reveals that they were not all precisely remembered as time wore on.”