The apostles of Christ, both the original twelve, as well as those of the seventy, were the foundation stones upon which Christ built His church. They were the guardians, so to speak, of the “way, the truth and the life” (John 14:6), for they were entrusted with the recording, preserving and promulgating the Words/teachings of “the Word made flesh.” (John 1:14) We are told in Revelation 21:14 that the twelve foundations of the wall of the New Jerusalem will have in them the names of the twelve apostles. It is quite evident that Jesus attributed great importance to these men, both in this life as well as in the life to come. In the study of these courageous first-century lives, and what apostleship meant in the time of Christ, we should carry the examples of their lives, that of undaunted faith, courage, vital experience, responsibility, consecration and achievement in carrying out the Great Commission given just before Christ’s ascension, and apply said examples and qualities in the developing of a Spirit directed twentieth-century discipleship as Christ must have meant it to be.
The Apostles and Their Steadfastness and Faithfulness to the Great Commission
The original twelve apostles and those who were later added into the apostolic ministry, were not necessarily the type of people that one might have expected Jesus to send forth on his mission to reach the world. There was nothing special or spectacular about them. They were just ordinary working men. But Jesus formed them into the backbone of the church and gave them the most extraordinary task imaginable: calling the entire world, including the mightiest empire ever known, to repentance and faith in the risen Christ. It goes without saying that any educated, first-century Roman citizen would have laughed at any prediction that within three centuries the Christian faith would be the official faith of the empire.[1] There is an abundance of extra-biblical accounts which testify to the effectiveness of the apostles taking the Gospel into all the known world of their day, which included both the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire and beyond. When one considers the opposition to the Gospel, which Jesus had forewarned His disciples of while He was yet with them, along with the multi-cultural challenges that they faced, the evangelizing of the world of their day stands as a testimony of their love and loyalty to their Savior and that of the power of the Holy Spirit.
| The following are a few excerpts from the early Church fathers: |
| Tertullian (AD 155-222) wrote:”The extremeties of Spain, the various parts of Gaul, the regions of Britain which have never been penetrated by Roman arms, have received the religion of Christ.” |
| Origen of Alexandria, the Greek Father, said in 230 AD:”The divine goodness of our Lord and Saviour is equally diffused among the Britons, the Africans, and other nations of the World.” |
| Arnobius, the Christian apologist, writing about 300 AD declared:”So swiftly runs the word of God that though in several thousand years God was not known except among the Jews, now within the space of a few years, His word is concealed neither from the Indians in the East nor from the Britons in the West.” |
| St. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem in 378 AD declared:”From India to Britain, all nations resound with the death and resurrection of Christ.” |
| Chrysostom, Patriarch of Constantinople, wrote in 402 AD about the British Isles in the following manner:”The British Isles, which are beyond the sea, and which lie in the ocean, have received the virtue of the Word. Churches are there founded and altars erected. Though you should go to the ocean, to the British Isles, there you will hear all men everywhere discoursing matters out of the Scriptures, with a different voice indeed, but not another faith, with a different tongue but the same judgment.”[2] |
The Apostle’s Martyrdom’s as Proof of Christ’s Resurrection
In his excellent book, “The Signature of God,” Grant R. Jeffrey appeals to the historical evidence of Christ’s resurrection as the reason for the apostles’ steadfastness and unshakable faith and perseverance in promulgating the Gospel and preaching what Paul so aptly stated to the church in Corinth, “but we preach Christ crucified…Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:23-24)
Some atheists have suggested that the disciples, during the decades following His death, simply invented their accounts of Jesus. These Bible critics say that the disciples, in an attempt to enhance His authority, then published the story that Jesus claimed to be God and was resurrected. Any fair-minded reader should consider the historical evidence.
First, the apostles were continually threatened and pressured to deny their Lord during their ministry; especially as they faced torture and martyrdom. However, none of these men who spent time with Jesus chose to save their lives by denying their faith in Him.
Consider this hypothetical situation: Suppose these men had conspired to form a new religion based on their imagination. How long would anyone continue to proclaim something they knew was a lie when faced with lengthy tortures and an inescapable, painful death? All they had to do to escape martyrdom was to admit they had concocted a lie and simply deny their faith and claims about Jesus as God. It defies both common sense and the evidence of history that anyone, let alone a group of twelve men, would persist in proclaiming a lie when they could walk away by admitting that it was a fraud.
Yet, history reveals that not one of these men, who knew Jesus personally, ever denied their testimony about Him despite the threat and reality of imminent death. This proves to any fair-minded observer that these men possessed an absolute unshakable personal knowledge about the truth of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Each of the apostles were called upon to pay the ultimate price to prove their faith in Jesus, affirming with their life’s blood that Jesus was the true Messiah, the Son of God, and the only hope of salvation for a sinful humanity.[3]
William Lane Craig adds, “The apostles who had been with Jesus were, so to speak, the guardians of the information of His life and teachings. It is simply unbelievable that fictitious stories of Jesus’ appearances to them could arise and flourish so long as they were living and active, much less that wholly false stories could replace the true.”[4]
Walther Kunneth states:
It is extremely difficult to see how the Gospel accounts of the resurrection could arise in opposition to the original apostolic preaching and that of Paul…The authority of the apostolic eye-witnesses was extraordinarily strong. It would be inconceivable how there should have arisen in opposition in to the authoritative witness of the original apostles a harmonious tradition telling of an event that has no basis in the message of the eye-witnesses.[5]
Non-biblical History of the Apostles
The history of the apostles starts in the books of the Bible. The genealogies of the original 12 disciples of Jesus were most important to the scholars of the day. We do not have as much information about the apostles as we do of Christ for the simple reason that the apostles preached Christ, not themselves, therefore what they wrote focused on the Words and life of Christ and not themselves. However, there are a number of documents that are purported to be written about the same time as the Bible, but were not included in our modern day Bible. Some of these are ‘Acts’ of Paul, the ‘Shepherd of Hermas,’ ‘Revelation of Peter,’ ‘Epistle of Barnabas,’ ‘Teachings of the Apostles,’ and ‘Revelation of John.’
The documents which document the very early church history give us further evidence as to the lives and martyrdom of the apostles and other important details about their lives, such as, what regions of the world they traveled to and evangelized, etc. One of the earliest of these is the writings of Eusebius, ‘The History of the Church,’ (to A.D. 324). These were written in A.D. 325 and include perhaps the most complete history of the apostles. But some say the information he quoted came from bishops he talked to. For example, Acts 12:2 tells us that Herod Agrippa had James executed. Eusebius adds a story he was told by the bishop Clement of Alexandria (215) that “the person who led James to the judgment seat was moved when he saw him bear witness and confessed that he himself was also a Christian. We can accept these narratives as reliable, taking into consideration of course that some of the Apocrypha material may be somewhat embellished, as in the first couple centuries of the church, much of the Christian story was passed on by word of mouth and the bishops of the church guarded these stories carefully. We should also take into account that Christians were being put to death which makes these stories more likely to have been true. While we don’t know every detail historically, the universal belief of the early Christian writers was that each of the apostles faced martyrdom, with the exception of John, faithfully without denying their faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
A book by C. Bernard Ruffin, entitled ‘The Twelve,’ lists sources of early records of the apostles. These sources are as follows:
Papias (A.D. 60-135). He was the bishop of Hierapolis, in what is now Turkey. He was a disciple of John. St. Clement of Rome (d. 101) was a disciple of Peter and Paul and served as pope between A.D. 91-101.
Iranaeus (A.D. 120-202) the bishop of Lyon (in what is now France).
Clement of Alexandria (A.D. 153-217). He was an eminent Greek theologian and hymnist.
Hippolytus (A.D. 170-236), an author of a number of theological works;
Tertullian (A.D. 145-221, a Latin-speaking African theologian,
Origen (A.D. 185-254), an Egyptian teacher and theologian and St. Jerome (342-420), an Italian scholar and translator.
These writings include bits and pieces about the apostles and are what many of our churches have used, along with the Bible, as a basis for their individual histories.
For further study please see the following books:
Jesus & the Eyewitnesses—Richard Bauckham
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels—Craig L. Blomberg
Cold-case Christianity—J. Warner Wallace
[1] Curtis, Ken, What Happened to the Twelve Apostles?, 2013
[2] Jeffrey, Grant R., The Martyrdom of the Apostles, from the book, The Signature of God, Frontier Research Publications, Inc. (1996), p.254-257
[3] Jeffrey, Grant R., The Martyrdom of the Apostles, from the book, The Signature of God, Frontier Research Publications, Inc. (1996), p.254-257
[4] Craig, William Lane, The Son Rises, pg. 107, Moody Publishing/Wipf & Stock, 1981
[5] Kunneth, Walther, The Theology of the Resurrection, trans. J. W. Leitch, London: SCM, 1965, pg. 92-93
