HistoricalChristian.Faith

The Apostles

The apostles were the men Jesus chose to be with him and to be sent out in his name — the word apostolos (ἀπόστολος) means “one sent.” The Gospels name twelve; after one of them, Judas Iscariot, betrayed Jesus and died, the remaining eleven chose Matthias to fill his place; and the risen Christ afterward called Paul, “as to one born out of due time.” This page introduces the group and opens onto a separate timeline for each figure — tracing, earliest source first, how the church's memory of who he was, where he preached, and how he died took shape across the centuries.

Unlike the belief-timelines elsewhere on this site, each apostle's page follows a person rather than a doctrine: the “development” it charts is the growth of the tradition about him, from the spare notices of the New Testament through the Fathers, the apocryphal Acts, the Byzantine and Latin apostle-lists, and the medieval legendaries, down to modern scholarship. Where the sources genuinely conflict — was Bartholomew the Nathanael of John's Gospel? did Thomas reach India? was Peter crucified at Rome? — the question is weighed on its own page rather than settled by assertion.

Related doctrines: The apostles — see also Simon Peter · Andrew · James, son of Zebedee · John, son of Zebedee · Philip · Bartholomew · Thomas · Matthew · James, son of Alphaeus · Thaddaeus / Jude · Simon the Zealot · Judas Iscariot · Matthias · Paul

The four lists of the Twelve

The New Testament gives four lists of the Twelve — in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts. They agree in dividing the names into three fixed groups of four, each group always headed by the same man (Peter, Philip, and James son of Alphaeus), and they agree that Judas Iscariot comes last. Two names vary: where Matthew and Mark have “Thaddaeus” (some manuscripts “Lebbaeus”), Luke and Acts have “Judas son of James”; and the Simon whom Matthew and Mark call “the Cananaean” Luke and Acts call “the Zealot.” Acts, listing the Eleven after the resurrection, omits the dead Judas Iscariot.¹

Judas's place refilled: Matthias

Between the Ascension and Pentecost, Peter stood up among the believers and proposed that another take the “office” (ἐπισκοπή) left empty by Judas's fall. Two men were put forward; the company prayed and cast lots, “and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.”²

Paul, born out of due time

To the Twelve and Matthias the tradition adds Paul, who never followed Jesus in Galilee but met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. He called himself an apostle “as to one born out of due time” — “the least of the apostles, that am not meet to be called an apostle” — yet one who “laboured more abundantly than they all.”³

The apostles, one by one

The Twelve as the Gospels name them, followed by Matthias and Paul. The bare identifications below are those the New Testament itself gives; the traditional identifications — several of them debated (Bartholomew as Nathanael, Matthew as Levi, Thaddaeus as Jude) — are weighed on the individual pages as they come online.⁴

• Simon Peter — the fisherman of Bethsaida and Capernaum, always named first.
• Andrew — Simon Peter's brother, who first brought him to Jesus.
• James, son of Zebedee — with his brother John, surnamed by Jesus a “son of thunder”; the first of the Twelve to be martyred.
• John — son of Zebedee, brother of James; “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” the last of the Twelve to die.
• Philip — of Bethsaida, the town of Andrew and Peter.
• Bartholomew — traditionally identified with Nathanael.
• Thomas — called Didymus, “the Twin.”
• Matthew — the tax collector (publican); traditionally identified with Levi.
• James, son of Alphaeus — sometimes distinguished as James “the Less.”
• Thaddaeus / Jude — the apostle Matthew and Mark call Thaddaeus (or Lebbaeus) and Luke and Acts call Judas son of James.
• Simon the Zealot — called “the Cananaean” in Matthew and Mark.
• Judas Iscariot — who betrayed Jesus, and whose place among the Twelve Matthias took.

And, added to the Twelve:

• Matthias — chosen by lot to replace Judas Iscariot.
• Paul — the apostle to the Gentiles, called last of all on the Damascus road.

Beyond the Twelve

The apostolic circle did not end with the Twelve. Luke's Gospel records that Jesus also appointed “other seventy” (seventy-two, in many manuscripts) and sent them out ahead of him, two by two, into every town he meant to visit.⁵ Standing near the same circle are figures the early church remembered as co-workers of the apostles — Mark and Luke, the evangelists; Barnabas, Paul's first companion; and James the brother of the Lord, who led the church at Jerusalem. Their traditions belong to the same story and may in time join the timelines here.

The sources, and how far to trust them

Every one of these timelines draws on the same layered body of evidence, and the layers are of very uneven historical worth. It is worth setting the ladder out once — earliest witness first, latest last — because the same caution applies each time a legend of an apostle's travels or death is weighed. The rule followed throughout is simple: date a source, name it, and signal its reliability the same way wherever it recurs, and never let a vivid late legend pass as early fact.

The reliable core — the New Testament

The four Gospel lists, the Acts of the Apostles, and Paul's own letters (especially Galatians 1–2) are the bedrock. They are also spare: the only apostle whose death the New Testament actually records is James son of Zebedee, killed by Herod Agrippa. Of the rest it tells us where they were commissioned, not where they died.⁶

The early Fathers (2nd–4th c.) — genuine but fragmentary testimony

Between the New Testament and the great compilers stand scattered notices of real value, though often surviving only as fragments quoted by later writers. Papias of Hierapolis (c. 100–130) preserves some of the oldest apostolic memory — including the grotesque account of Judas's death.⁷ Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215), in the lost Hypotyposes known through Eusebius, gives the story of the aged John at Ephesus and the note that several apostles were married.⁸ Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Polycrates of Ephesus (all 2nd c.) place John and Philip in Asia and Peter, Paul, and John at Rome.⁹ Origen (early 3rd c.), quoted by Eusebius, supplies the “division of the world” — Thomas to Parthia, Andrew to Scythia, John to Asia, Peter to Rome and crucified head-downward.¹⁰ These are early and independent, but each must be judged on its own attestation, not taken as a block.

Eusebius (c. 325) — the master synthesis

Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, especially Book 3, gathers most of the foregoing into the first connected account of where the apostles went and how they ended. It is indispensable precisely because it preserves earlier witnesses — but it is a compilation, and the traditions it relays are only as strong as the sources behind each one.¹¹

The apocryphal Acts (2nd–3rd c.) — low biographical value

The “Leucian” corpus — the Acts of Peter, of Paul (with Paul and Thecla), of Andrew, of John, of Thomas, and the later Acts of Philip — supplies most of the famous scenes: Peter's inverted cross, Andrew's X-shaped cross, Thomas in India, John and the poisoned cup. They are romance-hagiography, often carrying encratite or gnostic tendencies, and are of little worth as biography. They are early and valuable in a different way — as witnesses to how the apostles were venerated — and are treated that way here, never laundered into fact.¹²

Jerome, On Illustrious Men (393) — a compact Latin summary

Jerome's short lives of Peter, Paul, James, John, and Matthew condense the Greek tradition for a Western readership; a useful primary to quote, though itself dependent on Eusebius and others.¹³

The apostle-lists (uncertain date, mutually dependent) — church memory, not history

A family of late catalogues — Pseudo-Hippolytus's On the Twelve Apostles and On the Seventy Apostles, Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre, the Latin Breviarium Apostolorum (c. 600, which fixes feast-days and burial sites), the Byzantine Chronicon Paschale, and Isidore of Seville's De ortu et obitu patrum — assign each apostle a field and a manner of death. They are of uncertain authorship, depend on one another, and are critically judged unreliable as history; their value is as evidence for how the church came to remember the apostles.¹⁴

The Golden Legend (c. 1260) and later hagiography — late legend

Jacobus de Voragine's Golden Legend gives the fullest and most colourful lives — Bartholomew flayed in Armenia, Simon and Jude martyred in Persia. It is cited here as late legend, more than a millennium after the events, never as an early witness.¹⁵

Modern scholarship — the tools for grading the traditions

Where a mission or a martyrdom is contested, these pages lean on recent critical work that grades the evidence rather than repeating or dismissing it wholesale — Sean McDowell's probability scale (on which only Peter, Paul, James son of Zebedee, and James the Lord's brother rate as “definite”), Candida Moss's skeptical counterweight, and studies such as F. F. Bruce's on the leading apostles.¹⁶

Sources