In Christian tradition, Jesus’ closest disciples – a group known as ‘the Twelve’ – have had a staggering history: one betrayed Christ, another became the first Pope, two of them went on to write gospels, while the rest attracted stories of miracles and martyrdom.
But how much of what we know about ‘the Twelve’ is fact, and how much is fiction?
To find out, I went to the writer behind one of the best academic-Bible substacks I’ve come across. Over the last year, Sophia in the Shell has been doing incredible work, making scholarship on ‘the twelve’ accessible in a series of posts. In this interview, I got to ask them about some of their reflections from this project. I hope you enjoy it!
JN: On your substack, you’ve been digesting a lot of scholarly literature on Jesus’ disciples. It is a wonderful resource! What inspired you to undertake this project?
Thank you! Before I ever joined Substack, I was a regular contributor to the forum “AcademicBiblical” on Reddit. The vast majority of the activity in that community is people asking questions related to biblical scholarship and receiving high-quality answers which cite relevant academic work.
There I started to notice a pattern in which, whenever anyone asked a question about Jesus’ closest disciples – and especially what happened to them after and outside the events covered in the New Testament – forum contributors always recommended the same book. I did a deep dive into the book and found… it really wasn’t very good. I started identifying not only outright errors in representation of primary sources, but a remarkable lack of interest in things like genre and intertextuality of those sources. I’ll spare the book a call-out here, but anyone reading can feel free to ask me elsewhere.
The next problem that I identified was that it was no wonder this book kept being recommended; there simply wasn’t much else out there. Scholarship on these disciples existed, to be sure, but it was scattered across countless books and papers and reference texts. So I set out to build an alternative resource of my own, collecting from these various sources.
In doing so, I felt it was important to build the resource in a “low trust” way. That is, you should not have to place a ton of trust in me personally to make use of this resource. So the resource is largely direct quotes from scholars, organized in what is hopefully a sensible way that makes for decent reading.
JN: In the gospels, Jesus gathers a group called ‘the twelve’. How much can we say, historically, about this group, from sources within and outside the New Testament?
We might separate this into two questions: first, how much can we say about ‘the twelve’ as a group and second, how much can we say about the individuals constituting ‘the twelve’?
The first question is certainly interesting on its own. Critically, they appear as a group in 1 Corinthians 15, as a part of what is often considered to be a pre-Pauline creed, when Paul says that he handed on and has received “that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.” They then appear also in the Synoptic Gospels, where their names are listed, though these lists are not identical both between the gospels as we read them today and across manuscripts of said gospels.
And so there are a lot of interesting debates in scholarship about the nature of ‘the twelve’ as a group. Did they really exist during Jesus’ ministry, or were they a post-Easter group which was read backwards into said ministry? Were they primarily a council of advisors, a set of missionaries, a prophetic symbol, witnesses? Interesting as they are, these were not the questions I set out to cover with my series; though if anyone wants to learn more, I think the discussion in Volume III, Chapter 26 of John Meier’s A Marginal Jew is still pretty good.
My series, rather, focused on the second version of the question: how much can we say historically about the individual members of ‘the twelve’? I would say, even liberally, that outside of Peter and the sons of Zebedee the answer is very little. The language that John Meier uses in Chapter 27 of the same volume just mentioned is “with the exception of a few persons … next to nothing.” I have not seen much in my research to dispute that.
And yet, we seem to have wound up with quite the number of vivid stories about these disciples, their missions, and ultimately their deaths. I think it remains fascinating to ask then, where did these stories come from? Could we find historical kernels in such stories? What purposes did these stories serve? This is much of what my series covers.
JN: The traditional idea that many people still share is that two of Jesus’ disciples – Matthew and John – went on to write gospels. What do you make of this tradition?
Personally, I do not think either Matthew nor John wrote gospels. I’d love to see someone on Substack steelman the traditional authorship of the Gospel of Matthew because I think that one is uniquely difficult to defend. You either have to commit to the uphill battle of rejecting Markan Priority or you have to defend Matthew approaching the story of his own introduction into the Jesus movement in a very peculiar way, to say nothing of other complications.
Traditional authorship of the Gospel of John has tended to be easier to defend, especially if one takes the view that this gospel has multiple layers. Indeed, for awhile, I really liked the proposed layers presented by Urban von Wahlde in his commentaries. Once you’ve decided that these layers exist, you’re in a better position to argue that John the son of Zebedee was involved with the earliest layer, while later layers account for material that is difficult to attribute to this disciple.
Unfortunately, Hugo Méndez had to go and ruin even that possibility for me with his persuasive book The Gospel of John: A New History. I found his arguments that the Gospel of John is an example of “disguised authorship” to be very compelling, and the picture he paints of this gospel is not something I’ve been able to “un-see” when reading it ever since.
Still, this leaves us with the question of why early Christians came to believe these two apostles had written gospels, which is fascinating in any case. In the case of Matthew, we have our fragment of Papias, received through Eusebius and seeming to begin mid-thought with “so then”, in which we are told that “Matthew compiled the oracles in the Hebrew language, but each interpreted them as they could.” Early interpreters of Papias would understand this to mean that our Greek Gospel of Matthew was translated from a Semitic original, even though today scholars tend to think that the text very much does not look like a translation. We could go on with the story, but Michael Kok is great on this in Tax Collector to Gospel Writer.
Then there is John. Belief in traditional authorship is and was deeply tied into the identities of the “Beloved Disciple” internal to the fourth gospel and a “John the Elder” whom is referred to by Papias, sufficiently complex topics that we won’t get into here. But one thing I might note is that early reception of the fourth gospel and its authorship is also tangled up with gnostic reception of this text. The earliest extant attribution of this text to the apostle John is probably a fragment from Ptolemy, an early student of Valentinus. Still, this does not mean he invented the attribution; indeed, he takes it for granted and probably did not.
JN: A lot of the disciples attract legends about them after the fact. Which of the disciples has the most interesting or surprising after-life?
It would be far too difficult to select the single one with the most interesting “after-life”, but I’ll take the opportunity to highlight, perhaps surprisingly, Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus becomes surprisingly important in a very roundabout way.
In early church legends, you have a figure by the name of “Addai.” Now, originally, Addai doesn’t seem to be a member of the twelve, but one of the seventy or seventy-two disciples from Luke 10, and in fact seems to be operating at the direction of the apostle Thomas. But as your readers may have guessed, there is a close relationship between the names “Addai” and “Thaddaeus”, and so these names switch back and forth in the legends. Eusebius, for example, speaks of a Thaddaeus of the seventy sent by Thomas to evangelize Edessa. The same story, but regarding an “Addai”, is represented in the Syriac text known as the Teaching of Addai or Doctrine of Addai. Critically, Addai in this text makes succession arrangements and dies in Edessa.
Now at some point, the Armenian Christians get their hands on this text. Valentina Calzolari is great on this in The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles in Armenian. At this point, a tradition may or may not have already existed in which the apostle Thaddaeus was one of the founders of the Church of Armenia. In any case, the Armenians translate the Teaching of Addai in a way that is, as Calzolari says, “generally faithful”… until the end. Addai’s death is completely rewritten into a departure from Edessa to continue journeying east. The changes are systematic; for example, Addai’s funeral procession becomes a procession of people accompanying Addai leaving Edessa.
This then sets the stage well for another text, the Martyrdom of Thaddaeus. Thaddaeus in the text receives Armenia as his mission by lot, but simply stops in Edessa along the way to fulfil his part in the King Abgar legend as articulated by Eusebius. But he arrives to Armenia, preaches there, and Thaddaeus is eventually executed by order of a local king.
Many steps in the development of this tradition are unclear. But it sure looks like Thaddaeus of ‘the twelve’, a total blank slate in the gospels, is combined with another disciple of legend, and that this legend is extended to flesh out a narrative of how one member of ‘the twelve’ came to establish the Church of Armenia. This is actually not the only member of the twelve to which the Church of Armenia claims a connection, but we’ll leave it at that.
JN: Judas is the most infamous of the twelve disciples. He raises all sorts of questions for the biblical historian. Why did he betray Jesus? How did he die? Was he a real person at all? Where did you land with the person of Judas?
I tend to think Judas Iscariot existed and did betray Jesus in some way, but I don’t consider skepticism on these questions to be absurd. For example, I’m convinced that “paradidōmi” in 1 Corinthians 11:23 has nothing to do with Judas, which loses me one of the best reasons to believe that Judas existed. Ultimately I personally lean towards his existing for no better reason than that it’s the simplest way to explain his presence in the gospels. The arguments that some have made for why one might invent this figure have not been that compelling to me, but nor have I found them (all) ridiculous.
Beyond that, however, I don’t know what to make of how or why exactly he betrayed Jesus. I do not have much confidence in the early church to represent his reasons for his actions fairly, if they even knew such things, but I also do not think the data justifies any confidence in the more romantic views of Judas’ motivations one might see in William Klassen’s Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus? or, for that matter, the wonderful musical Jesus Christ Superstar.
Nor do I think we know how he died. Both the Gospel of Matthew and the Acts of the Apostles seem like they could be drawing, at least in part, upon preexisting traditions (or legends?) regarding his death in their descriptions of such. If I had to choose which of the contradictory accounts is more likely, certainly I’d opt for the one in the Gospel of Matthew. But I wouldn’t be surprised if neither account is historical.
JN: Perhaps the most well-known of the disciples is Peter. In tradition, he becomes the first ‘Pope’, he is connected to the Gospel of Mark, and dies in Rome. How much of this tradition – if any at all – do you think is historically reliable?
I think it is plausible that Peter died violently in Rome, quite possibly by execution. I could be biased by how little there is to work with regarding the fates of most of the other disciples, but it seems there is a respectable amount of data consistent with that conclusion and relatively little to contradict it.
Beyond that, I am more skeptical. Did he have a formal leadership role in Rome? It’s possible, and I don’t doubt he was very influential in any time he spent there, but I think the evidence for his having been in a role we would recognize as sole “bishop” is pretty slim. Was he crucified upside-down? This strikes me as an invention of the Acts of Peter. Unless we are also prepared to say that Peter was executed because he convinced the wives of noblemen to stop having relations with their husbands, we probably owe ourselves some caution in trying to pull historical kernels out of that particular apocryphal text. I do not find Timothy Barnes’ speculation that Peter was executed by being burned alive to be on that much weaker ground than the claim that he was crucified.
Did Peter have some sort of connection to a member of the early Jesus movement named Mark? Maybe, but I’m not even really sure what this would mean. C. Clifton Black’s Mark: Images of an Apostolic Interpreter left me with the impression that almost anything we might want to say about this “Mark” is on incredibly shaky ground. So in some sense my reaction to those asking “did Peter know Mark?” and further “did a man named Mark write the Gospel of Mark?” is perhaps—but what does this get us?
JN: I wonder, are there any findings in your research that have seriously altered your perception of any particular disciple, or the group as a whole?
I think I’ll live dangerously and stay on Peter for this one, as he would be my honest answer. Hopefully this isn’t too controversial.
It was not until my research on Simon Peter that I really began to appreciate how important the movement’s belief in the Resurrection was for Peter’s role in the early church. Certain types of commentators, generally outside academia, have had a tendency to give Paul a hard time about the nature of his introduction into the movement. “He didn’t even meet Jesus!” you’ll sometimes see it said.
But Peter is not in that much better of a position. True, he knew Jesus in life. But at the point of Jesus’ execution, what had Peter done? He had denied Jesus, essentially disavowed the movement. It is the idea of a risen Jesus that creates an opportunity for an early redemption of sorts for Peter. As far as I can tell, Peter’s credibility and Paul’s credibility were each deeply tied into the Jesus movement’s early belief in the Resurrection.
JN: Finally – it would be remiss of me if I didn’t ask! Do you have a favourite disciple, or a disciple that you think more of us should know about?
You know, I keep going back to Philip, actually. He’s very interesting to me in that we may know next to nothing about him, or, if one particular thesis is correct, we may know a respectable amount. A major source of my research on Philip was Christopher Matthews’ book Philip: Apostle and Evangelist, a revision of his Harvard dissertation.
Here is the context of Matthews’ thesis. Acts of the Apostles suggests to its readers that there are two figures named Philip: a Philip of ‘the twelve’, and a Philip of ‘the seven’, a separate group appearing in Acts 6. The Philip narratives in Acts, then, are about this latter Philip, and not Philip of the twelve. Then when one turns to second-century and third-century patristic sources, there often seems to be only one Philip, generally seen as a conflation of the two.
But what if the patristic sources are not wrong? What if the author of Acts was wrong? What if these two men named Philip really are the same person? That is the position of Christopher Matthews. He thinks that what may have happened is that the author of Acts had access to the list in Acts 6:5, had access to lists of the twelve, and simply made a mistake in interpreting the existence of a name which appeared twice.
Am I convinced? I don’t know. I go back and forth. But I think his argument is strong. I’d love to see more scholars discuss the possibility because it could have all sorts of implications related to Philip’s daughters, the nature of early Christian ecstatic practice, and perhaps even the origins of the Montanists.
