Victor R. Claveau, MJ
Ordinary men—fishermen, a publican or tax collector, a zealot—who had found an extraordinary mutual mission—to follow Jesus Christ even unto death and to become known as the foundation stone of His One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, these were the grass root laborers who mingled with, shared food with, and breathed in the same air as the God-man, Savior of all mankind. Few in the days of yesteryear have had such an explosive impact on the face of salvation history and a perpetuating influence on the seeking souls of the descendants of Adam and Eve.
In Revelations 21:14, we are told: “And the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and in them the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb. So be it. Jesus inscribed their names in the hearts of man, replacing their stony hearts with hearts of flesh (Ezekial 26:36).”
The 18th century poet, Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man, wrote that, “the proper study of mankind is man”[1]. In reference to the men with whom Christ associated in his public career, and whom He proclaimed his personal representatives at the end of his earthly life, what little we know about the Apostles is well worth the time and effort to study; and the fact that we do know so precious little makes the study all the more intriguing.
Records of that period in history haven’t much to report. The immediate successors of the Apostles were seemingly occupied with things other than recording character descriptions of the men Christ chose for his entourage. Here and there, scattered through the Scripture narratives about their Lord and Master, you may happen upon a few meager scraps of data, which provide us a glimmer into facts about their character and personalities. Pagan historians of their day regarded them only as a troupe of eccentric men preaching an alien creed, and yet there can be no doubt that they were each striking individuals with their own unique personalities that lent toward a style of preaching which ignited the Faith in those who listened. Most tend to think of the Apostles as a group—as if they had no individual character at all. Nothing could be further from the truth, for even the bits and stray scraps of information that have come to us across the years leave no room for doubt about their distinctiveness. They were men—strong men in their own right, and—in God’s own good time, He refashioned them into eminently successful men by heavenly standards. History cannot pinpoint any other group of men in time who could boast of such an exalted accomplishment.
Although we cannot offer a complete portrait of these men, we know from snippets, occasional speeches, praises from their Master or, more often rebukes, that there was on the part of Christ’s Twelve consternation or indignation on occasion, ignorance and weakness, at times downright hard-headedness or treachery—these are the bits and pieces which serve to give us a sketch of who they were and who they came to be as they walked the narrow way of Jesus. We have to scratch below the surface of the Gospel story about their deeds and their association with Jesus in order to glean the briefest information and then exercise our imaginations in order to formulate an historical picture of their personas.
The portraits which we will present are primarily based on the Gospel story along with accounts given in the Acts of the Apostles. In addition, there have been various traditions passed down to us concerning their works and their deaths. But few of the traditions are profoundly reliable, and we cannot be certain that they have not been embellished or lessened over the years; however, they do serve to shed light into some relatively obscure periods of apostolic history.
The Apostles were at times fallen human beings. Too often we erroneously view the saints as superhuman rather than ordinary people who experienced the same human temptations, passions and failings that we all bear. These were fallible men, made of the same feet of clay as the rest of us, yet they were strengthened by the grace of the sacraments and their submission to the will of God. The prime purpose of this presentation is to provide a character sketch of their strikingly different temperaments with their individual strengths and weaknesses so that we may understand more fully the reason why we have come to admire them as saints. We too, through heavenly grace and devotion to Christ, have the potential to rise above our current circumstances and become faithful and true witnesses of the Gospel.
“And he appointed twelve, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach and have authority to cast out demons: Simon whom he surnamed Peter; James the son of Zebedee and John the brother of James, whom he surnamed Bo-anerges, that is, sons of thunder; Andrew, and Philip, and Bartholomew, and Matthew, and Thomas, and James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus, and Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, who betrayed him.[2]
When the Apostles began to follow Jesus, He renamed them because He had a special purpose for them in their missionary lives.
“Jesus did not greet the Apostles, “Simon” or “John.” Rather, he referred to them by their Hebrew or Aramaic names, as follows: Simon was Shimon. James was Yakov (that is, Jacob). John was Yochanan. Bartholomew was Bar-Talmai (son of Ptolemy). Matthew was Mattityahu, meaning, “gift from God.” Thomas was Tau’ma, an Aramaic name. Thaddaeus was a variant of Theudas, which was a Grecian version of Judas or Yehuda.
Andrew and Philip are of Greek derivation, their names are Andreas and Filippos; there are no Hebrew equivalents. Thus, we may surmise that Andrew and Philip were either Grecian-Jews or Grecian-Gentiles. In all probability, we may discount the theory that they were Gentiles: Jesus was a Jew who saw his mission as teaching and healing his fellow Jews. “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”[3] It would be hard to imagine preaching to Jews while having Gentile Apostles. “Judas Iscariot was Yehuda.”[4]
It is a tribute to the impact of Christian history that when we hear the words “Christ’s Twelve”, the vast majority of people in the world would immediately recognize them as the Apostles. These are the men Christ chose from a handful of converts to be set aside for a special mission. They are, in a unique sense, His chosen, for although He came to call all people to salvation and to redeem all mankind through His Passion, still, there was a specially designated group of men who were privileged to hear His invitation to leave everything and follow Him, even if it meant over the long haul a grueling participation in Calvary. “Come follow Me,”[5] He said to one after another of these men, and their number is twelve.
Chosen in different circumstances and at different times during the three years of our Lord’s public life, the Twelve were sharply individualistic and different from one another, yet when they heard the invitation and call of Christ they became one in purpose and did just what He asked of them. Luke 5:11 tells us “that they left everything and followed Him.” They were rewarded by three years of personal friendship and intimacy with the most sublime personality that ever walked the earth, the God-man, Jesus the Messiah. Saint John recorded in his Gospel that Jesus told them: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.[6]
What sort of men were these who were so honored by Christ that they were invited to follow Him even to Calvary? When Jesus was about to die, He gave to them what has become known as the Great Commission: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”[7] Along with this He also gave them His promise: “I am with you always, to the close of the age.”[8] It was this promise that would comfort and support them in times of trial, even to their deaths.
We have no knowledge of Christ’s childhood nor his early adulthood friends. It may be true that none of the original Twelve or Saint Paul or the Judas-substitute, Matthias, ever saw Christ before the day He beckoned them. Several of them—tradition says five—were distantly related to our Lord: the two Jameses, John, Jude, and Simon, but none of them had been close to Him in any sense, until their compelling invitation to leave everything behind and follow Christ into the unknown. They were all natives of His land for the first appeal of the God-man was to His own people—the chosen people of God. They were to be the first invited to accept or reject the words of salvation, and so it was the Jews who Christ chose as His Apostles.
They were rugged, hard-working men; nearly all were outdoor types, most of whom worked hard manually and were not well educated. It is assumed that some were unable to read or write. It has been speculated that perhaps Bartholomew was educated in some regard. A number of Apostles were fishermen, rough, uncouth, possibly with crude manners, strong-willed, passionate, and independent. One of them, Matthew, was a publican or tax collector for the Romans; Judas was perhaps a steward; Phillip was a fellow townsman of Peter and Andrew, but he was not a fisherman; Paul was a tentmaker and a scholar. The task these men were to be given after the Ascension of our Lord was a task for strong-willed, determined men, and yet it is certainly apparent that the weak were chosen to confound the strong. If judged by human standards, they were assuredly a badly chosen lot.
In the Gentile world, the human characteristics of these Jews would be considered as nothing short of nearly overwhelming handicaps. Imagine the following situation set in the Rome of the Caesars. The Roman world was a luxurious one, built on human pride; the patrician, that is someone from one of the elite founding families of Rome, regarded himself as the finest creature on the face of the earth. He worshiped the thousand and one gods that he believed had made Rome great. His morals were of his own making; pleasure was the only god he worshiped. Force was acceptable; revenge was a duty – that is, hatred was a matter of course after an injury or even an assumed slight and forgiveness was considered to be an effeminate weakness. His days were spent in the luxury of the baths and his nights in riotous banqueting and bacchanalia. Rome had once been a city of brick; he saw it as a city of marble, a great and splendid utopia in the eye of the sun.
Imagine that one day this Roman encounters in the forum a short, stumpy, gnarly-handed, straggly-haired Jewish fisherman who has acquired the gall to tell him that he is living his life all wrong—that forgiveness is a dictate of the One True God; that he must forever abandon his life of luxury and ease and that he must substitute it with a life of penance and mortification; that their despised slaves are at least as worthy as he himself and in many cases a great deal better; and that, finally, he must abandon all the pantheon of Roman and Greek gods and goddesses and worship the One True God—the Christ—a crucified Jewish criminal. Such a Roman would scoff at this notion. And who was the preacher of this outlandish doctrine? It could only be a Jew, and an ignorant Jew at that. And so these self-righteous patrician drives on the slaves bearing his sedan chair and has a ludicrous, novel story to regale his friends at the baths this afternoon. Later in the day, he would witness thousands of men, women and children die in torment rather than deny this “fanatical” new religion of the Jewish fisherman who preached salvation in the crucified Christ.
The original preachers of Christianity were all Jews to begin with, and the world of that day hated the Jews, just as some people today hate them. The Apostles were all Galileans, except Saint Paul and Judas, so that even the rest of the Jews hated and condemned them. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”[9] was a recorded biblical sneer that more than one Jew must have heard in his lifetime. With the exception of Saint Paul, gifted writer and speaker, the Apostles were considered ignorant of the finer things in life and of social graces, untrained and uncultured. They would not have been deemed eloquent when eloquence is judged by ordinary standards. They were renowned for nothing in the world of culture and intellect. And yet these ordinary, plus the genius of Paul, blasted the Roman-Roman world from its entrenched position and preached Christ Crucified so well that within 50 years, not only was the Christian dogma preached and believed and treasured all over the known world, but the very emperor Constantine of Rome, the embodiment of the Roman state religion, regarded as a sort of incarnation of the divinity of the Roman gods, himself became a follower of the lowly Nazarene. This was beyond any doubt such a remarkable triumph of proof of the Divine mission. Not even the best twelve men ever created much less ordinary Jewish fishermen could have produced such remarkable results of their own accord. The conclusion is simple enough—the Twelve were not the cause behind the effect but rather the instruments of that cause. The Apostles success was hinged on the power of the Holy Spirit Who spoke in and through them. And so they became heroes – all but that one abysmal failure, Judas – through a flaming personal devotion to an ideal, the ideal that God made man for His everlasting pleasure and for man’s lasting good.
Apollonius, a second century writer relates a tradition current in his time that the Apostles did not separate until twelve years after Christ’s Ascension. It was said that Christ commanded them to remain in the locality of Jerusalem in order to solidify the foundation of the Church. Clement of Alexandria recorded a statement from Saint Peter, quoted as the words of Jesus: “If any Jew shall repent and believe the Gospel, he shall be pardoned; but after twelve years go ye into all the world, that none may pretend that they have not heard the Gospel.” It is generally admitted that the Apostles did remain together to consult and plan all things that would be necessary for the constitution of the Church, and the development of her ritual and liturgical ceremonies.
What did the Apostles do after Jesus’ Ascension?
They returned to Jerusalem and in prayer and seclusion awaited the coming of the Holy Spirit. The treason and death of Judas had left their number incomplete. Peter, therefore, exercising his supreme jurisdiction, advised the Apostles to select from among the Disciples someone to fill the vacancy. Two names were proposed, Matthias and Barnabas; lots were draw, and the choice fell on Matthias. The days after the Ascension, the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles in the form of fire, during the Feast of Pentecost – the anniversary of the promulgation of the law on Mount Sinai..
If Jesus was thirty when He began his ministry and the twelve Apostles tended to be younger than Him, their average age would be somewhere in their twenties. It is hardly likely that Jesus was leading around teenagers—people around half his age—so the twenties must be a correct assumption. Let us suppose that they were, on average, twenty-five years of age at the time Jesus’ ministry began. Given this, the average Apostle would have been born around A.D. 4. We can refine this estimate in a few cases, though, because among the Twelve there were at least two sets of brothers—Peter and Andrew (sons of Jonah) and James and John (sons of Zebedee).
We have no evidence that they were twin brothers. Twins are very uncommon, and we already have reason to think that Thomas was a twin (that is what both his Aramaic and Greek names mean), therefore Thomas probably wouldn’t have been called “the Twin” (John 11:16) if there were other twins in the group. Protocol would indicate that the brothers named first were older, so there must be some time between the births of the elder brothers (Peter and James) and the younger brothers (Andrew and John). Although it is possible that only a year separated the older from the younger, this is unlikely. Not only do couples typically delay the resumption of marital relations after a birth, in the ancient world, mothers breast fed their children, which tended to delay the onset of the next pregnancy. There were miscarriages, stillbirths, and cases of infant mortality. Half of all children were girls, and there could even be an intervening brother who did not follow Jesus. Between these factors, a considerable amount of time is likely to have passed between the birth of the older brother and that of the younger. We will estimate the period as being six years.
This means that we may estimate Peter and James as having been born three years earlier than the average estimated birth year (i.e., in A.D. 1) and Andrew and John as being born three years later (i.e., in A.D. 7).
This would give us estimated birth years for three of the traditional authors of the New Testament:
- Peter: A.D. 1
- Matthew: A.D. 4
- John son of Zebedee: A.D. 7
Two of Jesus’ “brothers”—James The Just and Jude—also authored books of the New Testament. There have been attempts to identify them with the Apostles known as James Son of Alphaeus and Jude Thaddeus.
However, this is implausible, because John’s Gospel unambiguously indicates that Jesus’ “brothers” were not disciples during his ministry, stating, “even his brothers did not believe in him” (John 7:5). It is thus scarcely likely that two of them were among the apostles that followed him during his ministry.
We thus can’t use the average age of Apostles to determine the age of these two figures. However, we may be able to determine their probable ages in another way. If the theory—common in Protestant circles—were true that they were Jesus’ younger half-brothers (born to Joseph and Mary) then we might estimate their birth years based on Jesus’ birth year. However, this view is excluded by other information we have, which indicates that Mary remained a virgin after the birth of Jesus.
Since the time of Saint Jerome, it has been common in Western Catholicism to propose that the brethren of the Lord were cousins. If so, we have no way of telling whether they were older or younger cousins (or both). We would know only that they were of the same generation as Jesus, which we could have determined anyway.
However, the earliest proposal for who were the brethren of the Lord—a proposal that dates to the A.D. 100s, making it older than either of the above views, and which has always been the view maintained in Eastern Catholicism and Eastern Christianity—is that they were Jesus’ step-brothers, that is, children of Joseph by a prior marriage. As an elderly widower Joseph was not seeking to begin a family and thus, he was willing to serve as the guardian of the consecrated virgin Mary.
If so, the brethren would have been older than Jesus—but by how much?
The Gospels identify Jesus’ brethren as James, Joses (Joseph), Jude, and Simon (Matt. 13:55, Mark 6:3a). They also indicate that he had at least two “sisters” (Matt. 13:56, Mark 6:3b). We have already taken into account the effect that sisters would have had on the average gap between surviving sons, so if the above list reflects the birth order of Jesus’ brethren (as is probable), we may estimate that James was the oldest, that Joses was six years his junior, that Judas was twelve years his junior, and that Simon was eighteen years his junior.
We must also allow time for Joseph’s first wife to pass and for him to grieve and then become the husband of Mary. We will assume that this represented three years, since men with small children (as Simon would have been) tended to remarry quickly in the ancient world. After marrying, it was customary to wait a year before beginning cohabitation, and Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit during this period. That would give us the following estimates for the births of Jesus and His brethren:
- James: 25 B.C.
- Joses: 19 B.C.
- Jude: 13 B.C.
- Simon: 7 B.C.
- Jesus: 3/2 B.C.
Of course, these are only estimates, and Jesus’ brethren—or at least some of them—may have been born much less than six years apart. On the other hand, around A.D. 378, in his Panarion, St. Epiphanius of Salamis reports a tradition that James died at the age of 96. From Josephus, we know that James was martyred in A.D. 62, in which case he would have been born in 35 B.C., so the above estimates might be too late rather than too early.
Either way, however, the brethren would have been significantly older than Jesus, which may explain their attitude of disbelief during Jesus’ ministry. As Jesus said, a prophet has no honor in his own family. From their perspective, Jesus was the much younger son of their father’s second wife, and it took the miracle of the Resurrection to convince them that he was the Messiah.
[1] An Essay on Man: Moral Issues and Satires, Epistle II, (London: Cassell & Company) 1891
[2] Mark 3:14-19.
[3] Matthew 15:24.
[4] http://www.jesusandtheprofessor.com/2011/03/hebrew-names-for-jewish-apostles.html#tp
[5] Matthew 19:21.
[6] John 15:15.
[7] Mark 16:15.
[8] Matthew 28:20.
[9] John 1:46.