Paul was beheaded. Peter was crucified, upside down at his request, since he did not feel he was worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord. Christians there claim him as the first to bring the gospel to their land. He also preached in Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, and in Greece, where he is said to have been crucified. Tradition has him preaching as far east as India, where the ancient Marthoma Christians revere him as their founder.
They claim that he died there when pierced through with the spears of four soldiers. In retaliation the proconsul had Philip arrested and cruelly put to death. Some of the oldest reports say he was not martyred, while others say he was stabbed to death in Ethiopia. There are various accounts of how he met his death as a martyr for the gospel. There is some confusion as to which is which, but this James is reckoned to have ministered in Syria.
The Jewish historian Josephus reported that he was stoned and then clubbed to death. The apostle chosen to replace Judas. Tradition sends him to Syria with Andrew and to death by burning. The only one of the apostles generally thought to have died a natural death from old age. The fifth Titus was similar in role and position to Timothy who was an apostle. There are 5 other named possibles that we are aware of, plus other unnamed possibles.
However in the Greek the word apostolos appears with these references. A literal reading in English does not always convey apostle, but a reading in Greek does. How Many Apostles are Mentioned in the Bible? In Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve , author Tom Bissell sets off to discover whether the Twelve Apostles were actual historical figures or merely characters in a fictional story.
On the way, he walked for miles along the Camino de Santiago pilgrim route in northern Spain, visited the place where Judas Iscariot reportedly hanged himself, and hunted in vain for a mysterious monastery in Kyrgyzstan where the bones of the Apostle Matthew are believed to be buried.
Discover why the Virgin Mary is the world's most powerful woman. Speaking from Vancouver, Bissell explains why one of the inspirations for his book was the Monty Python film Life of Brian and how his views of Christianity changed along the way. There was no distinction between evangelistic propaganda and what the writers themselves believed to be true.
But I have to confess that the biggest inspiration for this book was the film Life of Brian —that scene where Brian is running from the Romans, jumps out of a tower, and lands in the middle of a marketplace full of all these gabbling prophets saying nonsense, and so just starts reciting random stuff and attracts an audience. A couple of the names recorded in the New Testament are probably actual people.
There was probably a Peter and a John, definitely a James the brother of Jesus , and probably a Thomas. One of the great mysteries of early Christian history is that we know a fair amount about Paul and we know that James, the brother of Jesus, was a real person.
Yet neither of them is a member of the Twelve. That is a very thorny question. According to tradition, though scripture is not clear on this, Judas hanged himself in a place called Hakeldama in the Hinnom Valley, which is this rocky, desert-like valley in the southern part of Jerusalem. You feel the centuries of hatred and disgust for this person who betrayed Jesus. Whether or not his name was Judas is a much more difficult question. I suspect the broad outlines of the Judas story, as the gospel writers outlined it, is probably fictional.
In a lot of the other Jesus stories, the gospel writers seem to be singing from the same hymn sheet. But with Judas, I think they had much less raw material to work with, so they all treated it in their own way. This suggests to me that he was more a fictional character than actual person. The Gospel of Judas was an artifact of Sethian Christianity , a very confrontational form of non-mainstream Christianity in the second century.
They believed Judas walked a slightly different path than the conventional Judas. Their Judas is simultaneously an object of condemnation and also illumination. They believed in a completely different God from the proto-orthodox Christians of their time. The Sethian Christians hated the apostolic authority model that other Christians followed. There were a lot of really diverse forms of Christianity floating around in the first two hundred years of the faith.
And some of them were really odd. Kyrgyzstan is not a place most of us associate with Bible stories. But you went there looking for the tomb of Matthew. Tell us about your trip—and whether you found it. Today, central Asia does not seem to be the most Christian-accommodating part of the world, but until the Middle Ages there were a large number of Christians. They were not Roman or Greek Christians. They were Middle Eastern Christians, who kept migrating eastward.
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