^ofPRifvcr^ OGIGAl BS2440 T47 Thompson, Robert Ellis, 1844-1924. Apostles as everyday men, The apostles AS EVERYDAY MEN President Robert Ellis Thompson, S. T. D. The Sunday School Tunes Company PHILADELPHIA Cop3n:ight, iQTO, by Thx Sunday School Times Company CONTENTS CHAPTBR PAGE The Twelve Apostles 3 I. Simon Peter and Andrew^ .... 15 II. James"^and John"^ 23 III. Philii^ and Nathanael" 31 IV. Thomas' AND Matthew^ 41 V. James and Jude . ^ 51 VI. ^ Simon the Zealot and Judas ... 59 VII. What Became of the Apostles?. . 69 THE APOSTLES AS EVERYDAY MEN It is of lasting interest for every later church of Jesus Christ to observe what was the character of the first church, gathered by our Lord himself, living under his dis- cipline, and meeting in its way the demands of its time. Such a church was the college of the Apostles. The first thing we observe in it is its hu- man imperfection. Later churches from that day to this have been arraigned as not true churches because of their imperfections. Some — ^like the late Joseph Barker — have cast off the Christian name and profession through disgust with the loud professions, the feebleness in action, the censoriousness and other faults of the actual churches. But 3 4 THE TWELVE APOSTLES the New Testament says nothing to warrant our expectation of perfection in a church. It does say, " Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect" — not as the church is perfect, or as even its ministers are perfect. So this first church has its grave faults, which tried the patience of our Lord (Mat- thew 17:17), which grieved his heart, and which demanded of him a care which was extraordinary. "I am the good shepherd," he says, with a sense of what silly creatures sheep are and how they must be on the mind of every one who cares for them. But they are his sheep, know his voice, and share his care. Like sheep, they are clean in instinct, hating the mire if they fall into it, always wanting to be out of it and clean again. Like sheep, they will follow him from the fold and back again, trusting their going out and their coming in to his love. It may seem possible that our Lord should have made a better selection of men for the apostolic office. Then, as now, there were AS EVERYDAY MEN 5 men of an enthusiastic temperament, who when once convinced of a truth or a duty would have gone to the death rather than be- tray it. But these twelve are mostly below that level of earnestness, and not of the high- est level of intelligence. They thrust their doubts upon him. They give way to small jealousies. They miss the sense of his teaching. They fail to sympathize with his great purposes. I have heard it suggested that that sorrowful saying, "The Son of man hath not where to lay his head," did not refer to his want of a home, but to his lack of a breast on which he could rest his head with perfect assurance of being understood. Suppose, however, that our Lord had made up this first church out of rare and elevated natures — of men who never would have doubted what he said, or flinched from peril, or acted on the lower motive when a higher was possible, how much we should have lost! We should have felt that these Apostles were exceptional men, that they 6 THE TWELVE APOSTLES were strong where we are weak, that they did not feel our difficulties, or ask our ques- tions, or need the help we do in our tempta- tions. The Gospels would have been far less to us then than they now are. We should have said that it is a beautiful story, full of religious poetry, but unfitted to take hold of people like us. We can have no such feeling about the actual story, for that is the story of how Jesus Christ made up this first church out of just such people as make up his churches to-day. So we can be sure that we were represented in its membership, our questions were asked, our temptations met and overcome, our difficulties brought before his mind. Another point of great interest in the history of this first church is found in the individual distinctness with which its mem- bers stand out in the Gospel record. This is true, indeed, of all the actors in the Gospel story, and especially of those who appear in the third Gospel. Our Lord seems to AS EVERYDAY MEN 7 have acted upon men much as his Spirit did upon his inspired prophets and apostles. We too easily slip into the notion that in- spiration supersedes the personality and individuality of the inspired man. Just the reverse is the truth. It intensifies, expands, emphasizes his individuality. The prophe- cies of Jeremiah are the best field for study- ing inspiration, for in no other book of the Bible is it presented so clearly in its process and its methods. Jeremiah is not less Jeremiah, but vastly more of a Jeremiah, for being an inspired prophet. Inspiration brings out his peculiarities, and shows the tender, shrinking, almost feminine nature of the priest of Anathoth, braced to do a man's work and more, in a dark and almost des- perate age. So of all the prophets. They leave the stamp of their personality on their work more distinctly than is true of the authors of any other body of ancient litera- ture. It was this fact which enabled John Sargent to present them with such vivid 8 THE TWELVE APOSTLES individuality in the greatest sacred painting of the last century. On the other hand, the influence exerted by a powerful and selfish character upon his fellow-men is cramping and belittling. No one ever came under the influence of the first Napoleon without being hurt by it. He found himself less of a man, less respectful of himself, less hopeful of the victory of the everlasting righteousness, for that contact. But these bad influences last but their time and disappear; that of God's Spirit lives on through the ages. The Apostles were touched, enlarged and ennobled by the same Spirit as spoke through the Prophets. Saul of Tarsus, for instance, if our Lord had not entered his life, might have had a name among the Rabbis of the Talmud, that weary and dreary compilation of rules and opinions, refinings and hair- splittings. He would have been lost in the crowd of tradition-mongers, and his in- fluence on the world's history would have AS EVERYDAY MEN 9 been utterly unimportant. Our Lord's first command to Paul, in the hour of his con- version, is, ''Arise and stand upon thy feet.'* There we find him for the rest of his check- ered life, standing on his own feet, living his own life, uttering his own thought, leav- ing his personal mark on every word he wrote, and all this because he is living and acting by the inspiration of his Lord's presence, and can do all things through the Christ who makes him strong. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." So the presence of Christ in the Gospel story acts upon those who come in his pres- ence. They have to lay aside their pre- tenses and their insincerities, their second- hand opinions, and show their real selves. They learn more about themselves than they knew before. Simeon foretold that through Him "the thoughts of many hearts" would be "revealed," and the prophecy is fulfilled in the portrait gallery left us by the four Evangelists. lO THE TWELVE APOSTLES God has use for the differences which make us individual and distinct from each other. They stand in close relation to our efficiency in service. Before a man can do his best work, he must discover that God has put into his clay something, be it per- fume or color or grace, which he shares with no one else, and which fits him to do what is not asked of others. No man does his best until he brings into his work what is most characteristic of himself, and "stands on his own feet." Duplicates do not count, except in swelling the figures of the census; and there are none around Jesus in the Gospel story. But through this infinite variety of types there runs also an infinite order, adding unity to variety. One man reminds us of another, not perhaps in the outward face of the per- son, but in the inward face we call character. We come to think of them together, and to bind them up with a common adjective. Thus we find men gathering into groups on AS EVERYDAY MEN II the basis of an inward kinship. Variety and unity thus balance each other in the world of mind, as in that of matter. Our Lord himself claimed to be the Son of Man, the perfect exemplar of humanity at its best. He possessed the rounded com- pleteness of that which God thought of when He said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." Other men are arcs or segments broken from the circle. They suggest more than they amount to. They make us think of the rounded circle, but after a little they come to a stop and disappoint us. Jesus Christ alone never disappoints us, but is the total circle in its fulness. The Son of Man came to gather the human race into one body or fellowship, of which he is the Head. His Church is the expression of his purpose to realize the unity of mankind in one brotherhood. Other organizations accept boundaries; the Church has none. From it no child of Adam shall be shut out, except by his own fault. Within it is broken 12 THE TWELVE APOSTLES down every. wall of separation which divides sex from sex, race from race, nation from nation, class from class. The Twelve are the handful of corn first gathered by the hand of the great Reaper on the mountain-top, whose seed shall fill the earth. In selecting the Twelve, as we shall see, he did not choose men of a single noble and responsive type. He gathered into this first church a notable variety of just such people as fill his churches to-day. But he saw in each of them what the French call "the defects of his qualities"; and when he sent them out, "He sent them not singly, but "by two and two," Mark says (6:7). Matthew (10 : 2-4) groups them in pairs, which we have good reason to regard as the actual arrangement. On what principle were they paired? Should we not expect that this would be so done that each Apostle would find in his com- rade the man who most differed from him- self, and therefore could best supply his AS EVERYDAY MEN I3 defects, making out of two half-men one whole one ? This was first suggested by Dr. John Robertson of Glasgow Cathedral. In a volume of "Sermons and Expositions," which appeared in 1864, after his death, he tried to trace the differences in character which justified their association. In the case of three pairs — Simon and Andrew, James and Jude, Judas and Simon — he comes off fairly well; but even these are not so fully treated as the Gospel story warrants. In the other three pairs he fails to make good the contrast he is seeking, and seems to ad- mit so much by the hesitating manner of his statement. In this series of papers I shall try to show what are the contrasts exhibited in the Gospels, as indicating our Lord's purpose. The Scriptures lend themselves to micro- scopic study of details, as well as furnishing the broadest views of the divine purpose and its realization in the history of human- ity. While our general practise in their 14 THE TWELVE APOSTLES study must be that of a man who uses his eyes about objects which come with- out effort or instrument into the range of his vision, the microscope and the tele- scope may have their place and use. It is the microscope to which we have re- course in this case. I. SIMON PETER AND ANDREW We have grown so used to calling this first Apostle " Peter," as to forget that was not his name, but his nickname, or "given name,"' bestowed upon him by our Lord. His real name was Simon bar- Jonah, or, in English, Simon Johnson. And from the time of the Maccabees, Simon was one of the common- est of names among the Jews. For while Judas, the first heroic leader of that family, broke the yoke of the oppressor, it was Simon, the third, who had achieved the com- plete independence of the people. Hence we have two Simons and two Judases among the twelve Apostles. Cephas, or Peter, or " Rockman," seemed a strange given name for this son of Jonas. He seemed to have in him nothing of the steadfastness of the rock. He changes his mind with an ease and a swiftness which no other Apostle equals. The tragic moment of his life, when he denied his Lord "with 15 1 6 THE TWELVE APOSTLES oaths and cursings," came not so long after his solemn declaration that whoever else might forsake his Master, he would stand by him to the death. But then he changes back almost as quickly into his old relation to our Lord, and the three questions by the lake- side seem meant to remind him of his fickle- ness. It is noteworthy that in that inter- view, John speaks of him always as Peter or Simon Peter, but Jesus drops that name and calls him Simon, Son of Jonas. A tor- rent-man rather than a rock-man, one might have said. Peter, however, is one of several in the New Testament story, who, under our Lord's discipline, come to be noted and even pro- verbial for the possession of that very grace or virtue in which they naturally were most deficient. John, Mark and Paul are out- standing instances of this. Grace remade the narrowest and most exclusive of Jewish rabbis into the largest-minded of Apostles. So Peter acquires the rock-like quality, and SIMON PETER AND ANDREW 1 7 grows in firmness, until the Church almost forgets his original name — calls him Peter and nothing else. Much of the change came at Pentecost, when the timid deer of the Gospel story were transformed into the lions of the Acts. But some of his old variable- ness still clung to the man, and Paul had to withstand him to his face as blameworthy in that he first agreed to the conclusion reached in the conference at Jerusalem, and then so far yielded to the Judaizers at An- tioch as to refuse to eat with Gentile con- verts. It was the last infirmity of a noble mind, for they often give way wrongfully to the urgency of those they love and trust, while standing unmoved by the threats and cajolery of their enemies. Peter is always interesting. In this regard he holds the place David holds in the Old Testament. He is so frank, outspoken, regardless of consequences at most times, and so generous in most of his impulses, even when mistaken, and so open to the better 1 8 THE TWELVE APOSTLES suggestions which correct his mistakes, that we forget his hot-headed impatience and his instability. He is utterly wanting in that personal reserve of which we make so much — perhaps far too much. He acts on Steven- son's rule, "When in doubt, speak!" He cares little for conventional propriety, or for the difficulties which block the way. He does not feel the weight of usage and wont, which hold most men back from doing a right thing if it be unusual. He acts, or pro- poses to act, as if the social friction of resist- ance had no existence. With his reckless tongue, his heedlessness of prejudice, he seems rather a strange choice as an Apostle. The Church was encompassed by jealous and watchful ene- mies. Every slip would be caught and used to her disadvantage. We would have looked for a man of more caution, more steadfast- ness, more respect for social opinion. But our Lord chose him, and made him the fore- most of the Apostles. What was wanted in SIMON PETER AND ANDREW 1 9 the forefront was initiative, and Peter had plenty of that. With him in the lead, there would be "something doing," and even blundering is better than a timid inertness. He who said that in the day of judgment men would be condemned, not for the evil they did, but for the good they missed doing, must have had a deep sense of the futility, the feebleness in action, the sensitiveness to obstacles, which hinder so much good. Peter was security that the Church of his time would not perish of rust or of dry rot. So he had a work to do in strengthening his brethren. But the Master who chose Peter sent with him Andrew his brother. We do not know so much of this other bar- Jonas. He is not an outstanding figure in the story. But what is told of him indicates a man of quite another mould from Simon. Were it other- wise, how could he have been chosen the patron-saint of the Scotch, that far-seeing and "douce" people? He appears three 20 THE TWELVE APOSTLES times in the story, (a) The multitudes are hungering in the wilderness, and it is Andrew who knows, as a committee of ways and means, that "there is a lad here, who hath five barley loaves, and two fishes, '* and then he adds in his Scotch way, "But what are these among so many?" (b) The disciples are startled by the prophecy of the utter overthrow of the Temple; so "Peter and James and John and Andrew ask him pri- vately" what his words mean (Mark 13 : 3). That is, the three confidential Apostles go with Andrew and go secretly, most likely at his suggestion, (c) " Certain Greeks," either proselytes or Hellenized Jews of the Dis- persion, would like to meet our Lord, and they go to Philip, the apostle with a Greek name, to ask an introduction. But Philip is at a loss how to act, so he takes them to Andrew, as a man who will imperil nothing by a mistake. Such were the two sons of Jonas; and our Lord sent them out together. He needs SIMON PETER AND ANDREW 21 them both, for they each have a special work to do for him. And they need each other, that each may supplement the other's defects, and correct the other's faults. He needs the outspoken boldness of the man of initiative, who cares little for prejudice and convention and "the proper thing," who sees when the iron is hot, and strikes at once. He needs also the man of foresight, who has a sense of difficulties and tries to provide against them. But each needs the other. The Radical needs the faith of the Conserva- tive that God was in the past, leading and directing the course of events. If he lose that, what hope can he have for the future? The Conservative needs the Radical's faith that God still lives, and "has more truth to break out of His word," and has grander things to do for us than he yet has done. The Church is ill guided when either of these tempers gets the upper hand to the exclusion of the other. She is well guided when Peter and Andrew go hand in hand. As our Lord 22 THE TWELVE APOSTLES says (Matt. 13:52), "Every scribe who hath been made a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like unto a man that is a house- holder, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old." Tennyson interprets the saying — " Not clinging to some ancient saw, Not mastered by some modern term, Not swift nor slow to change, but firm." 11. JAMES AND JOHN In the two sons of Zebedee we have the second of three pair of brothers among the Tv/elve. Note the order in which these two are named in the synoptic Gospels and in the Acts. It is ahvays "James the son of Ze- bedee and John his brother," if the two are named together. We should have said, "John the son of Zebedee and James his brother." John bulks much larger to us as the great Apostle of Love, the author of the fourth Gospel and the great Epistle of Chris- tian Assurance. But those earlier docu- ments ranked them differently. The other Apostle James is called by Mark (15:40) "James the less" to dis- tinguish him from the son of Zebedee, who must therefore have been called " James the great." The word has no reference to either bulk or eminence, but only to age. The exact sense is Junior and Senior. And as James the son of Alphaeus was a full- 23 24 THE TWELVE APOSTLES grown man, this James must have been well on in life to justify the epithet. He was singled out by Herod as the victim of the second persecution, and he died the first of the Apostles. His brother John, on the other hand, seems to have been a mere lad during our Lord's ministry. (Two of my own brothers differed in age by twenty years.) All the indications point to his youthfulness: (a) His unusual intimacy with our Lord, which excited jealousy only when James was associated with him in their mother's request for places of special distinction in the coming kingdom; (b) his passing unquestioned through Pilate's praetorium, when Peter at once was called to account; (c) the saying among the Apostles that he would live until our Lord's return to judgment; (d) his ac- tually surviving until the reign of Trajan, which began sixty-five years after the Cruci- fixion, and his writing the last Gospel and the last Apostolic Epistles. JAMES AND JOHN 2$ Before I speak of this contrast in age, let me note that they had some things in com- mon, which are noteworthy. Both shared in the ambition of their mother Salome that they should be given the highest places in our Lord's kingdom. Both had confidence in their ability to go through anything they might have to face on their way to that eminence. Both showed a vengeful spirit in proposing that our Lord should call down fire from heaven upon the Samaritan village which would not receive them. And John mentions to Jesus the act of himself and other disciples — including probably his brother — who forbade a man to cast out demons in the name of Jesus because he was not of their company. It is curious that James never is mentioned in the fourth Gospel. This ambitious, vengeful and exclusive spirit is far from being in harmony with our conception of the Apostle of Love. John was not naturally amiable — quite the re- 26 THE TWELVE APOSTLES verse. The discipline which made Simon a Peter was that which made John loving and lovable. In him our Lord took in hand the hardest scholar in the class, and made him proverbial for the abundance of that grace which he most lacked before that discipline. "Not that we loved God, but that he loved us," is his own account of the matter. Five times he calls himself in the fourth Gospel "the disciple whom Jesus loved," but never once "the disciple who loved Jesus." It was our Lord's loving discipline which wrought that miracle in him, and its crowning act was our Lord's entrusting Mary to John's care, as he hung upon the cross. For the way to deepen the flow of love in any one, and especially in the young, is to get them to do something for us which involves a sacrifice on their part. As to the contrast between these two, it might seem as if it were not specifying a difference of character, when it is said that their ages constituted the contrast. But JAMES AND JOHN 27 the old and the young, apart from other differences, are contrasted in character. In passing from the one stage of Hfe to the other, we undergo changes which affect our minds and our dispositions vitally. We acquire different standards of judgment, are respon- sive to different influences, and see things at a different angle. The Apostle John himself lays stress on these differences in his great Epistle (2 : 12-14) a-s having to do with our spiritual life and service; and Paul in his Epistle to Titus (2 : 2-6) makes them the basis of similar exhortation. The ordinary, worldly view of the matter is that youth has value only as a preparation for maturity, that the world is the possession of grown-up people, and that children are merely incipient men and women. This is not our Lord's view. He saw in childhood a freshness of life and feeling, an openness to divine impulses, a freedom from worldly calculation, and a simplicity of faith which he so often missed in the mature, that he 28 THE TWELVE APOSTLES declared that none could enter the kingdom of heaven except by becoming little children. His demand that we be born again certainly implies that we are to be born to a new child- hood. We are to return to the childlike spirit of our first youth, recover from the bluntness of feeling into which we have sunk, and part with our calculations and our reservations, which we have been tempted to think our best wisdom. Good people often have been puzzled over the problem : How can children be saved? Our Lord's problem was : How to get grown people to become children again, for their salva- tion. The children play a great part in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. The very structure of the book has reference to them. It is the only book that claims to disclose God's mind to men, which has not been writ- ten exclusively for grown people, and on the lines of their interest. It would seem as if God had said to its authors: "Do not forget JAMES AND JOHN 29 my children. Put in stories which will in- terest them — the stories of the world's childhood, and of brave heroic things, which will give them joy. Put in the story of the wonderful Child of Bethlehem and Nazareth, that they may see in their Saviour one of their own age. Let the book have wisdom for the wisest, but also delights for the young." So the young are represented in this first church, as in every true church from that day to this. And the Master sends out the old apostle along with the young one, as it is thus that he always wants to have it in his Church. He needs them both, and each needs the other. Any arrangement which severs their activities is less perfect than his wish for both. Age has much to teach to youth. Its loving experiences of God's ways must have brought it a serenity of trust in God, an assurance that his own will never be forsaken in their need (Psalm 37 : 25), and a knowledge that it is not worth while to add to to-day's troubles the imaginary 30 THE TWELVE APOSTLES vexations of to-morrow. And youth has much to teach to age. Its face is to the sunrise, and its hopes are large in the coming of the better day. It is endowed with the love of things lovable, the hate of things hateful. It has not grown used to either, so that neither excites a responsive feeling in its heart. It is ready to believe the largest things, if it have a Father's word for them. Keble has a fine expression of this in his verses on "St. Simon and St. Jude" in "The Christian Year'' : And as of old by two and two His herald saints the Saviour sent To soften hearts like morning dew, Where He to shine in mercy meant; So evermore He deems His Name Best honour'd and His way prepar'd, When watching by His altar-flame He sees His servants duly pair'd. He loves when age and youth are met, Fervent old age and youth serene, Their high and low in concord set For sacred song, Joy's golden mean. III. PHILIP AND NATHANAEL The next pair of Apostles had been per- sonal friends, not kinsmen, before their calling, although Philip, like Peter and Andrew, was of Bethsaida, at the upper end of the Lake of Gennesaret, while Nathanael bar-Tolomai (or Bartholomew) was of Cana, in the center of Galilee. The contrast they present is in point of intellectual force and agility. Philip's Greek name is a reminiscence of the history of the Macedonian conquest of Asia by the son of Philip of Macedon. But there 'was nothing else Greek about the Apostle. He had none of their brightness in perception, their incomparable cleverness in finding a solution for every puzzle. He was, in fact, a slow-witted plodder, as is shown by every appearance he makes in the gospel story, (a) To Nathanael's objection to Nazareth as the possible home of the Messiah, he has no better answer than, 31 32 THE TWELVE APOSTLES " Come and see." (b) When the multitudes are hungering in the wilderness, our Lord, as if to give the slowest scholar in the class his chance, asks Philip how they shall be fed. He has nothing better to say than that "two hundred pennyworth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one may take a little." (c) The Greeks who have come to the Pass- over desire to meet Jesus, and they single out Philip, probably because of his Greek name, to effect their wish for them. He is at a non- plus about it, and has to refer the matter to the cautious Andrew, (d) Our Lord, on the night of the Last Supper, is speaking of himself as the manifestation of the Father. Philip misses the point utterly, and says to Him, "Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Observe how our Lord's patience and his sense of the Apostle's slow- ness blend in his answer: "Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip ? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayestthou. Show us the Father ?' ' PHILIP AND NATHANAEL S3 Such was he, the stupid among the Apos- tles. But our Lord has use for the dull as well as the bright, and Philip was to be a use- ful minister of the kingdom, like many an- other dull but loyal man. He has need for all grades of intelligence in his service, and room for all in the membership of his Church. What a German theologian calls "the intellectual theory of Faith," that which substitutes the acceptance of a number of doctrinal statements for personal trust in a living Redeemer, has tended at times to con- vert the Church into a school of theology, in which every one has been expected to draw the line between every doctrine and its counterfeit heresy. But we are getting away from that to a more reasonable and spiritual estimate of what membership in the Church requires. The old-fashioned Presbyterian Churches, wnth their high value for doctrinal exactness, were apt to make this mistake. It is told of Dr. Samuel B. Wylie, the first pastor of the 34 THE TWELVE APOSTLES church of my boyhood, that once he received an application from a poor woman who de- sired admission to communicant member- ship, but was unable to answer the doctrinal questions put to her by the elders of the session. They recommended her to post- pone her application until she was better instructed, and she rose to leave the session- room, but burst into tears, saying, " I do not know all those things, but I know that I have a Saviour who died for me." Dr. Wylie arose, took her by the hand, brought her back to her seat, saying, "My sister, after all, that is the root of the matter; that is all we have a right to ask of you." Most of us have heard the story of the half-witted Scotch lad, whose application the session put off again and again. At last they admitted him, and as he sat at the communion-table he saw what they never did. He had a vision, he said, of "the bonnie man," and that night he died in an ecstasy of joy. The Lord had use for Philip from the PHILIP AND NATHANAEL 35 very day of his conversion, for it was he who brought his friend Nathanael to Jesus. He went to look for him, that he also might share in the joy of the Messiah, and when he found him he told him of the fulfilment of the hopes excited by the Law and the Prophets in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. But Nathan- ael was a man of a very different sort from his friend. He was of quick wit, alert intellect, and therefore likely to see at a flash the ob- jections to any statement. At once there comes to his mind all that was associated with the name of Nazareth, and he asks if any good thing could come out of that place. But when brought to see for himself, and when he discerns in our Lord first a super- human knowledge, and then a divine insight, he bursts into that great confession, which he was the first to make, "Rabbi, thou art the Son of God; thou art King of Israel." He was satisfied in two questions, and satis- fied forever. So the Lord sent them out together, the 36 THE TWELVE APOSTLES man slow of wit and the man of quick wit, having need of both, and each having need of the other. The dull man has his dan- gers, that he may dwell for years in the presence of great truths, and miss both their significance and their comfort. He is no standard for the Church in the matter of what he does not know, and still less in the matter of what he does not care to know. There is a sort of pious laziness which makes a man console himself for having nothing but the few great elements of spiritual knowl- edge. All the Bible he has any use for could have been printed on one page. But we are bidden to abound in faith and in knowledge also (2 Cor. 8:7); and Paul prays for his Philippians that "your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all dis- cernment" (i -.9); and he bans out of the kingdom "zeal for God, but not according to knowledge" (Romans 10 : 2). "The Scrip- tures," says Coleridge, "are distinguished from all other writings pretending to in- PHILIP AND NATHANAEL 37 spiration, by their strong and frequent recom- mendations of knowledge, and a spirit of inquiry." The devotion which is the child of ignorance they neither recommend nor sanction. The Nathanaels, with their mental alert- ness, have their dangers also. The most perilous is that they may be held back by such superficial objections as this about Nazareth, from coming to see what are the claims of the Truth. Such objections often block the way to faith effectually, especially when they excite in the objector an admira- tion of his own cleverness. The ^^akm&i' man who said he was "a heap too smart to believe in God and the Bible," is not an isolated instance. Many a bright young man, and some not so young, have had their minds taken up with this or that objec- tion to the Gospel, and go no farther. The only cure for them is that which Philip brought to Nathanael: "Come and see!" It was not a very bright answer, and yet it ^S THE TWELVE APOSTLES was profoundly wise. For if men will " come and see" what the gospel of the Son of God has done and is doing for our race — see the miracles of transformation it has wrought upon men's characters — see the slow and steady gains of its humanizing influences upon social ideals and usages — see the sus- taining hopes and comforts it brings to the suffering, the poor and the helpless — there would be far fewer sceptics in the world. It is told of Alexander Hamilton, the great- est of American statesmen — "the greatest statesman of his age," says the German historian Niebuhr — that in his youth he fell into the sneering and mocking fashion of treating Christian beliefs which was so com- mon in that time. At a social party one evening he had gone farther in this than ever before. When he returned to his home, and after he had knocked for admittance, the thought came to him: "If you had been paid the meanest retaining fee that ever was given you for defending a case at law, you would PHILIP AND NATHANAEL 39 have given to that case ten times the time and thought you have given to this which claims to be the only hope for men in life and in death." Before that door opened, Alexander Hamilton had resolved that he would "come and see" what there was in the gospel; and as a result he bowed his great intellect to the greatness of the Son of God. Let Philip and Nathanael go forth together in the Master's service. He has use for both. He has been served by the pro- foundest thinkers, no less than by the humblest believers. He has work for philosophers and theologians in the defense and development of the Truth, and the discovery of its subtle relations with the worlds of nature and of man. The New Testament itself contains suggestions of deep principles, as in Romans 7:19-23, Colossians 1:15-20, and James s'-^) which have taxed and will tax men's powers of thought to ascertain the fulness of 40 THE TWELVE APOSTLES their meaning. The Bible is plain enough for men of simple faith, and deep enough for men of the strongest minds. " A lamb may wade in it, but an elephant may swim in it," says Richard of St. Victor. IV. THOMAS AND MATTHEW The fourth pair of the Apostles are not associated in any other way known to us than as comrades in Apostolic labors. The conjecture that they were twin brothers rests upon no evidence, but it has been sug- gested that the name Thomas is Hebrew for Twin (Greek, Didumos). For what we know of Thomas, as also of Philip, we are indebted to the fourth Gospel. John portrays him as a man of keen and sceptical intellect, unready to accept any fact upon authority, or to blink any objection to a belief. In three situations this character comes out distinctly: (a) Our Lord tells the disciples that Lazarus is dead, and pro- poses to go up from Perea to Judea to him. " Thomas, therefore, who is called Didymus, said unto his fellow -disciples, Let us also go, that we may die with him." He seems to mean, "He does not know how those Jews hate him; but let us go. After all they 4X 42 THE TWELVE APOSTLES can but kill us." (b) Jesus, speaking of his departure to the Father, says, "Whither I go, ye know the way." Thomas flatly con- tradicts him : " Lord, we know not whither thou goest; how know we the way?" (c) Thomas is absent when the Lord first ap- peared to his Apostles collectively after the Resurrection. " The other disciples therefore said unto him. We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe." But even that proof was granted to the doubting Apostle, who burst into those words of confession which have comforted many doubting souls since then : "My Lord and my God!" "Doubting Thomas" has been a proverb ever since. Note our Lord's attitude toward him. There is no repudiation of him as an Apostle. Judas has fallen; Peter has dis- owned his Master; but Thomas is in good THOMAS AND MATTHEW 43 standing as one of the witnesses of the Resur- rection. He is not the man we should have chosen for the work of founding a Church whose very existence depended upon the faith of its adherents. In fact we hardly would let him into the Church now, after all these centuries of growth and experience; and if we found him in its ministry, we would have a heresy trial and depose him. It is told of a young Scottish minister that he came before his brethren with the confession that he had lost faith even in God and im- mortality, and desired to be released from his charge. They very wisely refused to do so, treating his trouble as a temporary phase of his spiritual development. "You are young," they said, "and you will change." He did change, and he lived to comfort and strengthen many by his writings. He was George Matheson, author of "O Love that wilt not let me go!" Love did not let Thomas go. Our Lord knew the kind of man he was from the first, must have borne 44 THE TWELVE APOSTLES with him in many a passage which is not recorded, and then sent him forth to testify to men the incredible news of the Incarna- tion, the Passion and the Resurrection. Thomas, indeed, had a service to render to the whole Church which none but a man like himself could. As Augustine grandly says, "Thomas doubted that we may never doubt." His story proves, if proof were needed, that the Apostles were not a set of silly devotees, who were ready to believe whatever was told them, for there was at least one among them who insisted on proof and evidence, as might a Tyndall or a Huxley. Observe, however, that our Lord does not extend his approbation to Thomas' way of attaining behef. "Jesus saith to him. Because thou hast seen me, thou hast be- lieved: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." Thomas' action may be useful, but it is not ideal. Faith rests on no demonstration, but on a venture of the mind, growing out of personal trust. THOMAS AND MATTHEW 45 Our Lord avoided every kind of proof of his mission and his work, which left no room for doubt, and therefore no room for the ex- ercise of the will in accepting and believing. Doubt has tormented many a good man under both the old and the new dispensations. The Seventy-second Psalm, for instance, is the frank confession of the doubts which had tormented Asaph; and it is but one of many Psalms which record such battles in the dark. Why did Paul dread lest he should be a castaway, after having preached the truth to others? Was it not the dread of a failure in faith? Luther was visited by a country pastor, who came to tell him of the doubts which tormented him. "Can you still say your creed ? " Luther asked. " Oh yes, blessed be God, I can say that." "Then thank God for his grace to you, for some- times Satan plagues me with doubts even about that." These men knew that "Faith is a victory," and not a dull acquiescence in what they were told. And Richard 46 THE TWELVE APOSTLES Baxter says that we always have the strong- est assurance of the truths we once doubted. "Do not fear to doubt," says Coleridge, "if you wish to believe." It is the man who does not wish to believe, who hopes that the truth he doubts will be found false- hood, that he may be delivered from the condemnation it implies, or the responsibil- ity it imposes, who should fear to doubt. The honest doubter who wishes to believe will end where Thomas did, on his knees before the Master, and his mouth filled with praises. Tennyson says, with something of exaggeration — There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds. He fought his doubts and gather'd strength, He would not make his judgment blind. He faced the spectres of the mind And laid them : thus he came at length To find a stronger faith his own ; And Power was with him in the night, Which makes the darkness and the light, And dwells not in the light alone. THOMAS AND MATTHEW 47 The Lord sent with Thomas Matthew the Pubhcan. His second name, Levi, indi- cates his membership in the tribe set apart for the worship and service of God; but his profession shows him self-exiled from his people, engaged in a business which patriotic Jews despised, and even heathen detested. Two facts only of his life stand out in the story, but they are sufficient to mark him as the type of wholesouled and unflinching faith after his conversion : (a) He was "sit- ting at the receipt of custom," that is, collect- ing taxes which he had bought from the Roman government, and which were his worldly substance. The Master passed by and said, "Follow me"; and the publican rose up, left his money, and followed the Saviour. It was a searching test. Men naturally like to combine with their religios- ity a fair amount of earthly security for their material comfort. They feel as does a char- acter in one of Mrs. Stowe's stories, who says it is well to trust Providence when there 48 THE TWELVE APOSTLES is a strong man in the house to keep it. It is true that other Apostles had made such sacrifices; but Matthew probably had more to give up than any of them, for the pub- lican's business, if it was contemptible, was very profitable. And it was one which taught men to put their trust in riches more than any other. The more wonder when a Zaccheus or a Matthew leaves it behind him. (b) Having cast in his lot with Jesus, he makes him a feast and asks "a great com- pany of publicans" to sit at meat with him. His newly found faith did not shrink from the criticism, sneering or jocular, of the men he had lived among, and who knew the seamy side of his life, if there was one. To these men of low standards and no ideals, whose pile of money made life for them, he shows his faith and its author, and faces all they may have to say of it. In the presence of Jesus he can stand it all. Observe the effect of his call to the Apos- tle's work on his feelings toward his nation. THOMAS AND MATTHEW 49 As a publican he was despised as the op- pressor of his own people, and an outcast from Israel. But that day he rose up a Jew, newly conscious, like Zaccheus, of his sonship to Abraham; and he lived to write the most Jewish of the four Gospels, that which describes our Lord's life as a new chapter in the history of the Hebrew nation. aXSo the Lord sent them out together. Hon- est doubt and fearless faith are not enemies, but the best of friends in the long run. The Church cannot do without either. She needs the Matthews, who can rise up and leave all at a word, in the assurance that it comes from one who can make life supremely blessed under any condition. And she needs also the spirit of fearless inquiry and research into whatever claims to come with authority to the spirits of men. There is a timidity as to such procedures which calls itself faith, but is in truth unbelief, which dare not in- quire because it fears that inquiry will show that the pillars on which Christianity rests 4 50 THE TWELVE APOSTLES are rotten. It is a spirit which would cast Thomas out of the Church, or at least out of its ministry. But Jesus chose him and used him, and has use for such as he still. V. JAMES AND JUDE 4bout_JheJdei^^ among the Apostles there Js_iuo.re_djspute than about any other , of the tw elve. ^^Twice in the Gospels we have mention of a James as one of the four "brothers" of our L ord (Matthew 13 :55]^Maric_^^J)j^ a nd twice among thew omenat the Cross we hear o f a Mary "the moth er of Joses and James" (two ot the ^' brothers" named elsewhere) , alon g^with Mary M agHalenp anH Splnrnp^ and other wo men — Matthew says "man^ " — ^^i^_ il^^ Toliowed Him from Galilee . But the first three Gospels do not mention the presence at the Cross of Mary of Nazareth, our Lord's own mother. For that we must go to John's Gospel (19 : 25-27), and there we find also mention of " her sister, Mary the wife of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalene." Now Cleophas is another way of Hellenizing the Aramaic name which is Hellenized Alphaeus in the lists of the Apostles (Mat- si 52 THE TWELVE APOSTLES thew lo :3; Mark 3 : 18; Luke 6 : 15), so that it seems a fair inference that these ''brothers" of our Lord were really his cousins, but called brothers by a Hebraic usage found in the Septuagint, although not in classic Greek writers; and that they were the sons of Khalphi (Alphaeus or Klophas), and a Mary who was sister to our Lord's mother, although bearing the same name — a fact not without parallel in that time. But a difficulty arises from the statement in John's Gospel (7 : 5) that " even his brethren did not believe on him" at the time of the Feast of Tabernacles preceding the last Passover of his life; while the choice of the Apostles occurred a year and five months earlier according to Dr. Riddle's chronology. On the other hand, Luke, in the Acts (i : 13, 14), mentions the Apostles, including " James the son of Alphaeus," as being in the upper chamber after the return from Olivet, and also "Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brethren." It is to be remembered, JAMES AND JUDE 53 however, that such general statements as that about the unbelief of his brethren are some- times made in a comprehensive but not an arithmetical sense, as is seen in the Gospels themselves. If "Joses and Simon and Judas" were still unbelievers, while James their brother was already a disciple, the evangelist, to avoid interruption of his nar- rative by explanations, m.ay well have said that "his brethren" did not believe on him. That there was not another "James the Lord's brother," besides "James the son of Alphaeus," the Apostle, appears from Paul's repeated mention of "James the Lord's brother" as an Apostle in the Epistle to the Galatians (i : 19; 2 19). L-Early tradition represents James as^ealous for tfie Law of Israel^and anxious to lay stress on the points^ of contact between the old and "the new dispensations, rather than their points of difference. This corresponds with the account of him in the Acts, where his conciliatory speech about what should be 54 THE TWELVE APOSTLES required of Gentile converts was taken as settling the matter. He who stood for the honor of the Law admitted the unwisdom of requiring circumcision of those converts, and all agree d^ (Acts 15 ^ 13-21) . His epistle, ad- dressed to " the twelvelribes which are of the Dispersion" — he was not aware of any of them having been "lost" — reflects this at- titude. (/It is the only New Testament writing in which the meeting of the Chris- tians is called a synagogue. rv^^llthough it contains more reminiscences of our Lord's teaching than does any other epistle, yet its Hebraic tone is very marked. God is " the Lord of Sabaoth." Conformity to his will as expressed in the Law is the goal of Chris- tian living. On the point of justification he seems to contradict Paul, citing from the Old Testament cases to prove that a man is justified "by works and not only by faith." On this account, and because he believed this James was not the Apostle, Luther re- jected the epistle from the Canon; and in this JAMES AND JUDE 55 he was followed by Lutheran theologians generally down to Neander, who, as a con- vert from Judaism, was in a better position to judge of its merits. V^adition gives him the title of "the Just," and he fully deserved it. He was a man of practical righteousness, who had no use for the religiousness of notions and emotions which do not shape men's lives to goodness. His epistle has its rebukes for the loose tongues, the empty professions, the divisive jealousies, the backbiting speeches, Ihe hard hearts of Christians of his day J It is a series of shocks to those who imagine that the first churches were perfect or ideal com- munities. And its maxim is "Show me thy faith apart from thy works, and I by my works will show thee my faith" (2 : 18). He was eminently a just man, keeping the Com- mandments, and inciting others by word and example to do the same. Judas, the associate of James in apostolic labors, is also called "James' Judas," 56 THE TWELVE APOSTLES which has led some to suppose him the brother of James, who, indeed, had a brother of that name. But the phrase more natu- rally is rendered "the son of James" — of some unknown person of that name. In the lists of the Apostles given by Matthew and Mark he is called Lebbeus or Thaddeus, nicknames of closely related sense — " breast- child" or "heart-child." John calls him "Judas (not Iscariot)." He is known to us only by his epistle, and by one passage in John's Gospel. His epistle also is an epistle of rebukes, but in this case for the false teachers who have laid waste the Lord's vineyard by their false doctrines. Its outstanding text is "Contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints " — the only verse often quoted from it. In the fourth Gospel we are told that our Lord was speaking of the manifestation of himself which would be bestowed on those who kept his commandments. " Judas (not Iscariot) JAMES AND JUDE 57 saith unto him, Lord, what is come to pass [more exactly, * How does it happen '] that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world?" He wants the matter defined, as might a synod of divines, and is not content to have anything left vague. He evidently was a man of clear-cut con- victions of divine truth, who thought these worth striving after, and worth fighting for. He was Jude the theologian. So the Lord sent them out together, the man of practical righteousness and the man of doctrine. He needs them both, and they need each other. Neither is com^plete with- out the other. The Gospel is not mere morality, as even ^ James will show you. We are to serve God with all our minds as well as with all our strength. We are to obey the truth, and to find our liberty in obeying it. Our Lord is the Truth, as well as the Way and the Life. And the vivifying truths of the Gospel, its wonderful disclosures of the divine will, its 58 THE TWELVE APOSTLES great doctrines of grace and salvation, have been among its mightiest forces. Nor is the gospel mere theology, as even Jude will show you. Separate its doctrines from life and character, and it becomes a very valley of dry bones, destitute of saving power, until the Spirit of life breathes upon them that they may live. Separate its injunctions to duty from the great truths of its disclosure, and these become powerless, as the green withes with which Delilah bound Samson, to bind and control the hu- man will. The gospel is both "the power ^ of God and the wisdom of God " — the ! power unto life and the wisdom unto doc- \ trine; and what God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Let James and Jude go forth together, and the churches will grow in both faith and god- liness. VI. SIMON THE ZEALOT AND JUDAS The last pair in the group of the Apostles presents the greatest contrast of all. Hereto- fore we have been considering contrasted types of mind, each of which has place and use in the kingdom of Christ. Now we come to two types, one of which has its place in the kingdom, and the other has not. For of Judas pre-eminently might be said what the Apostle John said of some apos- tates of a later day, "They went out from us, but they were not of us." This second Simon among the Apostles is called "the Zealot," and "the Cananean." The latter is the Aramaic equivalent for the former (Greek) term. This designation places him among the radical and revo- lutionary party among the Jews, which finally plunged the nation into the fatal struggle with the imperial power of Rome, and led to its dispersion by Vespasian and Titus. Jewish law and usage protected 59 6o THE TWELVE APOSTLES them in doing things which would have been punished in others, for the Jews, like all other Shemites, regarded zeal as a sacred thing, probably a divine inspiration. Our Lord claimed the immunity of a zealot when he made the scourge of small cords and drove the money-changers out of the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple. His disciples, in this connection, "remembered that it was written. The zeal for thy house shall eat me up" (John 2:17; Psalm 69:9). But the Apostle Paul, once himself a zealot in effect, took pains to discriminate between a zeal according to knowledge and for good works, from bitter and ignorant zeal (Romans 10 : 2; Galatians i : 14; 4 : 17, 18; Titus 2 : 14). In modern times the worship of " earn- estness," regardless of its object, has much in common with the worship of zeal among Jews and Moslems. The aim of the Zealots was the complete liberation of the land from alien rule, as the first step to a Jewish Empire under the SIMON THE ZEALOT AND JUDAS 6l Messiah. Their motto was "Independ- ence at any cost!" and they sometimes regarded even the Pharisees as time-servers, much more the courtly Herodian party. Under the leadership of Judas of Gamala, they had risen in revolt, A. D. 6, against the Census taken by orders of Augustus as a basis for taxation; and, although crushed for the time, they propagated their party until the final collapse sixty-four years later (Acts 5 : 37). We may presume that Simon had been drawn to this party by his naturally zealous temperament. They had no other attraction for him than their likeness to his own disposition. And when he became an Apostle he would not lay that aside, al- though he would blend sweetness and light with his zeal. His motto now would be "Christ at any cost! All things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord!" (Phil. 3:8). Judas of Karioth (Iscariot) is the only native of Judea among the Apostles, all the 62 THE TWELVE APOSTLES rest being Galileans, but he coming from a small town to the south of Hebron, which is mentioned in the Book of Joshua (15 : 25) as one of the cities of Judah. His being selected as an Apostle has bewildered many readers and distressed some; but there is no reason to doubt his sincerity at the outset. He had been drawn to our Lord by some- thing which he found attractive to his better self; and his capacity as a man of business seems to have suggested his being taken as the keeper of the bag, which held their scanty supply of money. As the parables of the goodly pearl and the treasure hid in the field indicate, there are place and use for the business temperament in the service of the kingdom, as it is that which makes a man act on ascertained values promptly and without reserve. Indeed, as Jonathan Edwards says, true religion is nothing but to know great things as great, and small things as small, and to act on that knowledge. It is Judas' giving way to the especial tempta- SIMON THE ZEALOT AND JUDAS 63 tion which the man of business must face, and tampering with the moneys entrusted to him (John 12 : 6), which undermined his devotion to the best things in Hfe, and pre- pared the way for his final apostasy. He lost any zeal he ever had for Jesus Christ. We are too apt to think of his sin as some- thing strange and exceptional, and as lying out of the range of our possibilities as sinners. In truth, it is the easiest and the commonest sin of all among Christians. For this man, whose name is a curse, the bitterest word that anger can fling at its object, was just what Dr. Cuyler calls a "minimum Christian.'^ Almost to the end he is willing to go a certain way with Jesus, if he be not asked to go too far. He finds Mary extravagant in her spending the pound of precious ointment to anoint our Lord's feet. According to Mat- thew and Mark he got some others among the Apostles to join with him in this censure; but John tells that it came from him first of all, and that it was because he was a thief 64 THE TWELVE APOSTLES that he said it. In his view there were some sacrifices too great to make for our Lord, some gifts too precious to offer Him, some devotion too profound to be fitting. That was his sin : he weighs, chaffers and counts; and he falls. He alone of all the Apostles does any counting : he counts the two hun- dred pence, and he counts the forty pieces. The rest give without counting. " Give all thou canst ; high Heaven rejects the love Of nicely-calculated less or more." *'The virtue is not safe which is not en- thusiastic," Seeley says in his "Ecce Homo." The faith is not safe which is not zealous, and ready to make sacrifices. Let us never come to counting how little holiness will get us into heaven, how little devotion and obedience will entitle us to be called Chris- tians, how much we can afford of conformity to the world without really belonging on that side of the line. That is the Judas temper, and the Christian must fly it as he would a SIMON THE ZEALOT AND JUDAS 65 deadly plague. It is the dry rot which does so much harm to the Church of our days, as we abound in formally good people, who are good for nothing in the Master's service, because they lack zeal for it and discourage zeal in others. Many seem to think that the best state for a church of Christ is one of dull routine in the practise of whatever is ac- cepted as "the correct thing," and will make no one uncomfortable. They detest originality, unconventionality, initiative and whatever else savors of zeal. Their place is with the Church of Laodicea. As we look back on the story of our Lord's handling of his Apostles, we may see some practical lessons for the Church of our time. The first is that no type of mind and char- acter is shut out of the kingdom, or required to transform itself into another type to be 66 THE TWELVE APOSTLES acceptable to him and useful in his service. We are not called, as the proverb says, to "measure our wheat in another man's bushel." We are called to faith unfeigned, love of the brethren, zeal for the cause, and hope toward God. But God delights in variety in his kingdom of grace, as well as in the world of nature. His word shows that he has many ways of calling souls to himself, and of training them when they have an- swered his call. He lays down no fixed "ordo salutis," such as the old theologians tried to extract out of the Scriptures. He can find use for the most varied gifts in his children, as Paul points out in his picture of the manifold activities of the first churches (i Cor. 12 : 4-31). The second is that we serve him best, not by singling out the brother who is most like us, and who will respond most quickly to our preferences in action and our ways of thought and feeling, but just the opposite. It is the brother who is most unlike us in SIMON THE ZEALOT AND JUDAS 67 disposition and temper who can work best with us in the long run, and will supply our defects of insight and of activity. Our Lord still wants to send us forth together in such unities of diversities; but we have not been willing for this. Our sectarian divisions have grown far more often out of these in- nocent differences of taste and habit of mind, than out of any grounds of truth or right- eousness. Therefore the world has not fallen before the Church and her testimony, because instead of going forth together, we have too often gone forth against each other, like troops which in the heat and smoke of the battle pour volley after volley into the ranks of their companions in arms — or like the two ships of war which spent the night in bombarding each other, and then, when the morning sun arose, found it was the same flag that was floating over shattered hulks and decks slippery with blood. Let us labor and pray for that sunrise in whose light we shall know our brethren as such, and 68 THE TWELVE APOSTLES learn to seek not our own things only, but recognize the gifts and graces of our fellow- Christians of every name. Then will be fulfilled that great prayer which Paul prayed for the Ephesian church ; "That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, that ye may be strength- ened with power through his Spirit in the inward man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be strong to apprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge, that ye may be filled unto all the fulness of God." Mark the expression, "with all the saints"! It never will be until it is "with all the saints." Never, while we go on building up sectarian walls of division, will we come to enter into the love of the uniter of mankind, the enemy of all parties and divisions, the Son of Man. VII. WHAT BECAME OF THE APOSTLES ? Naturally the Christian Church has wished to know more of the subsequent labor and history of the Twelve Apostles than the New Testament tells us. The books and parts of books which undertake to do this would make a considerable library; but they contain many self-contradictions, and contradictions with each other, along with many incredible and useless wonders. To sift the grains of truth from out this mass of apocryphal material is a great under- taking, first begun by Johann Albert Fabri- cius of Hamburg (1703-17 19) and resumed in our own time by Alfred von Gutschmid (1864). Thilo, Tischendorf and Lipsius have done the most work in recent times. The oldest sources are certain apocryphal "acts" or " journeyings " or "preachings" of individual Apostles; and out of these later writers have compiled general state- ments, of which the most notable bear th^ 70 THE TWELVE APOSTLES names of Abdias of Babylon, Dorotheus of Tyre, and Hippolytus of Rome, but are all the work of compilers of the fifth or sixth centuries at the earliest. Yet in both these classes of documents, as Professor von Gut- schmid has shown, there are historical ele- ments capable of verification from indepen- dent sources. And these give us a clue to the field of labors occupied by each of those six Apostles whose history is most obscure — Andrew, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, Jude and Simon the Zealot. The enumeration of the countries rep- resented at the Day of Pentecost is im- portant here. It covers broadly the region occupied by the Jewish Dispersion, and that therefore to which the Apostles first directed their labors. Luke specifies (Acts 2 : 9, 10) "Parthians and Medes and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, in Judaea and Cappadocia, in Pontus and Asia, in Phrygia and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and sojourners from WHAT BECAME OF THE APOSTLES? 71 Rome, both Jews and proselytes." The omission of all Europe except Rome, and of all Africa except Egypt and the Cyrenaica, is notable. We know, from the Acts, of Jews in the cities of Macedonia, Thessaly and Achaia (Greece); but these are passed over, probably because they held a much less important place in the Dispersion than did the Asiatic region, which was divided between the Parthian and the Roman Em- pires. In the opening of his first Epistle Peter mentions "Pontus, Galatia, Cappa- docia, Asia, and Bithynia," — also Asiatic regions of the Dispersion, as he indeed says. The historic consciousness of the Jews had been enlarged by the Captivity and the sub- sequent diffusion of their own people through adjacent countries, mainly in the Asiatic direction. Those who were sent to "the lost sheep of the house of Israel," must seek them mainly in that continent; and the division of the missionary field between Paul on the one side and Peter and James 72 THE TWELVE APOSTLES on the other (Galatians 2 : 7-9) seems to have been understood as including the rest of the Apostles along with Peter. It is doubtful if any Apostle except Paul ever trod the soil of Europe. I. Past the middle of the second century we first hear of Peter as, together with Paul, the founder of the church in Rome. Then we begin to hear of his being bishop of that church for twenty-five years, and being put to death along with Paul in the year A. D. 67. So he must have set out for Rome by A. D. 42, a fact to which Luke makes no reference in his account of what went on in the church of Jerusalem in the years A. D. 46-53; nor does Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, writ- ten about A. D. 56-58. Sir William Ram- say insists that his first Epistle must have been written under the Flavian Emperors, after the fall of Jerusalem in A. D. 70, as they first made the Name a capital offense. If so, he survived Paul by a considerable period. The countries Peter names in his WHAT BECAME OF THE APOSTLES? 73 own Epistle are probably those in which he labored. That he writes to these from Babylon (i Peter 5 : 13) has been construed as a reference to the ''mystical Babylon" of the Revelation, namely Rome. But the Apostle is not writing an apocalypse, but an epistle; and such a veiled allusion is alien to his straightforward character and his purpose. II. Andrew is said by early tradition to have gone to the land of the Cannibals (An- thropophagi) and to have been martyred at the city of Myrmecion. This enables us to locate him on the southern coast of the Black Sea, inhabited by piratical peoples, some of Greek stock and others natives. Other accounts represent him as extending his labors as far east on that coast as Colchis. The church at Byzantium, now Constanti- nople, claims him as its founder, but on no good grounds. As Peter puts Pontus first in his own field, we see the two brothers associated in later as well as earlier labors. 74 THE TWELVE APOSTLES III. James the Son of Zebedee we know from the Acts (12 : 2) to have died under the sword of Herod about A. D. 42. This confirms the early tradition that the Apostles stayed about twelve years in Jerusalem be- fore dispersing. IV. John the son of Zebedee we know to have received from our Lord the trust of his mother Mary. We also know that he out- lived all the other Apostles, dying in the reign of Trajan, which began A. D. 98, that he was banished to Patmos, probably in the previous reign, and that he spent his last years in Ephesus, laboring to promote love among its Christians. The Muratorian Fragment (A. D. 75) tells us that he wrote the last Gospel at the persuasion of his brethren in the ministry. The story of his miraculous deliverance from death, on being plunged into a cauldron of boiling oil, is apocryphal. V. Philip is identified by some with the Evangelist of that name, who was the in- WHAT BECAME OF THE APOSTLES? 75 strument of the conversion of the treasurer of Queen Candace, and who had four daughters possessing the gift of prophecy. But this seems to have been a different Philip, as he never is mentioned as an Apostle. Four very early Fathers of the Church mention the Apostle Philip as labor- ing in Phrygia, of which Colosse was a city, and as dying and being buried at Hierapolis. It is not said that he was a martyr. VI. Nathanael bar-Tolomai found his field of labor in Pontus, and the adjacent parts of Armenia. Two historic kings come into his legend, Artasy of Armenia and Pole- mon of Pontus, brothers, and also Polemon's wife, Queen Tryphaena, a granddaughter of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, and a prominent figure in the curious story of Paul and Thecla. VII. Of the Apostle Thomas we have a fuller account than of most of the Apostles, and while this is mixed with the marvelous to an extraordinary degree, there are his- 76 THE TWELVE APOSTLES torical elements easily discovered and sepa- rated. He labored in the Parthian Empire and probably on the frontiers between Par- thia and India, at a time when the Booddhists of India were making inroads on the Zoro- astrians of eastern Parthia, and the Par- thians were retaliating by conquests of the Indian province called White India or Ara- chosia. The name of King Gondophares, the Parthian ruler who effected this, is found on ancient coins, and his capital near Herat is mentioned both in the Thomas-legends and in ancient sources. It is said that Thomas converted the "three kings of the East,'* who came to bring gifts and adoration to the infant Saviour. Prof. Gutschmid is able to trace the three traditional names — Bal- thasar, Melchior and Gaspar to Parthian names of this time. One tradition fixes the scene of Thomas' martyrdom at a point on the Indian coast near Bombay. The Syrian Christians, settled on that coast centuries at least before European navigators reached WHAT BECAME OF THE APOSTLES? 77 India, claim Thomas as their founder, but with small reason. VIII. Matthew is described by one tradi- tion as preaching the gospel among the Ethiopians of Abyssinia; but this we know to be impossible, as the Christianization of that country was begun in the fourth cen- tury. It is more probable that he labored first in the Syrian colony established at Palmyra (Tadmor) in the wilderness be- tween Damascus and the Euphrates, and that he passed eastward to the Median people of Carenania. Another tradition takes him to labor with Andrew am.ong the man-eaters on the coast of the Black Sea. IX. James the son of Alphaeus is generally regarded as having remained in charge of the church in Jerusalem, when the rest of the Apostles dispersed to their several fields of labor. His story is much obscured by Ebionite fables, some of which are repro- duced by Hegesippus (A. D. 170) and by the pseudo-Clementine writings, which exalt 78 THE TWELVE APOSTLES him to a sort of popedom over the whole Christian Church, with even Peter as his humble subordinate. X. Judas, not Iscariot, found his field of labor in the Syrian kingdom of Osroene, with its capital at Edessa, the first definitely Christian country, as its king Abgar V (B. C. 15-A. D. 50) became a convert. The apostle is said to have died at Berytus (Beyrout). XI. Simon the Zealot found his field of activity in the Parthian Empire. At this time it was governed by two kings, brothers, Vardana reigning at Babylon and Nerseh (corrupted into Xerxes) in Persia. The Apostle seems to have begun his labors in the South at Babylon, and moved northward through the empire, as he met his death at Colchis in the far north. XII. Of the sad ending of Judas Iscariot I need not speak, except to note that the phrase used by Peter (Acts i : 18) as to the manner of his death, is the Hebraic equiva- lent of our modern phrase "broke his heart." WHAT BECAME OF THE APOSTLES? 79 Of the Matthias appointed to take his place the history tells us nothing we can accept as authentic. The field of labor of the Apostles of the Circumcision is thus seen to have been west- ern Asia, from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf, and from the Levantine coast to the frontiers of Bactria and India. This we know to have been the home of that part of the Jewish people which did not return from the Captivity, or did so but temporarily. This embraced what the Apostle James calls "the Twelve Tribes in the Diaspora^^ (or "the Dispersion"), and not two tribes only, as has been fancied in later times. The New Testament knows nothing of any "lost Tribes" of the Jewish people. BS2440 .T47 The apostles as everyday men, Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library III llllllll 1 1012 00013 4033 DATE DUE ■"'•■ •PK.i^^V _ « jfUl'! DEC 2 9 ^iJU-J flMr ** ^1 ' IF m§^ - •'' 1 ,11*^ GAYLORD #3523PI Printed in USA