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[ABOVE:Anthonie Blocklandt van Montfoort, The Beheading of Saint James the Greater, 1560–1579. Oil on panel. Museum Gouda—Public domain, Wikimedia]

When people talk about the lives of the apostles beyond what is recorded in Scripture, they often refer to a vague entity called “tradition.” A pastor might declare in a sermon, “Christian tradition says Peter was crucified upside down” or “According to an early tradition, Thomas evangelized India.” Paul went to Spain, Mary lived in Ephesus, Bartholomew was skinned alive—all according to ancient church tradition. But what exactly does this word mean? And whatever it means, can it be trusted as a reliable historical source?

The tradition of the Christian church doesn’t form a single, monolithic bloc. As always when studying history, each text that came down to us from ancient times must be evaluated on its own merits. Various scholarly criteria can help assess validity. How early is the text? Could it be related to eyewitness accounts, or is it full of legends from a later era? Do multiple texts—or at least more than one—corroborate a certain point? Does the text show evidence of an oral prehistory? Does it come from the pen of a known writer, and if so, how reliable does the writer tend to be? What sort of community composed or used the text? How widespread was its usage? What was the original purpose of the text—historical record or spiritual edification?

THE EARLY CHURCH FATHERS

As historians evaluate claims about the apostles, the writings of the early church fathers provide some of the best information. These patristic writers, whom we usually know by name, recorded the apostolic traditions that were common knowledge in their day.

Of course, as we all know from personal experience, things considered common knowledge by a certain group don’t always turn out to be true. Sometimes we participate in shared delusions: the earth is flat, the moon landings never happened, Elvis is still alive. Nevertheless, a community’s knowledge is often based on some kind of collective memory, so it has more likelihood of veracity than one person’s offhanded statement or the quirky beliefs of a marginal sect.

Consider the question of whether the apostle Peter was martyred in Rome. Hints of this can be found in John 13:36–38, 21:18–19, and 1 Peter 5:13. But what does tradition say? An early pastor in Rome named Clement (d. 99) declared that “the greatest and most righteous pillars [of the church] have been persecuted and put to death. Let us set before our eyes the illustrious apostles. Peter . . . when he had at length suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him.” 

Later patristic writers confirm this belief in Peter’s Roman sojourn and martyrdom. Irenaeus of Lyons (130–c. 202) asserted that “Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome and laying the foundation of the church” until their “departure.” Likewise Tertullian of Carthage (160–240) said Peter endured “a passion like his Lord’s” at Rome. Widespread early attestation from Christians makes the tradition of Peter’s martyrdom believable despite conflicting details (see pp. 18–22).

Among the writings of the early fathers, the 10-volume Church History (c. 313) by Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–339) stands out as special. In the early fourth century, Eusebius was the curator of the ancient church’s greatest library, which had been assembled at Caesarea Maritima by his martyred mentor, Pamphilus (c. 240–309). The library’s collection had its roots in the impressive textual work of the church’s foremost scholar, Origen (c. 185–c. 253), who had lived in Caesarea for a time. Because Eusebius had access to many Christian documents—augmented by his own investigation of eyewitness accounts—he was in a position to produce a reliable work of ecclesiastical history.

Of course, Eusebius had purposes for writing beyond mere historical record. He wished to advance a pro-Constantine imperial agenda through his vision of the church’s origins, persecutions, triumph, and ultimate destiny. Even so, Eusebius often recorded bare statements of fact or copied firsthand quotations that can be taken at face value. 

When Eusebius called James “the brother of the Lord, to whom the episcopal seat at Jerusalem had been entrusted by the apostles,” he was repeating a common Christian understanding of James’s ministry. Modern historians, of course, will immediately remind us that the term “episcopal” would have meant something different in Eusebius’s time than in James’s. The multiple overseers of the first-century Jerusalem church didn’t have the same singular authority as civic bishops in Eusebius’s day. Nevertheless the tradition that James held a primary leadership role in the Jerusalem church (implied in New Testament texts such as Acts 15:13, 21:18, and Gal. 1:19, 2:9) finds corroboration in Eusebius.

Eusebius strengthened this claim by digging into his library and quoting an earlier historian named Hegesippus (110–180), whose writings are now lost. Hegesippus had recorded salient points about James. Because Eusebius’s Church History contains many such quotations, it serves as a vital source for reconstructing lost apostolic biographies.

THE “HIDDEN THINGS”

The term “apocrypha” means “hidden things.” Here, we aren’t talking about the Apocrypha that is included in Roman Catholic Bibles. Rather we are referring to a body of early Christian writings that remained outside the formal biblical canon, yet might have some value as historical texts. Though these books were kept “hidden” in the storage cupboards of the ancient church—not read aloud publicly like Holy Scripture—they can still provide a few details that help us understand what happened to the apostles.

Unfortunately these apocryphal acts of the apostles didn’t tend to come from the mainline, orthodox communities that we associate with the writings of the church fathers. They were used by—and sometimes even penned by—dubious authors or marginal sects considered to have sketchy doctrines and practices (such as extreme asceticism or a bias against marriage). Quite often the texts are tinged with gnosticism, a heresy condemned by the ancient church that claimed Jesus saves people through secret knowledge and enlightenment, not his death on the cross. This kind of thinking got woven into the apocryphal acts, making it hard for modern scholars to separate the grains of historical wheat from the gnostic chaff.

For example, many Christians have heard that Peter was crucified upside down. Why? The common answer is that the humble apostle felt himself unworthy of being crucified in the same manner as his Lord. But did the Romans really honor their victims’ wishes and crucify them the way they requested? Of course not! Peter’s humble request doesn’t show up as an explanation for the upside-down crucifixion until the late fourth century. A much earlier text, the second-century Acts of Peter, instead uses Peter’s upside-down posture (that may well have been preserved in eyewitness memory) as an occasion for him to give a gnostic-themed speech about the fall of the primordial man and the inversion of the universe. So perhaps modern historians can accept Peter’s upside-down crucifixion—the Romans often crucified their victims in strange postures—without affirming the pious reasons put forward by later traditions as fact.

QUESTIONABLE LEGENDS

A final category of source material about the apostles can be loosely categorized as medieval hagiography (literally, “writing about saints”). In late antiquity and especially during the Middle Ages, the narration of apostolic stories became a big business. Legends multiplied as cities vied to connect themselves to an apostle or his tomb. Powerful city-states rose and fell based on whether their cathedrals could claim to house apostolic relics beneath their altars. In 828 two crafty merchants of Venice stole the supposed bones of Mark from Egypt in a theft worthy of a spy novel. To this day tourists can visit St. Mark’s Basilica in its beautiful Venetian plaza, where the bones of the city’s patron saint are said to rest. While this assertion comes from “tradition,” it almost certainly isn’t true.

SIFTING THROUGH STORIES

Eventually a lot of these free-floating medieval traditions about the apostles and martyrs came to be collected and written down. A central figure in this task, Italian bishop Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1228–1298), compiled hagiographical accounts of saints’ lives in the Golden Legend (c. 1260), which became an international bestseller. Through this wildly popular work, the stories of the apostles reached many ears as preachers repeated them on the church’s feast days.

Modern scholars, however, consider most of these fanciful accounts as folklore. They describe things out of place in apostolic times or too fantastic to have actual grounding in history. Medieval writers, motivated by pious edification more than the objective recording of facts, imagined a lot of fiction surrounding the lives of the apostles, making the Golden Legend and related works questionable as historical sources.

In the end the lives of the apostles—especially the more obscure members of the Twelve—are difficult for historians to reconstruct. Everything has to be taken with a grain of salt. No traditions are unassailably secure. Scholars must sift the evidence, giving primary weight to early works or statements that corroborate one another.

Yet when careful historical methods are used, a few plausible assertions, along with many possible ones, can be made about the apostles. Even so we can’t know the apostolic stories in rich detail. Perhaps that will be one of the great pleasures of heaven: to ask these admirable forefathers of our faith, “What really happened to you after Acts?” CH 

By Bryan M. Litfin

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