Commissioning of the Twelve

After a series of high-profile miracles throughout the greater Galilean region, the gospel narratives sketch out a commissioning event in which Jesus chose twelve men from among a group of disciples and delivered remarks ahead of dispatching them on a preaching tour.

An amalgamated text of Mark 3:13–15, 6:7 / Matt. 10:1 / Luke 6:12–13, 9:1 that give the commissioning event might go like this:

Now it happened that in these days he went away to the mountain to pray, and was spending the whole night in prayer to God. And when day came, he summoned his disciples, and they came to him. And of them he epoiēsen twelve, whom he also named apostolous, so that they would be with him and so that he could send them out to preach, and (to have/gave them) power to heal every disease and every sickness, and to expel unclean spirits.

I retained the Greek words epoiēsen and apostolous to signal a kind of pause button on the Lukan account. It’s the only one that invokes these terms and it departs from the others in how it presents these twelve disciples in a particular Pauline light. (More about that below.)

Some details about this initial episode worth remembering: Jesus spent the whole night in prayer on a mountainside/hillside near Lake Gennesaret and the next day summoned disciples, which at first amounted to more than twelve. Of that larger group, he further summoned twelve men, and in the rest of the sequence, directed his remarks to them.

Ordination?

The very active verb epoiēsen in this passage really affects how we make sense of the event itself. What precisely did Jesus do relative to these twelve disciples? The King James renders this as “ordained,” but the trouble with that translation is, well, this verb doesn’t mean “to ordain.” Furthermore, we see no sense of “ordination” in any church context in the historical record of the time, since ekklesies didn’t confer holy status or priestly prerogative upon anyone.

What ancient Greek widely meant by epoiēsen had to do with appointing, adopting, or regarding someone in some way. Consider what the gospels attach to this action: Jesus (appointed/adopted/regarded) the twelve “so that they would be with him” and “so that he could send them out to preach” and “to have power to heal … and to expel unclean spirits.” Does one “appoint” someone else to be with them? That sounds commanding in ways Jesus resisted when confronted on this very question (see the pericope about James and John’s (or their mother’s) request to sit in glory with Jesus). In that sense, “adopt” makes a better translation. However, it does make sense for Jesus to “appoint” others to actions like preaching or healing or exorcizing. In the nuance of our English language, a careful translator would aim for both senses of “appoint” and “adopt,” while in the Greek, the verb here contains both and it works.

My point here is about what is captured by “appoint/adopt” and what is lost by “ordained.” Jesus appears to join these twelve men to his own ministry, but dispatches them two by two with his same task while he follows a different circuit. He does indicate to them that this preaching tour would only require the vicinity of Galilee and then they would regroup. The set of pericopes imply that the group would continue together after they finished this particular tour. The scale goes local, to specific areas where they had begun presently to reach with Jesus’s gospel message, even while Jesus’s reputation apparently expanded beyond Galilee into Decapolis, Sidon, and Judaea.

Anachronism

We have to confront an issue not just with the four gospels and not just with the Bible but with history more generally. Records periodically (and depending on the situation, sometimes frequently) perpetuate anachronisms, and this occurs in the Gospel of Luke in the pericope of the call of the twelve. What is an anachronism? An anachronism is something presented out of its proper place in time. Here’s an example: remember the old cartoon The Flintstones? Cavemen are shown hanging out with dinosaurs. This is supposed to be silly, but nevertheless, it’s an anachronism because the fossil record offers no evidence of hominids of any kind co-existing with dinosaurs. Another example: some television series have shown American soldiers in World War II with a 50-star American flag patch on their uniform. This is an anachronism because there weren’t fifty states in the United States until 1960. What makes the film Back to the Future so amusing in places is because of witty anachronisms like Marty McFly wearing an ’80’s jacket that folks in the ’50’s take for a life jacket, or Marty jamming to “Johnny B. Goode” when the song hadn’t been written yet. When we wish to establish what happened and when, anachronisms constitute errors of history and mislead us from the truth of the past.

In the pericope of the call of the twelve, Luke adds this line: “whom he also named apostolous.” The other gospels, and consistently at that, refer to this group as “the disciples” and/or “the twelve.” In quotations attributed to Jesus, the gospels don’t have Jesus referring to these men as “apostles,” again more often as simply “disciples” or “the twelve.” When we take into consideration how the original text of Luke-Acts was composed, and by whom and where, an accurate interpretation recognizes how Luke applied a vocabulary specific to the communities of Jesus’s followers established by Paul and Paul’s associates (including Luke)—and it was Paul who most conspicuously and deliberately fashioned the concept of apostleship, particularly as something separate from the work of the Twelve. Remember—at not time was Paul himself a recognized member of the Twelve or spoke of himself as one of them. His status as an apostle was something categorically distinct and separate from the category of the Twelve.

But Paul, Luke, and other first-century Christians called individual men associated with the Twelve by the additional title apostolos, and during heated disputes between third- and fourth-century bishops, later Christians made “apostle” an exclusive designation. The “age of the apostles” became a time period, and the Twelve and Paul (and a few others) were given the status of “Saints” and a whole authority discourse that connects with the Latin structure of imperium and not really at all with the historical Jesus. Medieval Catholics retained this vocabulary and rhetoric, and though Protestant reformers questioned just about everything of the Catholic priesthood, they appealed to the rhetoric of apostleship to claim a “priesthood of all believers,” never disputing the “primitive church” and whether the “apostles” held a kind of exclusive authority direct from Jesus. Joseph Smith clearly inherited this apostolic rhetoric and himself never considered the historical possibility that “apostles” could have been a common term and not exclusive of a group of twelve preachers Jesus had commissioned at one time.

I’m only scratching the surface here. The historical source materials and literature is vast and deeply interrogated. In my most neutral and robust of analysis of those late-antique sources and of the first Christians, I find an abundance of anachronism retrojected backward onto this commissioning event and onto oral traditions about the Twelve that serve the interests of later bishops, priests, theologians, reformers, preachers, and missionaries. Jesus also commissioned a group of seventy-two ministers (that may have included women) with the same mandate as the group of twelve, and thereafter, we can’t distinguish any preference between the “Seventy” and the “Twelve” by Jesus. Even Peter, James, and John joining Jesus in a few select episodes (like the Mount of Transfiguration and the Garden of Gethsemane) aren’t provably selective, since women suddenly factor into the transfiguration narrative when the whole pericope sequence is in kept in context and the whole group of disciples from the last supper appear at Jesus’s arrest, which took place immediately following the Gethsemane episode. Moreover, women like Mary Magdalene, Martha, and Salome appear to have offered an earlier and potent witness of the resurrection ahead of the Twelve and other disciples, and when considering other contemporaneous sources (like the Gospel of Mary), the broader historical account strongly suggests the Twelve separated themselves from other disciples when confronted with Mary Magdalene’s testimony of having been appointed by Jesus to proclaim his gospel.1 Insofar as that is accurate, it makes total sense how we see anachronistic retrojections about a kind of Twelve priority coming from those same Twelve, and challenged by just about everyone else of first-generation Christianity. I could go on peeling away the evidence of anachronism: Clement, Ignatius, Eusebius, Irenaeus, Augustine, and others all constructing their own “ecclesiastical history” placing “apostles” at the head of a Christian ekklesia—all based on their own rhetorical ploys against other Christian groups deeply resembling the sectarian divisions we see today among Christian denominations. I just don’t see strong evidence Jesus deliberately set apart a group of twelve beyond an initial preaching tour.

Apostolos, Missionary

Before Paul (and Jesus for that matter), elite Judaeans in Jerusalem dispatched tax collectors to bring in funds for the Temple, calling these collectors apostoloi, the Greek word for “emissary,” “courier,” or “agent.” The word carried a generic sense of being an envoy or agent sent to transact business or deliver a message on behalf of a sender, usually a government official. Some scholars regard the presence of the Greek word apostolous in the Gospel of Luke as a generic reference to an envoy or emissary, especially since the context for the word is Jesus literally dispatching twelve men to deliver teachings on his behalf. Regardless, the medieval and later notion of “apostle” as an ecclesiastical station or rank would be an anachronism for the time of Jesus’s ministry, since we don’t see Jesus or his initial followers organizing into any kind of ekklesia/synagogue/assembly, but rather this occasion and subsequent events relating only to preaching.

Paul, a Greek-speaking Roman citizen of Jewish ancestry and upbringing from Tarsus (in modern-day Turkey) claimed the identity of an apostolos and associated this role with representing an agent of Jesus in declaring the gospel to gentiles. His missionary ministries are legendary, with intrepid criss-crossing of the Mediterranean that forged a massive network of house-ekklesies that gathered believers together from many different backgrounds, not just Jewish/Judaean converts.

Paul referred to many of his fellow preachers as apostoloi, virtually none of which were or had been associated with the group of the Twelve. In Romans 16, he listed various apostles, one of whom was named “Junia,” a Latin woman from Rome. It’s clear from this and other of Paul’s writings that he thought of apostleship the way we think of missionaries. In fact, the Greek word apostolos was a cognate for the Latin word missio, the root of our English word “missionary.” You can see the sense of “dismissal” (being sent away) in the Latin word missionarius = apostolos = missionary.

Sidenote: I find it intriguing how the earliest call of an apostle in Latter-day Saint history occurred with D&C 18. On this occasion in June 1829, Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and David Whitmer wondered what their responsibilities entailed since the translation of the Book of Mormon had been or shortly would be finished. The revelation said that Cowdery and Whitmer were “called even with that same calling with which [Paul mine apostle] was called.” Interesting—apostleship here being associated with Paul, not Peter, James, John, or the Twelve. And then their duties, the revelation continued, had to do with “crying repentance unto this people,” a truly missionary task. There’s considerably more to say about the development of the Quorum of the Twelve in church history, but I do think it’s worth noting how the baseline for apostolic action in our own church had to do with the emissary role of Paul and not the Twelve.

The Markan and Matthean communities that gave us those two gospels use simply “the twelve” or “the disciples” to refer to a group of ministers who traveled with Jesus and formed a key witness of Jesus’s life and teachings. Jesus would indicate other aspects of this group of twelve later on. At this moment of commissioning, though, it’s rather well-manifested in the collective narration that the original twelve were recruited for a preaching task, which they carried out over what the gospels imply were a few weeks or maybe months in the late 20s CE.

Names of the Twelve

Jesus interacted with many disciples over the course of his ministry and even dispatched many others on “missions.” One such disciple we rarely recognize was the man afflicted with “Legion” who, after Jesus performed his exorcism, returned to his “right mind” and listened to Jesus for a time. This man approached Jesus and asked to follow him—and Jesus gently directed him not to follow but rather remain in his home country and testify of the miracle that had occurred and of Jesus’s good news. We also see individual women called “disciples” who followed Jesus across Judaea and later represented the first witnesses of Jesus’s resurrection. Mary Magdalene manifestly proclaimed the message of resurrection as much as any of the Twelve and was venerated as much as Peter and Paul among several communities of first-generation Christians as a special witness of Jesus. I’ve already mentioned the Seventy-two who left on a broader preaching circuit—which may have included some of the Twelve and women like Mary. Among these various groups of disciples, we only see a complete list of identities with the group of twelve. The lists of names of the Twelve don’t entirely agree, but they can be reconciled rather easily if we look at the original languages of the gospels and Acts. Here are the names’ original Hebrew/Aramaic except for Andreas and Philippos, Greek names, in their English transliterations (in the Society for Biblical Literature Simple system):

• Simon (“Peter”) = Shim’on
• James = Ya’akov
• John = Yokhanan
• Andrew = Andreas
• Philip = Philippos
• Bartholomew/Nathanael = Bar Talmai (or) Netan’el (but probably) Netan’el bar Talmai
• Matthew/Levi = Matityahu/Levi
• Thomas = Te’oma
• James the son of Alphaeus = Ya’akov bar Hilfai
• Lebbaeus Thaddaeus/Judas “not Iscariot” = Yehuda bar Ya’akov
• Simon the Zealot = Shim’on qan’ anaya
• Judas Iscariot = Yehuda ha-Karioth

Notice how among these twelve men, there were two Shim’ons (Simons), two Ya’akovs (Jacobs), and two Yehudas (Judahs). It makes sense how biblical translations over the centuries would try to disambiguate between them, and we’d end up with names like “James” that are far removed from the actual name Ya’akov. But we come full circle—the efforts to disambiguate actually confused copyists, and so names like “Lebbaeus” suddenly show up, further complicating how this list appears in our King James Version.

I’ll say more about the commissioning instructions Jesus gave to the twelve before their departure for the greater Galilean countryside. By way of preview, I have a bit to relay about what all that shaking dust from their feet meant and going without purse and scrip, and whether Jesus really said he brought a sword instead of peace.

Sources

• P. Oxy. IX 1170, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/97b61b7a-bead-444b-91ec-383910956634.
• Berlin Codex 8502, p. 7, line 1 through p. 19, line 5.
• Jenny Read-Heimerdinger and Josep Rius-Camps, eds., A Gospel Synopsis of the Greek Text of Matthew, Mark and Luke: A Comparison of Codex Bezae and Codex Vaticanus (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
• Mark M. Mattison, “The Gospel of Mary: Coptic-English Interlinear,” http://gospel-thomas.net/MaryInterlinear.pdf.
• Christopher Tuckett, The Gospel of Mary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).