Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
Language: English
Pages: 432
ISBN: 0375424660
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
“Expertly researched and fascinating… Bissell is a wonderfully sure guide to these mysterious men.… This is a serious book about the origins of Christianity that is also very funny. How often can you say that?” —The Independent
A profound and moving journey into the heart of Christianity that explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles—a book both for those of the faith and for others who seek to understand Christianity from the outside in.
Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell provides rich and surprising answers to these ancient, elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren’t), but also how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia.
Ultimately, Bissell finds that the story of the apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus’s ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations. In his quest to understand the underpinnings of the world’s largest religion, Bissell embarks on a years-long pilgrimage to the supposed tombs of the Twelve Apostles. He travels from Jerusalem and Rome to Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, India, and Kyrgyzstan, vividly capturing the rich diversity of Christianity’s worldwide reach. Along the way, he engages with a host of characters—priests, paupers, a Vatican archaeologist, a Palestinian taxi driver, a Russian monk—posing sharp questions that range from the religious to the philosophical to the political.
Written with warmth, empathy, and rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant synthesis of travel writing, biblical history, and a deep, lifelong relationship with Christianity. The result is an unusual, erudite, and at times hilarious book—a religious, intellectual, and personal adventure fit for believers, scholars, and wanderers alike.
Matthew?” “Yeah,” he said, “of course I did.” “Matthew the apostle.” He laughed. “I don’t think she knows anything.” I looked at the woman, who shrugged as though on cue. “This is really weird,” I said. “I agree it’s strange. But if she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know.” We walked back to Igor’s SUV and drove on down a dirt road. We had been asking around for an hour by this point, and Igor was getting angry. Andrei provided a running translation: “He says the Kyrgyz are ignorant. That’s
English. Translated by Geza Vermes. New York: Penguin, 2012. The community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls was almost certainly a group known as the Essenes, an apocalyptic, pistic, ablution-obsessed, and apparently very testy group who withdrew from Jewish society after the Maccabaean revolt of 166 BCE and lived in several highly organized communities in the desert around the Dead Sea. (The Essenes are believed to have resented, in the words of one scholar, the Maccabaean rebels’ Obamaian
divinity were not separate but united in one cohesive nature. The Western church, which regarded Jesus’s humanity and divinity as entirely separate, rejected Monophysite beliefs as anathema, even though its thinkers took their own sweet time in discerning the precise nature of the internal coexistence of Jesus’s humanity and divinity. Monophysitism became the official stance of Armenian Christianity in the middle of the fifth century, after the Council of Chalcedon, which granted equal stature to
as if he won, just as no one had ever had this argument before and felt as if he lost. Before going, Glenn wished me luck on what he called my “journey.” And so I wished Glenn luck on his. *1 “Tetrarch” literally means “ruler of a fourth part,” which is to say, king of one-fourth of Herod the Great’s kingdom, which his sons and grandsons variously ruled, always with Roman approval, in the years after his death in 4 BCE. *2 Luke characteristically avoids the confusion by noting only “the women
she said, “Father Spiridon good. Both good.” Father Spiridon laughed, thanked her, clapped his hands together, and announced, “Now icons.” Most icons are small paintings, often in panel form, of Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, an apostle, saint, or, sometimes, in particularly large icons, a combination of some or all of the above. Icons are extremely ancient. Eusebius, in the fourth century, mentioned seeing icons of Peter and Paul and, in Edessa, an icon of Jesus that Eusebius believed had been