The Fate of the Apostles

Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus

Sean McDowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317031895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Cristianismo

The Book of Martyrs by John Foxe written in the 16th century has long been the go-to source for studying the lives and martyrdom of the apostles. Whilst other scholars have written individual treatments on the more prominent apostles such as Peter, Paul, John, and James, there is little published information on the other apostles. In The Fate of the Apostles, Sean McDowell offers a comprehensive, reasoned, historical analysis of the fate of the twelve disciples of Jesus along with the apostles Paul, and James. McDowell assesses the evidence for each apostle's martyrdom as well as determining its significance to the reliability of their testimony. The question of the fate of the apostles also gets to the heart of the reliability of the kerygma: did the apostles really believe Jesus appeared to them after his death, or did they fabricate the entire story? How reliable are the resurrection accounts? The willingness of the apostles to die for their faith is a popular argument in resurrection studies and McDowell offers insightful scholarly analysis of this argument to break new ground within the spheres of New Testament studies, Church History, and apologetics.

Chapter 1
Introduction

How can we trust in the historical resurrection of Jesus? A commonly used argument points to the apostles’ willingness to become martyrs. Popular apologists frequently cite their deaths as good reason to trust the sincerity of their testimony, since it is difficult to believe they would go willingly to such gruesome deaths for the sake of empty deceit.

Credentialed scholars also make a similar argument. E.P. Sanders, for instance, in his The Historical Figure of Jesus, argues that “many of the people in these lists [of eyewitnesses] were to spend the rest of their lives proclaiming that they had seen the risen Lord, and several of them would die for their cause.”¹

And Michael R. Licona notes:

After Jesus’ death, the disciples endured persecution, and a number of them experienced martyrdom. The strength of their conviction indicates that they were not just claiming Jesus had appeared to them after rising from the dead. They really believed it. They willingly endangered themselves by publicly proclaiming the risen Christ.²

Further, in The Historical Jesus of the Gospels, Craig S. Keener argues:

The disciples’ testimony was not fabricated. Ancients also recognized that the willingness of people to die for their convictions verified at least the sincerity of their motives, arguing against fabrication. People of course die regularly for values that are false; they do not, however, ordinarily die voluntarily for what they believe is false. Intentional deception by the disciples is thus implausible.³

Still, despite the popularity and importance of this argument to historical Jesus studies, little scholarly work focuses primarily on evaluating the evidence for their martyrdoms.⁴ Questions naturally remain, then, which strike to the heart of the apostolic message: Were the apostles hopelessly biased? Did they really believe Jesus had appeared to them after his death, or did they fabricate the entire story? Do the deaths of the apostles provide positive evidence for the resurrection accounts? And perhaps most importantly, most fundamentally: How strong is the actual historical evidence that the apostles of Jesus died as martyrs? In offering this study, I hope to answer these questions.

In fact, we do have reliable historical evidence to trust the ancient and uniform testimony that (1) all the apostles were willing to die for their faith, and (2) a number of them actually did experience martyrdom.

The argument itself is quite simple: The apostles spent between one and a half and three years with Jesus during his public ministry, expecting him to proclaim his kingdom on earth. Although disillusioned at his untimely death, they became the first witnesses of the risen Jesus and they endured persecution; many subsequently experienced martyrdom, signing their testimony, so to speak, in their own blood. The strength of their conviction, marked by their willingness to die, indicates that they did not fabricate these claims; rather, without exception, they actually believed Jesus to have risen from the dead. While in and of themselves these facts prove neither the truth of the resurrection in particular nor Christianity as a whole, they do demonstrate the apostles’ sincerity of belief, lending credibility to their claims about the veracity of resurrection, which is fundamental to the case for Christianity.

In other words, their willingness to face persecution and martyrdom indicates more than any other conceivable course their sincere conviction that, after rising from the dead, Jesus indeed appeared to them.

Of course, however, many often misstate or misunderstand the argument from the deaths of the apostles to the truth of Christianity. Candida Moss, for example, claims that Christians “like to think of their martyrs as unique. The fact that early Christians were willing to die for their beliefs has been seen as a sign of the inherent truth of the Christian message …. Christianity is true, it is said, because only Christians have martyrs.”⁵ Two points are important to make in response. First, as I demonstrate, there are many martyrs outside Christianity; I don’t claim that only Christians have martyrs, but that the apostles died uniquely for the belief that they had actually seen the risen Christ, which demonstrates the sincerity of their convictions. The deaths of others for their religious causes in no way undermine the evidential significance of the fate of the apostles. Second, the apostles’ willingness to die for their beliefs does not demonstrate “the inherent truth of the Christian message,” but that the apostles really believed that Jesus had risen from the grave. The apostles could have been mistaken, but their willingness to die as martyrs establishes their unmistakable sincerity. The apostles were not liars; rather, they believed they had seen the risen Jesus, they were willing to die for this claim, and many actually did die for it.

Methodology

I am primarily concerned with the historical evidence for the martyrdom of the apostles, which involves studying the earliest available sources, including New Testament documents, with particular focus on the book of Acts, the writings of the early church fathers, pseudepigraphical writings such as the Acts of the Apostles, Gnostic sources, and other extra-biblical accounts.

While there are some valuable later sources for the fate of some of the apostles, this investigation focuses primarily on what Markus Bockmuehl has dubbed “living” memory. First- and second-century writers emphasized that they were passing on a shared “living” memory of the apostles, which is to make a stronger claim than saying they were simply passing on a shared tradition or cultural memory. Instead, they believed they were transmitting personal memory of events that trace back to the apostles themselves.⁶ This living memory extended until the end of the second century, after which it could no longer be accurately appealed to as a means of understanding the apostolic Gospel.⁷ This prevents neither the development of legendary material about the apostles nor theological disagreements. According to Bockmuehl, living memory simply means that “until the end of the second century there were living individuals who personally, and sometimes vividly, remembered the disciples of the apostles—and that such memory was still thought to carry weight in debates about how to interpret the bearers of apostolic faith.”⁸

According to Bockmuehl, living memory involves three generations: (1) Peter and his contemporary associates, assumedly dead by roughly AD 70, (2) the direct followers of the apostles, the last of which died by about AD 135, and (3) the second-generation followers of the apostles, who would have died by about AD 200.⁹ Of course, by focusing on living memory I do not mean to imply that later history necessarily becomes suspect and unreliable. On the contrary, one can know many things independently of living memory. Indeed, for some apostles no chain of living memory exists, and for these cases one will need to rely upon the merits of later tradition.

Historians have recognized a spectrum of epistemological confidence for the examination of historical events. For the purposes of this inquiry, I adopt the following scale for evaluating the historical evidence for the martyrdom of individual apostles:

• not possibly true—certainly not historical;

• very probably not true—doubtfully historical;

• improbable—unlikely;

• less plausible than not—slightly less possible than not;

• as plausible as not—plausible;

• more plausible than not—slightly more possible than not;

• more probable than not—likely;

• very probably true—somewhat certain;

• the highest possible probability—nearly historically certain.

The reliability of the historical evidence for each apostle will be analyzed individually and assessed based upon the quantity and quality of the available historical data.

If the terms were put into a numeric scale, the probabilities look like this:

1. not possibly true—0–1;

2. very probably not true—2;

3. improbable—3;

4. less plausible than not—4;

5. as plausible as not—5;

6. more plausible than not—6;

7. more probable than not—7;

8. very probably true—8;

9. the highest possible probability—9–10.

To help determine where each apostle falls on the numeric scale, a few specific questions will be asked. First, how many sources are there? Multiple sources, when they are independent, provide greater confidence the claim is true. Second, how early are the sources? Generally speaking, earlier sources are considered more reliable than later sources. Third, are there sources from varying perspectives? For instance, a martyrdom account has greater credibility if it is supported by Christian, Gnostic, and secular sources. And a written account may also find support from oral tradition. Fourth, is there a historical nucleus even if secondary details disagree? Various accounts often fail to match up on some particulars, yet historians confidently believe they can ascertain a historical core. This claim is true even if an account has legendary and miraculous details.¹⁰

Defining Martyrdom

What, precisely, is a martyr? In its original Greek setting, “martyr” simply means one who testifies in a legal manner, a “witness.”¹¹ Later, it came to refer to one whose testimony for Jesus results in death, which is now the standard Christian understanding of “martyr.”¹²

But does martyrdom require death, or can one’s suffering qualify one as a martyr? Are martyrs only those who confess certain beliefs, or might they be persons singled out, say, for moral acts? While these are worthwhile questions, I limit this discussion to the traditional understanding of Christian martyrdom, perhaps the strictest possible definition, as involving death for confession of the Christian faith.¹³

I should note that this understanding of martyrdom includes the idea that death is voluntary. Even though martyrdom can be avoided through one’s renunciation of belief, the martyr chooses death. This applies even if the confessor is not given an official opportunity to recant, for he or she continues in the faith with knowledge of the outcome that may result from such belief. Thomas Wespetal concludes: “Thus individuals like John the Baptist, Zechariah (2 Chr 24:20–22) and Uriah (Jer 26:20–23), although they were given no formal opportunity to recant, could have forestalled their deaths had they taken the initiative to retract their accusations against their king.”¹⁴

There are no early and reliable historical accounts to indicate the apostles were given the opportunity of recanting their faith at the moment of their de...