The study of biblical texts is a dangerous field. Mainly because, 2000 years later, the known stories arrive with layers of interpretation built by faith.
But many contemporary experts argue that the idea that Jesus had 12 apostles is symbolic and not an accurate account or close to reality.
It was a reconstruction of the life of Jesus that served to found the hierarchy within the community of the first Christians.
“On the question of the 12 (apostles): I would say that there is a strong tendency to believe that It was a symbolic representation, based on the 12 sons of Jacob, in the 12 tribes of Israel (family clans of the ancient Hebrew people), or even in other traditions,” historian André Leonardo Chevitarese, professor at the Institute of History of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and author of several books on the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
“The fact that Jesus made 12 apostles among his followers is debatable,” he adds.
“There were others, and even a woman”agrees historian, theologian and philosopher Gerson Leite de Moraes, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University.
“The term apostle seems to be a term that does not have a single use,” he explains.
Paul and Luke
To understand the controversy, one must try to understand what the Bible says about Jesus’ apostles.
And the earliest mention is in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, a document that was written in the first half of the 50sbefore, therefore, the gospels.
There is the passage that is known as the oldest kerygma of Christianity, that is, the announcement of the faith made by the first Christians.
It says that “Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures. He was buried, resurrected on the third day, according to the scriptures. He appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.”
André Leonardo Chevitarese states that this passage, in itself, has some problems, which is why some ancient Greek versions say “eleven” instead of “twelve”.
“Paul did not know that there had been a traitor,” he comments.
Judas Iscariot would have been the one who betrayed Jesus, so he could not be with the group after the death of the man they were following.
“The idea of the 12 is there. But it is the only time that Paul mentions this in his seven letters, all dating from the same decade,” says the historian.
Moraes believes that the 12 formed the main nucleus among those who accompanied Jesus, given the symbolism. But he recognizes that there are problems of agreement, especially if the Pauline letters are compared with the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
“In Paul, the notion of apostle is a little more widespread. Thus, the peculiar position of the 12 in early Christianity is clear, but it is not known whether such a position already existed when Jesus was alive”, Explain.
The Gospels
When reading the Gospels, the four biblical books that narrate the life of Jesus, the situation becomes even more complicated.
“This is because only one author of the New Testament material said who exactly the 12 were,” Chevitarese notes.
“It is in chapter 6 of Luke, in a book that commonly dates from the 90s, at the end of the first century.”
That is to say: it is a history already written under the “ideological contamination”, intentional or not, of a primitive church. that had already arisen. The author himself had not witnessed the stories he told.
A passage from the book of Luke says that: “When it was day, he called his disciples, chose twelve of them, and he named them apostles”.
“It speaks of a select group that Jesus would have chosen among his disciples,” explains the historian.
Number of followers
But how many really followed Jesus?
Chevitarese believes that It was a “very small and intra-Jewish” movement.
“We are not talking about a messianic candidate who attracted crowds. “Jesus was a popular leader in Galilee and moved a small number of adherents,” he analyzes.
These adherents, as defined by the researcher, can be called “disciples, individuals who heard his messages, agreed with them, and made the decision to remain close to Jesus.”
“Mainly it operated in rural, peasant environments,” he adds.
Although the majority of Jesus’ followers were poor peasantsthere was also a literate elite that ended up becoming interested.
“This explains why, in the 1950s after the death of Jesus, that is, from very early on, the texts to which we have access were in Greek and not in Aramaic. There was a small urban elite that agreed with Jesus from the point of view of the problems generated by the Roman occupation, by the alliance of sectors of the Jewish elite with Rome.
A clue to how many there were can also be found in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, since right after the passage in which he mentions the 12, he states that Jesus would also have been seen by “more than 500 brothers at once”.
“That is to say, in a certain way, Jesus had more disciples than those 12. And there is no reason not to admit it (…) there were also female disciples, women who had left part of their daily chores to listen to him,” says Chevitarese.
Apostle women
The oldest source to legitimize the existence of the 12 is Paul and he himself indicates that there were other apostles, so called. Including women.
In the letter to the Romans, also from that decade of the 50s, he greets the couple “Andronicus and Junias, my relatives and my companions in captivity.”
Say what The two “are eminent apostles and belonged to Christ even before me.”
Moraes recalls that today “there are many fundamentalists who say that Júnias was a man’s name.” “But she was a woman,” he says.
Deputy director of the Lay Center, in Rome, and professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, also in Rome, the Vaticanist Filipe Domingues comments on the important role that Mary Magdalene played in this central nucleus of the Jesus movement.
“There were women who followed him and Madalena is one of them. She is informally called the apostle of the apostles. and I like to remember that Pope Francis changed the Magdalene liturgy to make it a solemnity as important as that of the other apostles,” he points out.
“Today, from a liturgical point of view, it has the same weight,” he adds.
“She is not widely called an apostle only because there is no account, no evidence in the gospels, that she was sent to preach like the others. But we can see it as something of the period, since a woman did not do that at that time.”
Domingues also points out that Mary, mother of Jesus, was another close follower.
The historian Chevitarese states that the idea of the select group of twelve could have been “an invention of Lucas himself.”
“In Acts (the book Acts of the Apostles, also written by Luke, which narrates the first steps of the movement after the death of Jesus), he created the apostolic tradition,” he explains.
“This is very important in Luke’s mind, because for him it is as if Jesus had passed his teaching on to the 12, and the 12 went into the world, each one to a different place, bringing teaching and power.”
In the same book of the Acts of the Apostles, Barnabas is also called an apostle.
“This is all tradition,” adds Chevitarese. “Speech of power. A subtlety of establishing an elite on one side and the common people on the otherserves to break horizontality to impose verticality.”
For Moraes, “the controversy becomes very interesting because there are studies that say that the term, apostle, did not even exist in the time of Jesus.”
“Perhaps it was a term incorporated laterused in the hierarchical, charismatic government structure of the early church,” he concludes.
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