After Jesus Died
What happened to the 12 Apostles after the death of Jesus?
The Disciples were renamed the Apostles after Jesus’ death, and Matthias was selected by lot to replace Judas Iscariot.
The Apostle’s inner circle is comprised of Peter, James the Elder, and John.
They saw several of Jesus’ miracles. Paul is often mentioned among the Apostles since it was thought that his acts and emotions matched those of the original twelve.
Barnabas, Paul’s traveling companion, and Saint Luke, the author of one of the Gospels, have also been given the title Apostle.
The other 11 original disciples who became Apostles were:
Judas Iscariot, the original 12th, committed himself after his treachery during the Last Supper.
The arrival of the Holy Spirit at a meeting of the disciples after Jesus’ death and resurrection is described in the Acts of the Apostles:
“Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as if it were a violent wind and there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which separated and came to rest on the head of each of them.”
The Holy Spirit endowed the disciples with the capacity to communicate in a variety of languages, enabling them to disseminate the message of God and Jesus and usher in the Christian era. This is considered the founding day of the Christian church.
Jesus’ Followers
When Jesus was alive, he was often surrounded by 70 or more followers, with the main group consisting of his 12 disciples:
“This myth is founded on a misunderstanding of the three types of Jesus’s followers,”
Reza Aslan wrote in the Washington Post, explaining why the notion that Jesus had 12 disciples was a hoax.
The first group consisted of folks who came to hear Him speak or be cured whenever He passed through a hamlet or town. This group is referred to as “crowds” in the Gospels.
The second group was people who followed Jesus from town to town and village to hamlet. These were known as disciples, and there were either 70 or 72 of them, depending on whose version of the book you believe.
The apostles were the third group of Jesus’ disciples. These 12 men were unlike ordinary disciples since they did not just follow Jesus from one location to another.
Instead, they were granted authority to go forth on their own and preach His word without supervision. In other words, they were the primary missionaries of the Jesus movement.
Disciples and Apostles
The Twelve Apostles were Jesus’ followers who were sent forth after Christ’s crucifixion to proclaim the news of the new religion.
After his death, they played an important role in spreading his ideas and the Christian faith.
The term “apostle” is derived from the Greek Apostolos, which means “messenger.”
According to Luke 12-13, Jesus
“went out onto a mountain to pray and remained in prayer to God all night.”
And when it was day, he summoned his disciples to him, and he picked twelve.
All of Jesus’ followers were Jewish men.
Four were fishermen, including Peter, James, and John, and one was a toll collector, Matthew. Andrew and Peter were followers of John the Baptist when they joined forces.
“Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men,”
Jesus said.
Some of Jesus’ followers were outspoken Jewish liberationists.
“The angry, wrathful ones,”
according to James and Mark. Judas of Galilee was a guerrilla commander described by Josephus as
“a highly bright rabbi who aspired to monarchy.”
We know little about his death, but we do know that his sons continued the fight against Rome, that two were crucified, and that another claimed to be the Messiah. At least one of Judas’ descendants perished at Masada.
As the Bible puts it, most understood more about mending nets than gaining converts when Jesus claimed he would make them “fishers of men,” writes Andrew Todhunter in National Geographic.
Thomas, sometimes known as Doubting Thomas, was one of the Twelve Apostles.
He was joined by Peter, Andrew, James the Greater, James the Lesser, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thaddaeus, Simon, and Matthias, who replaced Judas Iscariot, a previous disciple and accused traitor.
The titles “apostle” and “apostolic” were eventually given to others who disseminated the gospel.
In this instance of Paul, he claimed to be an apostle after seeing the Lord and receiving a spiritual commission from him.
For her role in revealing the resurrection to the Apostles, Mary Magdalene is regarded as the Apostle to the Apostles.
Even though only two of the four Evangelists Matthew and John were among the original Apostles, St Mark, and St Luke are regarded as apostolic due to the significance of their work in authoring the New Testament Gospels.
Following Jesus’ death, the Apostles spread Christianity.
The coming of the Holy Spirit at a gathering of the disciples is described in the Acts of the Apostles:
“Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as if it were a tremendous wind…and there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which divided and came to rest on the head of each of them.”
The Holy Spirit endowed the disciples with the capacity to communicate in a variety of languages, enabling them to disseminate the message of God and Jesus and usher in the Christian era.
This is considered the founding day of the Christian church.
From Jerusalem through Damascus, Antioch, Asia Minor, Greece, and eventually Rome, the Apostles propagated Christianity.
Although there is little evidence to support the claim, some individuals think that James the Elder visited Spain, St. Thomas visited India, Saint Matthew visited Ethiopia, and Saint Bartholomew visited Armenia.
Following Jesus’ crucifixion, John was busy converting people to Jerusalem.
Andrew is claimed to have been crucified on an X-shaped cross at Patras, Greece, for his missionary works in the Aegean (the origin of St. Andrew’s Cross).
There are reports that James the Younger was stoned to death, reportedly for evangelizing among Jews, and that Bartholomew was tortured and crucified while on a missionary tour in India.
Little is known about the Apostles’ life. They are barely mentioned in passing in the New Testament.
The Apostle’s Creed, a brief statement of faith alleged to have been spoken by the Apostle, started to be used in the Roman Church in the third century.
The Apostles were persecuted and martyred.
“In its early days, the movement was too minor to draw widespread persecution, and Christians, as they came to be known, had more conflict with nearby Jewish groups than with the Roman Empire,”
Andrew Todhunter wrote in National Geographic.
According to the Bible, the first martyr of the religion was St. Stephen, a young Christian leader who infuriated the Jewish community by implying that Christ would come and demolish the Temple of Jerusalem.
Around the year 35, after being convicted of blasphemy, his accusers carried him out of town and stoned him to death as he prayed for them.
The young Saul, who would soon become Paul in his famous conversion on the road to Damascus, saw Stephen’s death while keeping an eye on the cloaks of those who stoned him.
“In 44, King Herod Agrippa I imprisoned and killed James the Greater, the first of the Apostles to perish.”
When a huge fire destroyed ten of Rome’s fourteen quarters in 64, Emperor Nero, suspected by opponents of starting the fire himself, blamed the disaster on the budding Christian movement and executed dozens of Christians in his private arena.
Tacitus, a Roman historian, wrote:
“An enormous number of people were condemned, not so much of the crime of shooting on the city as of hate for humanity.
They were ripped by wolves and killed, or were tied to crosses, or were destined to the flames and burned, to serve as nightly lighting after daylight had departed.”
In the year 110, Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, was seized by Trajan’s Romans, brought to Rome, and sentenced to death ad bestias (by animals) in the public games. Such bloodshed would reoccur on an irregular basis over the following two centuries.
According to tradition, 11 of the Twelve Apostles were martyred. James the Greater and Thaddaeus were crucified; James the Lesser was beaten to death while praying for his assailants; Bartholomew was flayed alive and then crucified; Thomas and Matthew were speared; Matthias was stoned to death, and Simon was either crucified or sawed in two.
John, the last of the Twelve, most likely died peacefully, perhaps at Ephesus about the year 100.