excellent article showing that the supposed deaths of the apostles is tradition and not historical fact.


Lately I've been thinking about the twelve apostles of Christianity. According to Mark and Matthew, their names are as given above, although puzzlingly, the parallel list in Luke 6 omits Lebbaeus Thaddaeus and replaces him with James' brother Judas, or Jude (apologetic tradition claims that the two are the same person). After Judas Iscariot's death, Acts 1 informs us that Matthias was chosen to replace him.

An oft-heard Christian apologetic asks, "why would the apostles die for a lie?" Save for John, tradition holds, all of the original apostles eventually died martyr's deaths - yet if the resurrection of Jesus was an invented story, they must have known that, and why would anyone go willingly to their death for a claim they knew to be untrue?

I'll get into this claim in a moment, but first, an observation. One of the things I think any Christian should find strange is how little space the Bible gives to the twelve apostles. A few prominent ones such as Peter and John get more attention, but most of them vanish completely out of history after being named, with readers never being told anything else about them or anything they did. It is remarkable how unimportant most of the apostles seem to be in the Bible.

Of all the apostles, the Bible records the death of only two: Judas Iscariot, who either hanged himself or fell and burst open (depending on which contradictory gospel account one believes), and James, son of Zebedee and brother of John, whom Herod killed "with the sword" (Acts 12:2). The Bible has Jesus imply, in John 21:18-19, that Simon Peter will die by crucifixion, but such an event is not recorded in the text.

The question is, how did the other apostles die? More importantly, how does anyone know? Where textual evidence is lacking, tradition has obliged, and a wide variety of local legends sprang up in medieval times about the apostles' journeys and eventual deaths. But most of these traditions are late, invented hundreds of years after the fact, and lack any basis in earlier evidence. They are simply stories, tall tales. Such popular myths provide no support whatsoever for modern Christian claims that the apostles were willingly martyred.

Below is a brief survey of what history has to say about the apostles, and what sources our traditions draw from:

article continued:

www.daylightatheism.org/2...s-die.html