Apostle

by Tom Bissell

Jerome (ca. 347–420 CE): Theologian and translator.

  The Jewish War (66–73 CE): Also called the First Jewish-Roman War. Ended with the destruction of the Second Temple.

  John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407 CE): Preacher and bishop. Instrumental in deepening Christian hostility toward both paganism and Judaism.

  Josephus (37–ca. 100 CE): Jewish historian and defector to the Romans during the Jewish War. His histories are the source of much of our information about first-century Palestine outside the New Testament.

  Justin Martyr (ca. 100–ca. 165 CE): Early Christian apologist and martyr.

  Maccabaean Revolt (167–160 BCE): Jewish revolt against the Seleucids. Its leaders founded the Hasmonaean dynasty.

  Marcionism: After Marcion (ca. 85–ca. 165), a heterodox Christian who assembled his own proto–New Testament. Regarded the Jewish God as inferior to the Christian God.

  Nag Hammadi: Egyptian city where an important cache of early heterodox Christian texts was discovered in 1945.

  Origen (ca. 184–ca. 254 CE): Christianity’s first great theologian. Among the first to fuse Greek philosophical concepts onto Christian thinking. Later branded a heretic by the Catholic Church.

  Papias of Hierapolis (?–155 CE): Bishop and chronicler. Apparently wrote a quintology titled Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord, none of whose volumes are extant. His work survives only through limited citations by other early Christian writers.

  Polycarp (ca. 69–ca. 155): Bishop and martyr. Alleged to have known John the apostle.

  Pseudo-Clementine Literature: Collection of second-century Jewish Christian pseudepigrapha. Purportedly written by Clement of Rome.

  Qumran: Archaeological site in Palestine. Where a collection of nearly one thousand texts used by the Essenes, and today known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, were collected between 1946 and 1956.

  Second Revolt (132–136 CE): Also known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt. Was the last and most severe Jewish rebellion against Rome.

  Seleucid Dynasty (305–63 BCE): Founded by Seleucus, former infantry general of Alexander the Great. Major force in the cultural Hellenization of the Near East.

  Septuagint: The Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. What most of the authors of the New Testament knew as holy scripture.

  Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke. From synoptic, or “seen together,” due to their obvious similarities and reliance on similar traditions.

  Syriac Christianity: Form of Christianity with perhaps the strongest historical ties to Palestinian Christianity, that is, the Christianity of Jesus’s earliest followers.

  Tertullian (ca. 160–ca. 225 CE): First great theologian of the Latin-speaking world. Ferocious heresiologist. Eventually joined heterodox Christian cult.

  Acknowledgments

  * * *

  Thank you to Jay Rubenstein, Dana Prescott, John Thavis, Arman Schwartz, Suzy Hansen, Andrei Bondarev, and Gideon Lewis-Kraus for accompanying me on my apostolic travels. Thank you, too, to everyone who spoke to me, especially Hal Taussig, who was the first.

  Thank you to the American Academy in Rome, the Black Mountain Institute at UNLV (especially Carol Harter and Richard Wiley), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their support during the writing of this book.

  Thank you to John Alford, Jamie Quatro, Dan Josefson, Pauls Toutonghi, and William Heyward for early, helpful reads of this book, and to Hendrik Dey for his scholarly expertise.

  Thank you to Ronnie Scott, Ted Genoways, and Bill Buford and Jason Wilson for publishing sections of this book in, respectively, The Lifted Brow, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Travel Writing 2010.

  Thank you to Dan Frank, Walter Donohue, and, as always, Andrew Miller for editorial faith and support.

  Thank you to my family and friends.

  Thank you to Trisha Miller, my heart’s Pantokrator.

  Thank you to my daughter, Mina, who taught me there are things greater than finishing a book.

  Bibliography

  * * *

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  ———. Jude and the Relatives of Jesus in the Early Church. 1990. Reprint, London: T & T Clark International, 2004.

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  ———. The Death of the Messiah: From Gethsemane to the Grave: A Commentary on the Passion Narratives in the Four Gospels. Vols. 1 and 2. 1994. Reprint, New York: Doubleday, 1998.

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ly nonpriestly family had taken over the high priesthood.) The ancient writer who had the most to say about the Essenes was Josephus. In his Life, he admitted to spending time in the desert with an ascetic hermit named Bannus, very likely a former Essene, and in The Jewish War described the Essenes as “peculiarly attached to each other…They possess no one city but everywhere have large colonies.” Not much else was known about them until the late 1940s, when a number of their scrolls—now called the Dead Sea Scrolls—were discovered in the spectacularly spooky caves at Khirbet Qumran about nine miles south of Jericho. The Qumran community, as it is known, is thought to have lived in this area for around two hundred years. Many questions concerning this community remain unresolved: Was the Qumran community’s collection of recovered scrolls a comprehensive library or a hastily gathered and just-as-hastily hidden cache of documents? If Essenism was so opposed to the encroachment of Hellenism, why are so many of its texts in Greek? Was the Qumran settlement a working community, a hostel for like-minded travelers, or a monastery of some kind? Was the community there a klatch of self-obsessed fanatics or representative of the larger beliefs of Essenism? Did this community have anything in common with early Christianity? This forces one back to the question of how reliable the gospel accounts of early Christian history really are. Whether one believes they are accurate generally, completely, or not very, there can be no doubt that part of the gospels’ intent was to accommodate. Not to obfuscate, or to betray theological principals, but to provide enough room for those teetering on the brink of belief to fall across the threshold of the faith being advocated. What is so striking about the work of the Qumran community is that it is not at all accommodating. The reason the Dead Sea Scrolls are not accommodating is they were never edited. Instead, they were hidden by people who never had the opportunity to go back for them, for the simple reason that they were killed during the Jewish War. (According to Josephus, the Romans were especially brutal when dealing with the Essenes, “subjecting them to every torture yet invented.”) One is thus left with a surprising realization: until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of the surviving work that covers the time of Jesus—which is to say, the gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, and Josephus—was written by those seeking accommodation. The earliest, preedited forms the first Christian writings took may well have resembled the Qumran writings in their spiritual extremism. Were we to have any access to those writings, the linkages between the Dead Sea Scrolls and early Christianity might be clearer and more startling.

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  ———. On the Apostolic Preaching. Translated by John Behr. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997.

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