Theopedia

Apostle

“And when day came, he called his disciples and chose from them twelve, whom he named apostles.”

— Luke 6:13

Definition

An apostle (Greek apostolos, “one sent out”) is, in the New Testament’s strict sense, one of a definite number of men personally commissioned by the risen Jesus Christ as his authoritative, eyewitness messengers, chosen to found and instruct his church: the Twelve, and later Paul.1 The office belonged only to those who had seen the risen Christ and received the gospel by direct revelation rather than from other men. The New Testament also uses the word more loosely for an ordinary messenger or missionary sent by a church, a broader sense that carries none of the Twelve’s own authority.2

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to the apostolic office itself. Its first chapter, however, states the principle that bears most directly on whether that office continues: God committed his revelation to writing “for the better preserving and propagating of the truth … which maketh the Holy Scriptures to be most necessary, those former ways of God’s revealing his will unto his people being now ceased.”3 The apostles were themselves the human instruments of one of those “former ways” of direct revelation (see Biblical Basis, below); the confession’s own claim that such revelation has now ceased is the ground later Reformed theologians build on to argue that the office which received and transmitted it has ceased with it.1

Biblical Basis

The Twelve

According to the Gospel of Matthew (10:1-4), the Gospel of Mark (3:13-19), and the Gospel of Luke (6:12-16), Jesus chose twelve men from among his disciples early in his ministry and named them apostles:

  • Simon Peter, also called Simon bar-Jonah, named Cephas by Jesus, a fisherman from Bethsaida “of Galilee” (John 1:44; cf. John 12:21).
  • Andrew, brother of Peter, a Bethsaida fisherman and former disciple of John the Baptist.
  • John, son of Zebedee, identified in his own Gospel as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.”
  • James, son of Zebedee, John’s brother, whom Jesus called Boanerges, “Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17).
  • Philip, from Bethsaida “of Galilee” (John 1:44; 12:21).
  • Bartholomew, from the Aramaic “bar-Tolemai” (“son of Tolemai”), usually identified with Nathanael.
  • Matthew, the tax collector, sometimes identified with Levi, son of Alphaeus.
  • Thomas, also called Didymus, both the Aramaic and Greek words for “twin.”
  • James, son of Alphaeus.
  • Simon, called “the Zealot” in Luke and Acts.
  • Thaddaeus, called “Judas, son of James” in Luke’s Gospel.
  • Judas Iscariot, later Christ’s betrayer.

Qualification and the choice of Matthias

Peter, addressing the disciples after Judas’s death, set the standard for who could stand in his place: one of “the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us — one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection” (Acts 1:21-22). Two men met that description, and the remaining eleven cast lots; the lot fell to Matthias, who “was numbered with the eleven apostles” (Acts 1:26) and is never mentioned again in Scripture. Hodge notes that the stated reason for filling Judas’s place was not to keep the office in perpetual succession but specifically to supply a witness to the resurrection. He also notes that the appointment took place before the apostles had received the Spirit’s power at Pentecost (Acts 1:8), and doubts on that basis whether it carried lasting validity.4

Paul’s apostleship

Paul, not one of the Twelve, described himself as an apostle “untimely born” (1 Cor. 15:8) and as the “apostle to the Gentiles” (Rom. 11:13). When his apostleship was disputed, he defended it on the same grounds the Twelve could claim: that he had been appointed “not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:1); that he had received the gospel “through a revelation of Jesus Christ,” not from human teaching (Gal. 1:12); that he had seen the risen Christ (1 Cor. 9:1); that his teaching carried the authority of a command of the Lord (1 Cor. 14:37); that God had authenticated his mission to the Gentiles as fully as Peter’s to the Jews (Gal. 2:8); and that “the signs of a true apostle were performed among you” in signs, wonders, and mighty works (2 Cor. 12:12).5 James, Peter, and John in Jerusalem accepted his apostleship as of equal standing with their own (Gal. 2:7-9).

The apostles as the church’s foundation

Paul describes the church as “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20), and Revelation pictures the New Jerusalem’s twelve foundation stones bearing “the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:14). Strauch reads both texts as pointing to a role that, by its nature, is laid once and not repeated: “the apostles were the living links between Jesus Christ and the church.”6

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic theology holds that the apostolic office did not end with the Twelve and Paul but continues in the church’s bishops, who as their successors hold the same teaching and ruling authority, exercised supremely by the Pope as successor to Peter. Robert Bellarmine’s influential statement of the church’s marks names three: “profession of the true faith, communion in the sacraments, and subjection to the lawful pastor, the Roman Pontiff” (subjectio ad legitimum pastorem, Romanum Pontificem).7 On this view, Christ’s commission to the apostles to teach and rule the church has passed down through an unbroken chain of ordination, so that the episcopate, collectively and under the Pope, continues to exercise apostolic authority in the church today, including the authority to interpret Scripture and tradition infallibly.8

Objections and Responses

If bishops are ordained in unbroken succession from the apostles, don’t they inherit the apostles’ own authority to teach and rule? Hodge argues that authority of this kind cannot be separated from the gifts on which it depended. The apostles were qualified for their office by independent, firsthand knowledge of the gospel; by having seen the risen Christ; by an inspiration that made them individually infallible in their teaching; and by miraculous signs authenticating their mission.1 “Modern prelates do not claim to possess any one of these gifts,” he writes; they hold “the authority of the office, but not its reality.”9 He adds that the New Testament gives no command to perpetuate the apostolate, no record of successors being appointed to it, and no historical evidence of its continuance: “they disappear entirely after the death of the original twelve.”2

Doesn’t the New Testament call people other than the Twelve and Paul “apostles,” which shows the office was broader than claimed? Both Hodge and Calvin address this by distinguishing three uses of the Greek word: its bare etymological sense, “a messenger”; a looser missionary sense, applied to figures such as Andronicus and Junia, who were “of note among the apostles” (Rom. 16:7); and its strict official sense, confined to the Twelve and Paul.10 Calvin notes that while every minister sent by the Lord could, from the word’s etymology, be called an apostle, Scripture reserves the title in its proper sense for that “primary order,” which “excelled others in rank and dignity.”11 Neither Barnabas nor Silas nor Timothy is ever treated in the New Testament, or in the church’s subsequent history, as the official equal of the Twelve.10

Was Matthias legitimately the twelfth apostle, given the doubts about the timing of his selection? Hodge leaves the question open rather than forcing an answer: whatever the validity of the Matthias appointment, Christ himself, “in his own time and way, completed the number of his witnesses by calling Paul.”4 Calvin’s account of the apostolic office points to the same resolution from a different angle: because the apostles’ commission was to lay the church’s foundation “not in another man’s foundation, but where the name of his Lord was unheard,” what secured Paul’s place among them was not a procedural question about how the Eleven filled a vacancy, but Christ’s own attestation of Paul’s calling and labor.12

Related Doctrines

References

  1. Charles Hodge, “Chapter V. Roman Catholic Doctrine Concerning the Rule of Faith,” in Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 139. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:141. ↩ ↩2

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 1. ↩

  4. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:140. ↩ ↩2

  5. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:139-140. ↩

  6. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: An Urgent Call to Restore Biblical Church Leadership, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: Lewis and Roth, 1995), chap. 3. ↩

  7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:135-136. ↩

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:137-139. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:140-141. ↩

  10. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 1:141-142. ↩ ↩2

  11. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 3, sec. 5, 319. ↩

  12. Calvin, Institutes, 4.3.4, 318. ↩