The Origin of Christian Apostles

The origin of the notion of apostles in the Jesus movement is disputed.

According to Mark and Luke, Jesus chose 12 disciples and named them apostles (Mark 3:14; Luke 6:13). The textual evidence for Jesus naming His disciples apostles is slim. The part of the Gospel of Mark that mentions the event (3:14, “whom he also named apostles”) is not found in the earlier manuscripts, leaving Luke’s Gospel as the only textual evidence of the 12 disciples being called apostles (Agnew, “The Origin of the NT Apostle-Concept: A Review of Research,” 85–90).

Karl Heinrich Rengstorf argues that the apostles can be traced back to Jesus Himself. It is possible that He used the existing Jewish concept of “emissary” in choosing disciples and naming them apostles. Emissaries represented the full authority of their masters as they carried out functions on their master’s behalf (Rengstorf, “ἀπόστολος, apostolos,” 421–22, 425–27). However, the Jewish concept of emissary is not found in any sources earlier than the second century ad.

Other attempts at understanding the origin of the notion of apostles focus less on the concept of emissary and more on the terminology of sending in both the Old and New Testaments. While the noun “emissary” appears rarely in sources earlier than the New Testament, the Old Testament and the Septuagint abound with verbs meaning “to send” (שָׁלַח, shalach; ἀποστέλλειν, apostellein). The same is true of the Gospels, which include many instances of the verb “to send” but only a few instances of the noun “apostle.” Additionally, the Gospels’ descriptions of commissioning align with the Old Testament (Hahn, “Der Apostolat im Urchristentum,” 69–75).

Arnold Ehrhardt, Günter Klein, and Walter Schmithals argue that the origin of the notion of apostles cannot be traced back to Jesus. According to them, the notion of apostle developed in the early Jesus movement and its post-Easter mission. The majority of passages that use the word apostle are found in Acts and in the Pauline Letters, writings that are closely related to the missionary experience of the early Jesus movement. Thus, these scholars claim that the idea of apostles originated in the early missionary work, as new leadership figures emerged, and provided the background to the abundant use of apostle in the Pauline Letters and Acts. The Gospel writers then included the idea in their descriptions of how Jesus called His disciples (Ehrhardt, The Apostolic Ministry, 4–5; Klein, Die zwölf Apostel, 22–52; Schmithals, The Office of Apostle in the Early Church, 98–110).