The Lists That Don’t Agree
~ Sunday, January 14, 2018 ~
The four canonical gospels agree that Jesus had twelve apostles. They do not agree on who those twelve were. The discrepancy is not a matter of copyist error or manuscript corruption; it is present in the primary texts themselves, and it has been there from the beginning.
The four canonical apostolic lists appear in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Acts. Three of these are in the gospels themselves; the fourth is in the Acts of the Apostles, which is understood to be the second volume of Luke’s two-part work. Together they constitute the documentary foundation for the claim that Jesus had twelve apostles whose names are known. It is worth reading them in sequence with some care.
The structure that holds
Despite the disagreement this article will come to, the four lists share a structural consistency that is itself significant. In each one, Simon Peter is named first. Philip is fifth. James son of Alphaeus is ninth. Judas Iscariot is last. The twelve are arranged in three groups of four, and the pattern is stable across what appear to be independent traditions.
This is not coincidence. The three-group structure requires someone, at some point, to have held a specific arrangement and transmitted it with care. The tradition was not careless about the list. This makes what happens in the tenth position more striking, not less.
The tenth name
Matthew (10:3) and Mark (3:18) give the tenth place to Thaddaeus. Luke (6:16) and Acts (1:13) give it to Judas son of James. No text in the New Testament equates these two figures, explains the difference, or resolves the question. The dominant scholarly reading holds that they are the same person — that one name is a personal name and the other a patronymic for the same individual. This is a reasonable inference. It is not supported by any documentary evidence within the tradition.
Matthew’s text introduces a further complication. Some manuscript traditions of Matthew 10:3 read “Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus,” while others read simply “Thaddaeus.” This internal variation within Matthew is a secondary problem layered on the Luke/Acts discrepancy — which suggests that even within the tradition’s own transmission, the tenth name was not held with the stability the others were.
The harmonization of Thaddaeus with Judas son of James exists because we require the lists to produce a coherent Twelve. It is worth acknowledging that this requirement belongs to us, not to the texts.
John’s position
The Gospel of John offers no formal apostolic list. It is the most theologically developed gospel in the canon, and it makes no systematic effort to distinguish apostles from disciples, enumerate the Twelve, or record who was or was not among them. John’s Judas son of Simon Iscariot appears; a Thomas appears; a Philip; an Andrew. But John does not compile a roster. It does not treat the apostolic circle as an institution requiring documentation.
This is unlikely to be oversight. John was writing for an audience that knew the synoptic tradition. The omission reads less like a gap than like a position — that the category of apostle, as the synoptics attempted to fix it, was not something John regarded as fixed.
A category, not a register
The New Testament uses the word “apostle” for people who are not among the synoptic Twelve. Paul calls himself an apostle throughout his letters. He extends the title to Barnabas. In Romans 16:7 he calls Andronicus and Junia “outstanding among the apostles.” The Didache, a community handbook of approximately 100 CE, uses the term for itinerant missionaries with no documented connection to Jerusalem or the synoptic circle.
“Apostle” appears to have been, for much of the first century, a functional description — one who is sent — rather than a restricted title for a closed group. The Twelve were apostles, but they were not the only apostles, and the category was not under the control of any institution that could enforce its limits.
None of this dissolves the significance of the Twelve. What it does is locate that significance accurately: not in a perfectly preserved list, but in a tradition that was plural, contested, and alive.
In this series
- The Seventy and the Problem of Names
- Paul’s Argument
- What Nag Hammadi Did to the Record
- The Number Beyond the Count
- The Missions North of the Danube
Sources
- Matthew 10:1–4; Mark 3:13–19; Luke 6:12–16; Acts 1:13 (primary texts). Nestle-Aland, Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2012).
- Meeks, Wayne A. The First Urban Christians. Yale University Press, 1983.
- Romans 16:7 (primary text, on Andronicus and Junia).
- Didache (c. 100 CE), chapters 11–13 (primary text on traveling apostles).