Emanuel Swedenborg did not deny that Paul was an apostle but he and the church he founded (The New Church or Swedenborgian Church which is still around in various forms) rejected his doctrine and teachings. There is even the suggestion in some of his writings that Paul resides in Hell.
There were many disciples of Jesus while he was on Earth. He chose the Twelve over a period of time from the large group of disciples that followed and learned from him. Many of his disciples came to him from John the Baptist’s disciples. He eventually commissioned his 12 closest disciples as the Twelve Apostles.
Apostles go out and spread a message, disciples are followers or students. Some of his disciples later became apostles, including the Twelve.
But when taking about the Twelve Disciples or Twelve Apostles, the key word, I believe, is Twelve. They were the chosen 12 among many other disciples and apostles.
What is the canonical numerology behind 12? Why were 12 apostles chosen, and not 15 or 8?
12 sons of Jacob who founded the 12 tribes of Israel.
Not answering the OP at all, but Mandaeism is a religion that reveres "Adam, Abel, Seth, Enos, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist (Jesus’ buddy), but not Jesus himself. Caodaism similarly likes an eclectic bunch of figures.
In Luke 10:1-24, there’s a reference to 72 Disciples. I’m not sure whether this is the second stratum of followers or if the 72 includes the 12 Apostles, but when Matthias was tapped (by the main 12) to replace Judas, I assume this is the pool he was selected from.
Wiki mentions some later Apostles: Barnabas, Andronicus and Junia, Silas, Timothy and Apollos. These are mentioned ONLY in the Pauline letters, not the Gospels, so I’m guessing they never got shown the fraternity handshake either. It looks like Paul authorized his own apostolic lineage.
Why did they NEED a replacement? Was there some special significance to the number 12 that they needed to make up a quorum (or a minyan) for their collective to have legitimacy?
BTW, are there any tales about the guy[s] Matthias beat out?
The 12 apostles would judge over the 12 tribes of israel. So that’s the reason apparently for why there was 12 apostles, however it doesn’t answer the question why 12 tribes.
Nm
I wonder if he was even the last. Maybe they recruited a new apostle every time an old one died or defected, and there’s a continuation to the present day?
IIUC the Roman Catholic Church considers the popes to be the line of succession from Peter (of the original Twelve); but I haven’t heard of any of the other apostles having a continuous line of successors.
How many tribes should there have been?
Biblically it appears to be 12 - though IDK the reason for 12.
I’ve heard one telling that 13 may be a answer - but really 12, as in one of the known 12 is false (such as Judas was a false apostle - basically put there by the enemy). With this, there was both one tribe of Israel and also one apostle displaced by this.
That false tribe is apparently the tribe of Levi - the tribe who was the religious ruling class, the one that Jesus identified as sons of the devil, and also like the false apostle Judas in control of the money.
It goes back to Genesis and the biblical patriarch Jacob, who was literally renamed Israel by god and had 12 sons whose issue and descendants would would go on to form the 12 tribes, with the Levites (from Levi) not having lands as they were designated to provide priests.
Not that any of that ever happened, but that’s the story in the OT.
As an aside, The Gospel of Judas (2nd century) describes Judas as the bestest disciple, not a false one, but I’m not sure the Gnostic Christians had any specific problem with Paul or vice versa? This was mentioned above but not in detail.
There almost certainly were in the earliest times, during Paul’s life. We have, as example, early works chronicling the dispute between Cerinthus and Paul.
Those groups would likely have had some writings, presuming that it’s true that the apostles wrote down everything they could remember as soon as Jesus died. At the worst case, they would have had access to the real apostles. But they wouldn’t have had a formulated “Bible”.
Over time, these groups matured and do seem to have standardized a bit. I might posit that the most advanced form of these would be the Elkasaites:
We can directly trace, through small and scattered references, some (and likely most) of the church of Jerusalem to the Elkasaites, Essenes, and Nazoreans.
There’s decent evidence (for low values of decency) that St. Thomas traveled between what would be modern day Armenia and Western India, teaching a form of Christianity from before Paul’s influence touched it. However…
In my personal read of the situation, in the early years of Christianity around the Mediterranean, we basically had three major centers of the religion, Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch.
Early on, in Egypt, we see some ascetics and such who might have been non-Pauline, but they seem to have been pushed out from Alexandria (see the Desert Fathers and Mothers) and replaced with Pauline adherents in the city.
In Antioch, while there was some early struggle between Cerinthus and Paul, there does seem to have been an effort made to go along with the ordains of the Council of Jerusalem and accept that Paul was indeed a revelatory apostle and that his teachings and those understood by Jesus in-person apostles needed to be unified into a single, compromise doctrine.
Antioch had the misfortune (I assume) of having more documentation of known authenticity from the in-person apostles and regularly schismed, leading eventually to the Nestorian Crisis
But two against three (Alexandria and Rome against Antioch), the vote went against the Nestorians and their expulsion largely ended any divide in the Mediterranean area.
Having been expelled, though, the Nestorians seem to have migrated over into the same area that St. Thomas had taught in. Plausibly, that whole area had been keeping up with Antioch teaching the whole duration. In either case, the best we have found from India is a document written by the Spanish, who had come in and conquered the region, detailing all of the books they were burning that had been forming the basis of the Christian religion there. The majority of those works seem to be, clearly, Nestorian - e.g. likely 5th century or later. The Syriac and Hebrew works (ignoring the one about Nestorian priests) would be the most likely to have a history dating back to the 2nd century, but it would be impossible to say much without the actual works to reference. The Exposition of the Gospels sounds to me like it’s probably something from the 150-300 range. It sounds like a work based on research not personal knowledge, but research done early enough that there were still sources surviving from which one could confidently* make such claims and of sufficient variety as to make that wideness of claims.
In the Arabic regions, we have continued tales along the lines of the Elkasaites. Manichaeism is often treated, from what I can tell, as the largely novel work of Mani. But, as best I recall, it seemed largely parallel to most descriptions of the much earlier Elkasaites. I believe that Mani was raised in an Elkasaite home, so it’s probably more fair to say that he was a popular Elkasaite teacher whose own works were probably grafted into the religion.
I believe that I was also able to trace, at some point, either Mani or Elkasai (I think it was Elkasai given the Arabic name - Al-Qasai) over to Armenia or India through some Arabic sources. We can probably expect the Elkasaite/Manichaean religions to be somewhat similar to what St. Thomas preached.
Through a variety discovered caches of documents plus small quotations and descriptions that have come down through the ages, we have a variety of writings that are likely non-Pauline. But the presumption that they are non-Pauline largely comes from the presumption that there was a schism, that we are tracing that schism, and that the schism was related to the differences of belief between the Jewish church and the Pauline church.
But, not finding Paul in the scraps of documents and descriptions that we have, you can’t say authoritatively that Paul won’t appear in the next one we discover. Something like the Nestorian documents, which are explicitly anti-Rome, we can certainly say have no intention of having any Pauline influence but we can’t be certain that they didn’t gain something from him (nor from others) over the centuries.
And due to what seems to have been a genuine intent to form a compromise religion very early on, and regular destruction (and loss) of documents though the millennia, very little that we can reliably say is very old has survived. And anyone on the Orthodox side of things will argue that the dates for those should be very late, basing it on claims like that Gnostics didn’t exist in the 1st century - regardless that early Christian writers of the early 2nd century wrote about 1st century Gnostics.
If you simply want a list of works that seem liable to inform you of what non-Pauline Christianity would look like, I could probably put one together. But you would really need to read through all of it and try to determine what parts seem consistent, on your own.
I’m not, personally, terribly interested in the teachings of Jesus. There are specific things like vegetarianism and asceticism that seem sufficiently documented over a sufficiently large area in places that seem to owe their influence to the non-Pauline apostles - and are readily identifiable in the materials - that they’re useful to help identify camps, and use that to identify more camps. But there’s sufficient difference in more esoteric theology that trying to work out the original is more of a PITA than I would care to commit to for something that is, at the end of the day, in my mind just nonsense mysticism. My interest is simply to determine the history of who did what, when, and how that moved across the map.
But here, for example, is something that seems like a fairly trustworthy early document that Paul seems unlikely to endorse:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Didache_(Lightfoot_translation)
If you want more, I’ll try to follow up later.
- Confidence == Correctness
I figured out what I was thinking of. I believed that I had identified that Bardaisan is plausibly the person later called Elkasai (al-khasai / the hidden god). Personal hypothesis, not fact. But his work would be a good example of (as best I can tell) non-Pauline Christian belief:
It would appear that Positive Christianity may fit the bill for the OP’s question.
That said, it’s unclear to what extent Positive Christianity was a genuine religion altogether, since the driving force was largely the subversion of Christianity into Nazi ideology, and it failed to supplant Christianity in Germany as intended. My guess is that while it didn’t catch on to nearly the extent the Nazi leadership intended, it probably had some mass following to one extent or another. But I don’t know.
Bee-czar
If you get rid of all the Jewish written parts of the Bible, that doesn’t leave you with much. Luke, minus any quotes from Jesus, and a couple of letters?
Not really. I think one of the core premises of this religious was that Jesus wasn’t Jewish altogether.
The sense I get is that they believed that Jesus was a tough guy rebel and rabble-rouser, which they identified with, but that Paul had subverted that approach into this Nice Guy turn-the-other-cheek Christianity which was incompatible with Nazi ideology and attitudes. More from Wiki: