Good afternoon. I'm David Bercot and this afternoon we're going to be going through Matthew 10 in the Historic Faith Commentary Series on Matthew, at least the first half of Matthew. And the portion of chapter 10 we're going to be focusing on exclusively is the choosing of the 12 apostles. So let's just start off with the significance of the number 12. I think as all of us realize any Bible student, the correlation between 12 apostles and 12 tribes of Israel.
And just as ancient Israel, the physical nation of Israel had 12 tribes, spiritual Israel, the Israel of God, was built on 12 apostles. What does the word apostle mean? The Greek word apostolos means someone who is sent forth, but it has a little bit greater significance in that. Where we see the word in Scripture, like in the Septuagint, it often is referring to an ambassador. So this is someone who's not just sent forth, but sent forth with authority to speak on behalf of the one who sent him.
So the apostles weren't just people who were sent out. They were sent out with authority. They could speak authoritatively in representing Jesus Christ. The twelve served as the primary foundation stones of the church built, of course, upon Jesus Christ. Now when we speak of the twelve, say in the book of Acts and thereafter, it's talking about the 11 faithful apostles without Judas and Matthias. Now, when I was young, I thought the 12 meant the 11 faithful plus Paul, and a lot of Christians still think that today.
But Paul himself talks about the twelve. They're in Acts, and obviously it's not including him. It's talking about a period before he was even an apostle, and it's talking about after Judas was dead. So Matthias was the person the Holy Spirit picked to replace Judas. Those were the twelve. Now, a lot of Christians have the notion, I've even read books that treat the twelve like they were kind of Jugheads. They really didn't do anything very great. We think of Paul as his really great personage.
But the 12, yeah, we think more about their flaws. For two reasons, we get to read about their lives before they were filled with the Holy Spirit, and we see all of the flaws during that time. Paul, we just know that he persecuted the Christians. We don't read about the other part of Paul other than that one fact, and then he has a miraculous conversion. He receives the Holy Spirit, and then we know about his life thereafter.
We don't have this long description of all the mistakes he made before he was filled with the Holy Spirit, but we do with the 12. Plus, because of their humility, even though it was among them who were writing the four gospels, they talk about their faults, not their strengths. It's a sign of what humble great leaders they actually were. But we also forget about what they actually accomplished. Now think about it, after Jesus died, there was no church at that time.
You had disciples, maybe several hundred disciples. There might have been even several thousand. I mean, they would have been scattered. They wouldn't have been together in any kind of uniform organization or anything like that. You only had 120 who were meeting for prayer there in Jerusalem. Now, from there on the day of Pentecost, how many people were added? 3,000. And just a short time later, their number grew to 5,000.
Now, I know what it's like in shepherding a church that grows, say, from 12, and then a year later, maybe you have 30 or 40 people. And wow, it's a lot of work to still keep everything going smoothly. You start having divisions or dissatisfied people and all of that. That's just growing from 12 to 30 or 40. Imagine growing from 120 to 3,000 or adding 3, 000 in one day. And then just a short time later, adding another 2,000. I mean, what incredible organizers these apostles were.
What incredible leaders that it didn't just descend into chaos. It didn't break up into a whole bunch of churches like what would happen today. They were one single church, the same church that we have now 2,000 years later, it's still here. So these 12 apostles were amazing men, not amazing in their own strength, but the power the Holy Spirit gave them. But Jesus chose them well.
I mean, he didn't choose people who were ignorant and would do a poor job, which some books I've read indicate that, oh yeah, they were just, you know, regular people who didn't have anything special about them. They were unlearned, untrained people, but no, they were special men of faith who Jesus saw all of this leadership ability in them.
And because of their hard work, because of their godliness, I maybe first became aware of them as how wonderful they were when I started reading the early Christians and I was used to reading Protestant books that kind of slammed them and this sort of thing. And then you read the early Christians and they're always talking about how great these men were and what all they accomplished and how they got the church established and all of that.
That first, I think, is when I became aware of what special men that they were. And they were so looked up to by the early Christians that very soon after their death, Christians started naming their sons after the apostles. And that was a tradition that then continued. It still goes on today, but not near to the same extent. After, say, the 1960s and people have gone to other names than the apostles or even biblical names for their children.
Even among Christians, the name of the apostles aren't as popularly chosen today as they were, say, 100 years ago. But as recently as 1960, among the ten most popular boys ' names were three of the apostles. They were John, James, and Thomas. The three, you know, among the 10 most popular boys ' names, three of them were from the apostles. So that's what remarkable men they were, the impact that they had on human history. Now, the New Testament provides us with four lists of the apostles.
We find them in the gospel of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then also in the book of Acts. And although these were written by three different men, those four books, the four lists are harmonious, varying from each other only with respect to the alternate names that Bartholomew and Thaddeus had. And the fact that they aren't precisely uniform shows they weren't just copying from one another, but they were using independent sources, and yet they are harmonious. Now, Matthew sets forth his list.
He puts them in six pairs. We don't know why he puts them in pairs other than Jesus sent them out in twos, and these may have been the pairing that Jesus did when he sent them out. In fact, because right after it listed twelve, then he sends them out in two, so it's very likely the reason. And this is the list that Matthew gives us. First, Peter and Andrew, second, James and John. Third, Philip and Bartholomew. Fourth Thomas and Matthew. Fifth James Son of Alphaeus and Thaddeus.
And finally, Simon, I'm sorry, Simon, the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot. So let's just go down this list and talk a little bit about these 12 men. Some of them we know very little about, and some we have quite a good deal of history. Now, all of the lists of the apostles always start with Peter. And this wasn't because Peter was the first disciple or the first apostle chosen, because the first disciple was actually Andrew from the record that we have in the book of John.
Peter was actually chosen after Andrew, chosen as a disciple, I should say. Jesus chose all 12 apostles at the same time. Now, Peter, his original name was Simon, and he and his brother Andrew were both fishermen. They were both from the village of Bethsaida, which is right on the Sea of Galilee. Simon is the Greek form of the Hebrew name Simeon. Who was Simeon? Well, he was one of the 12 sons of Jacob or Israel, the leader of one of the 12 tribes of Israel.
Now, when Andrew brought Simon to Jesus, Jesus said to him, this is recorded in John, Jesus said, " You are Simon, son of Jonah, you shall be called Cephas. " Now Cephas or Kephas is perhaps the more correct pronunciation, is the Aramaic form of the name Peter, and both Cephas and Peter mean rock. And from the very start, Jesus singled out Peter for leadership among the twelve. He saw in Peter some very strong rock-like qualities that would make him the natural leader.
In fact, we see in just the accounts before he was given any special leadership position, I mean, he just becomes the natural leader of the twelve. We see a lot of human qualities in him that the Holy Spirit had to work with, but these same qualities were able to be honed into a tremendous leader. After his resurrection, it was Peter that Jesus spoke to and gave him the commission to feed my sheep.
And we see that Peter assumed this responsibility when we go to Acts is like a totally different man than what we read in the gospels, part of which is because he had received the Holy Spirit, and part of it is because he's not writing the account, pointing out his faults. It's Luke writing the account probably from his own eyewitness accounts or from accounts of other people. And yeah, we see the good side of Peter and the abilities that he had. They reveal the special status.
He's definitely the leader of the twelve by the time they meet together on Pentecost. He's the one who stood up and said, " We need to pick somebody to take the place of Judas. " It was also Peter who addressed the crowd along with the other 11, but it was Peter who did the talking on the day of Pentecost, talked to the crowd that led to 3,000 of them being baptized. It was Peter who did the initial evangelism there at the temple. He along with John.
It was Peter who dealt very decisively with the sin of Ananias and Sapphira. Their lying to the Holy Spirit. It was Peter and John who went down to Samaria and laid their hands on the converts there so that they could receive the Holy Spirit. It was Peter who God sent to Cornelius, the first uncircumcised Gentile convert to Christianity. It was Peter that God sent to open the door to the Gentiles. Finally, it was Peter who was the first one to speak at the Jerusalem Council that was on the issue of circumcision.
And do the Gentiles have to obey the provisions of the law? Peter was the first one to speak. In fact, he was the only of the 12 apostles who spoke there at that council. And yet he was a servant leader. You never read about him lording it over the other apostles.
The early Christians tell us and we can see it there in the book of Acts that rather than assuming the leadership of the church in Jerusalem that Peter wanted James, not James the apostle, but James the brother of Jesus to be the first leader of the church. And we see him acting in that position in the book of Acts. So it shows the humility of Peter that he was a servant leader. Now, Acts ends with his ministry there in Jerusalem, although he traveled to other places like to Caesarea.
He didn't just stay in Jerusalem. But after the book of Acts was written or maybe even before it was written, yes, because once Paul is converted, then Luke travels with Paul, and we don't hear very much after that about the other 12 apostles. But we do know that Peter had a ministry across the whole Mediterranean world. In his letter, he mentioned some of the places. It would indicate he ministered in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia.
And we also know from the early Christians that he ministered in Rome. In fact, he was in Rome when Nero was in power, he was in prison, and he died as a martyr at the same time as Paul. But Paul was a Roman citizen, and so he was beheaded. But Peter, not being a Roman citizen, he was crucified. And Eusebius, the church historian, tells us that at his own request, Peter asked to be crucified upside down. And one of the other early Christians said it was out of his humility.
He didn't feel worthy to die in the same manner that his Lord did. Even though he was going to be crucified, he preferred to be upside down just, you know, to show that he did not consider himself worthy to die like Jesus did. All right, the next apostle Matthew mentions was Andrew, and his is a Greek name that comes from Greek, Andreas, which means manly. Andrew was the brother of Peter, and as I mentioned before, he's the first recorded disciple of Jesus.
The fact that he bore a Greek name is just a reflection of the fact that there were a lot of Gentiles who lived in Galilee. Andrew was not a Gentile, he was a Jew, but you had a lot of Greek speaking Jews because of the Gentile influence there. So Andrew, no doubt, same as Peter. I mean, Peter wrote his two letters in Greek that they were evidently fluent in both Aramaic and Greek. Andrew had been a disciple of John the Baptist, and he had heard John say about Jesus, " Behold the Lamb of God.
" And, you know, he and another unnamed disciple then followed Jesus. Now, unlike Peter, Andrew was not part of the inner core of three, which was Peter, James, and John. Even though Andrew was Peter's brother, and even though he was one of the twelve, for some reason he was not part of that inner core of three. And after the first chapter of Acts, he's not mentioned any further in Scripture, not because he bowed out of the scene. No, he was just faithful in working in his ministry.
Now, Eusebius reports that his eventual field of ministry was Scythia, which is the area that is above the Black Sea. We're talking about above Greece and that region there. It was a fairly wild region, barbarian people there, so he did not have an easy assignment. It's where he ended up. Now let's move to James, the son of Zebedee. There were actually two apostles that were named James, so Matthew distinguishes them by calling the first one James the son of Zebedee.
He was the brother of John, and he was part of that inner three that I was speaking of of Peter, James, and John. On several occasions, Jesus took just those three with him. One of them was when they went to heal the daughter of Jairus, who actually had died, I should say, to raise her from the dead. The second time was a transfiguration, and then the third is in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he went with those three alone to pray by or near them.
He went a distance away from them, but he took those three with them away from the rest of the 12. And there were probably a lot of other incidents, so they were part of the inner core of Jesus ' ministry. Now, in all of the lists of the apostles, it always says James and then John, never the other way around. And yet John is certainly the more prominent of the two. So because of that, most people think James was probably the older of the two, and that's why he's listed first rather than John and James.
They say James and John. He also has the distinction of being the first of the apostles to die and the first one to die as a martyr. It was during the time of Herod Agrippa, who's the grandson of Herod the Great, who had tried to kill Jesus as a baby, and he was beheaded because it pleased the Jews. And so His ministry ended very early. And it's interesting Jesus chose him to be part of the inner three. And yet, for whatever reason, known only to Jesus, he did not allow him to live very long.
Maybe he wanted one of those inner three to set the example of martyrdom to give strength to the rest. Now, one of the things I discovered when I started going through this in reading the early Christians is they don't know him as James. They know him as Jacob. And they're always talking about him as Jacob. I'm not talking about the translations. I'm saying the things that they say they are relating him to the patriarch Jacob. And so, you know, I was looking at the Greek and I saw, well, that is his name.
It's Jacobus in Greek or Jacobus would be the correct pronunciation. It's not anything like James. So then I started digging as like, " Where did we come up with this name James? " And what I found out, it was interesting. I spent about a day on this, which was probably maybe not the most worthwhile research, but I was just really curious how if his name is Jacob, why on earth do we call him James?
And what happened in Europe, or at least in England, but some other countries like Portugal, his Latin name was Jacobus, not very different from the Greek name. But when these different barbarian tribes became Romanized and took on Latin, they didn't always pronounce it correctly. And so some of them were pronouncing his name, or I should say mispronouncing his name, as Yakomus with an M instead of a B. So that was the first step. And over a number of centuries, I mean, this took a long time.
Yakomus got shortened to Yamus. Okay, now we're getting very close to the name James. Well, then at some point later in the Middle Ages, the Latin letter I turned into the English letter J. And in many of those countries, they began pronouncing it as a J. So Yamus became Jamis, and then from there it was easy from Jamis to James. So that's why we end up with his name as James. Well, then I got thinking, why do we have the name Jacob then? Why in the Old Testament do we read about Jacob and not James?
Well, somehow both names, this is very unusual. Both names survived James and Jacob as distinct names. And when the Wycliffe translators, I'm talking about John Wycliffe or his disciples who translated the Wycliffe Bible, they came up with the idea. Maybe it was not a bad idea. When they talk about the Old Testament character, they call him James, I mean Jacob. And then when they talk about the New Testament people, not only the apostles, but also James, the brother of Jesus, they call him James.
And that's what the Wycliffe Bible translators did, just to distinguish the two. And then Tyndale decided to follow that example, and then the King James translators, and now it's so fixed. I mean, to try to change that would confuse everybody. But just as a matter of interest, his name is actually Jacob. And that's why you see several James's in the New Testament. It's like, why is that such a popular Jewish name? Well, it was popular because the name was Jacob, not James.
Okay, now let's move to John, who probably next to Peter is the best known apostle, and he was likewise the son of Zebedee, the brother of James. He not only wrote one of the gospels, but he also penned the book of Revelation and three letters as well, fairly short letters. But in all, five books of the New Testament were written by John. And the name John comes from the Greek form of the Hebrew name Johannan.
And in the days of Jesus, this was also a popular name, and it's why you run into a number of people named John. Now, it got popular during the days of the Maccabees, who you only read about if you're using the Septuagint or using a Bible that includes the books from the Septuagint, the Book of Maccabees, and there were several members of the Maccabee family who had the name John. Both the founder of the dynasty and then the most famous was John Hyrcanus who brought Judea into becoming a separate nation.
They won their independence from the Greeks and he established it as a separate kingdom that then conquered some of the neighboring kingdoms and was a fairly established independent kingdom during his kingship. And so that made the name John very popular and it's why there are several figures in the New Testament with that. Like his brother, the Apostle John was a fisherman. He would not have been highly educated.
He didn't have any training in the rabbinical schools, but he did speak Greek, and he wrote very decent Greek. And of all of the apostles, Jesus seems to have been especially fond of John, which would have been quite a privilege. Now, he didn't make John the leader. He made Peter the leader, but his special friend was John. John was the one who was laying on Jesus chest during the Last Supper.
And while he was dying on the cross, John spoke, I mean, Jesus spoke to John and referred to Mary as being his mother and for him and to Mary as John being Mary's son, which was understood that John was to take Mary and take care of him just like it was his own mother. So Jesus was entrusting John with something very special and privileged. I want you to take care of my mother when I'm gone, which is going to be in just a very short period of time.
John also during the final day of Jesus is of note because he followed Jesus into the courtyard of the high priest Caiaphas. And for some reason, he was personally acquainted with the Jewish high priest. We don't know why. There's no explanation given in Scripture, only that he was acquainted and he was allowed to come there. Unlike Peter, he did not deny Christ during that time. So in the next session, we're going to talk a little bit more about John, but I think I'll close today with what we've covered so far.