Christianity begins with a body presumed missing, which is then raised up from the dead. ("Okay, so we killed him, but only for three days", runs the Jewish joke.) Jesus, a Jewish rabboni, or teacher, had dared to confound the Temple authorities by returning to life.
Pier Paolo Pasolini's great film, The Gospel According to Matthew (1964), locates the sepulchre in the biblical-like landscape of Italy's remote Basilicata region ( where, 40 years later, Mel Gibson would make his lurid Christ extravaganza, The Passion of the Christ). With the word "Saint" pointedly omitted from the title, Pasolini's film was dedicated to John XXIII, the first pope to open up a dialogue between Catholicism and Marxism.
The Italian director’s solidarity with the apostles, at heart romantic, mingled an intellectual leftism with a fierce Franciscan Catholicism. Blessed are the poor, for they are exempt from the unholy trinity of materialism, money and property – a message that took hold in the late 1950s with Roman Catholic liberation theology.
Tom Bissell, in his new book Apostle, sets out in search of the 12 disciples and their putative resting places. It's a quixotic undertaking that takes the author (a US-born lapsed Catholic) from Syria to India, Jerusalem, Kyrgyzstan and, inevitably, Rome. There Bissell contemplates Counter-Reformation painters such as Caravaggio, whose roughshod, pauperist Catholicism looked forward to the religious cinema of Pasolini.
The naturalist intensity of Caravaggio’s saints and apostles glowed with such a cinematic intensity that a sinister illusion was suspected. (Where the Renaissance had seen the apostles draped in Hellenic folds and sandals, Bissell reminds us, Caravaggio used tavern boys and barefoot prostitutes as his models.) Gruesomely, Caravaggio’s St Thomas is shown inserting his finger into the bloodless, “almost labial” wound in Jesus’ side.
Of particular interest to Bissell is Paul, who was not one of Jesus’s original 12 disciples. The chapter on the Jewish future saint, who was born Saul, vividly reimagines the Gentile Mediterranean following Christ’s death. The letter Paul wrote to the Romans circa AD 55, one of western civilization’s “central documents”, insists on salvation through the reborn Jesus.
After his conversion on the road to Damascus in AD 33, Paul, the former Pharisee and persecutor of Christians, took his mission around the world and became the founding father of the Christian Church in Rome, with its hierarchy of prelates and pontiffs.
Paul’s remains
The Bible does not say when or how the apostle Paul died; according to early tradition he was martyred. His remains are today “purportedly” held within Rome’s second-largest basilica, St Paul’s Outside- the-Walls, which Bissell visits.
In Caravaggio's dramatic Conversion of St Paul, the Tarsus-born apostle lies prone beneath his horse on the dirt road to what is now the Syrian capital, his arms outstretched in mute supplication. The notion of Paul being knocked from his horse is "extra-scriptural", says Bissell, and was probably the fantasy of Counter-Reformation artists, yet it persists.
With the exceptions of Doubting Thomas and Judas Iscariot (“the most despised betrayer in human history”), most of the disciples lack a clear personality or role. Bartholomew, Jude, Philip: how did these ordinary men become paragons of Christian virtue?
What we do know is that they were the first to partake of the Eucharist tradition – “This is My body” and “This is My blood”, Jesus announced at the Last Supper – and they were present at Jesus’s agonising moment in the Garden of Gethsemane. Much else remains obscure.
Bissell's book, a colourful amalgam of travel and theological speculation, restores a sense of character to the Twelve. Jesus named the fisherman Peter "the rock" (petra) on which the church would be built and handed him the spiritual keys for the task. Yet the New Testament does not agree on how many apostles there were, or even what their names were.
And again: were they in fact apostles – that is, messengers – or just disciples, which hints at a less active role? Peter, the chosen key keeper and rock, might well be the “Prince of the Apostles”, but much else about him in Petrine literature is distinctly murky. No fewer than six names are used for Peter in the New Testament: Simon, Simon Peter, Simeon, Simeon Peter, Peter and Cephas.
The first gospel to be written, by Mark, tells us that Simon is the one “to whom Jesus gave the name Peter”. Matthew’s gospel, the most Jewish of the four (every recorded act of Jesus is shown in it to be rooted in Jewish scripture) relates that a certain Simon of Cyrene was at one point “compelled” to carry Christ’s cross when it became too heavy. How many Simons are there in the Bible?
In the course of his research, Bissell visits nine countries, more than 50 churches and as many apostolic reliquaries.
Some of what he says is contentious, such as: “History does not record a single member of the Twelve, with the possible exception of Peter, as having had any particular impact on early Christianity.” Really?
The Gospel According to John, the most virulently anti-Jewish of the gospels, claims to rely on eyewitness testimony. Johannine literature (from the Hebrew Yohanan, "God has been gracious") has a fierce and uncompromising view of what it means to believe in Jesus, and offers scant consolation to those who sin.
The Nasrani
From the beginning, Christianity had an ascetic edge. The first Christians, a messianic Jewish sect, adhered to circumcision and Mosaic law, and were known to outsiders as Nazarenes. (Even today, the Arabic word for “Christian” is
Nasrani
.) Christianity remained predominantly Jewish for several years following the death of Jesus, Bissell reminds us, and did not detach from Judaism definitively until AD 70, when Roman legions under Titus destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem.
Rome, not Jerusalem, is of course the city to which all Catholic roads now lead. By the time St Peter’s Basilica was completed in 1626 on the presumed site of the disciple’s internment, the Eternal City had become a palimpsest of buried apostolic histories and archaeologies. Much of the Baroque city as we know it was laid out by the zealous reformist Pope Sixtus V, whose urban regeneration schemes made dramatic use of the obelisks plundered from Pharaonic Egypt during the Imperial Age.)
Bissell’s informative and diverting book is the beginning of wisdom in all things apostolic, Catholic, Roman and Caravaggesque. I enjoyed it. Ian Thomson, a writer and journalist, is working on a book for Faber about the Baltic during the second World War
