Church History (Vol.1-3). J. H. Kurtz
may be. In answering this question those investigators take diverse views. Of those who cannot surrender their conviction that the Pastoral Epistles are genuine, some assign them to the Apostle’s residence of almost three years in Ephesus, others to the imprisonment in Cæsarea which lasted two years and a half, and others to the Roman imprisonment of almost three years. Others again, looking upon such expedients as inadmissible, deny the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles, these having appeared to them worthy of suspicion on other grounds.
§ 16. The Other Apostles after the Appearance of the Apostle Paul.
Only in reference to the most distinguished of the Apostles have any trustworthy accounts reached us. James the brother of John, at an early period, in A.D. 44, suffered a martyr’s death at Jerusalem. Peter was obliged by this persecution to quit Jerusalem for a time. Inclination and his special calling marked him out as the Apostle of the Jews (Gal. ii. 7–9). His ministry outside of Palestine was exercised, according to 1 Pet. i. 1, in the countries round about the Black Sea, and, according to chap. v. 13, extended to Babylon. The legend that, contemporaneously with the beheading of Paul, he suffered death by crucifixion under Nero at Rome (John xxi. 18, 19), is doubtful; and it is also questionable whether he ever went to Rome, while the story of his having down to the time of his death been Bishop of Rome for twenty-five years is wholly fabulous. John, according to the tradition of the church, took up Asia Minor as his special field of labour after it had been deprived of its first Apostle by the martyr death of Paul, fixing his residence at Ephesus. At the head of the mother church of Jerusalem stood James the Just, the brother of the Lord. He seems never to have left Jerusalem, and was stoned by the Jews between A.D. 63–69. Regarding the rest of the Apostles and their fellow-workers we have only legendary traditions of an extremely untrustworthy description, and even these have come down to us in very imperfect and corrupt forms.
§ 16.1. The Roman Episcopate of Peter.—The tradition that Peter, after having for some years held the office of bishop at Antioch, became first Bishop of Rome, holding the office for twenty-five years (A.D. 42–67), and suffered martyrdom at the same time with Paul, had its origin in the series of heretical apocryphal writings, out of which sprang, both the romance of the Clementine Homilies and Recognitions (§ 28, 3), and the Ebionite Acts of Peter; but it attained its complete form only at the end of the fourth century, after it had been transplanted into the soil of the church tradition through the Acta Petri et Pauli (§ 32, 6). What chiefly secured currency and development to this tradition was the endeavour, ever growing in strength in Rome, to vindicate on behalf of the Roman Episcopate as the legitimate successor and heir to all the prerogatives alleged to have been conferred on Peter in Matt. xvi. 18, a title to primacy over all the churches (§ 34, 8; 46, 3 ff.). But that Peter had not really been in Rome as a preacher of the gospel previous to the year A.D. 61, when Paul came to Rome as a prisoner, is evident from the absence of any reference to the fact in the Epistle to the Romans, written in A.D. 58, as well as in the concluding chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. According to the Acts, Peter in A.D. 44 lay in prison at Jerusalem, and according to Gal. ii., he was still there in A.D. 51. Besides, according to the unanimous verdict of tradition, as expressed by Irenæus, Eusebius, Rufinus, and the Apostolic Constitutions, not Peter, but Linus, was the first Bishop of Rome, and it is only in regard to the order of his successors, Anacletus and Clement, that any real uncertainty or discrepancy occurs. This, indeed, by no means prevents us from admitting an appearance of Peter at Rome resulting in his martyrdom. But the testimonies in favour thereof are not of such a kind as to render its historical reality unquestionable. That Babylon is mentioned in 1 Pet. v. 13 as the place where this Epistle was composed, can scarcely be used as a serious argument, since the supposition that Babylon is a symbolical designation of Rome as the centre of anti-Christian heathenism, though quite conceivable and widely current in the early church, is not by any means demonstrable. Toward the end of the first century, Clement of Rome relates the martyrdom of Peter as well as of Paul, but he does not even say that it took place at Rome. On the other hand, clear and unmistakable statements are found in Dionysius of Corinth, about A.D. 170, then in Caius of Rome, in Irenæus and Tertullian, to the effect that Peter and Paul exercised their ministry together and suffered martyrdom together at Rome. These statements, however, are interwoven with obviously false and fabulous dates to such a degree that their credibility is rendered extremely doubtful. Nevertheless they prove this much, that already about the end of the second century, the story of the two Apostles suffering martyrdom together at Rome was believed, and that some, of whom Caius tells us, professed to know their graves and to have their bones in their possession.
§ 16.2. The Apostle John.—Soon after the death of Paul, the Apostle John settled in Ephesus, and there, with the temporary break caused by his exile to Patmos (Rev. i. 9), he continued to preside over the church of Asia Minor down to his death in the time of Trajan (A.D. 98–117). This rests upon the church tradition which, according to Polycrates of Ephesus (Eus., Hist. Eccl., v. 24) and Irenæus, a scholar of Polycarp’s (Eus., iv. 14), was first set forth during the Easter controversies (§ 37, 2) in the middle of the second century by Polycarp of Smyrna, and has been accepted as unquestionable through all ages down to our own. According to Irenæus (Eus., iii. 18), his exile occurred under Domitian; the Syrian translation of the Apocalypse, which was made in the sixth century, assigned it to the time of Nero. But seeing that, except in Rev. i. 11, neither in the New Testament scriptures, nor in the extant writings and fragments of the Church Fathers of the second century before Irenæus, is a residence of the Apostle John at Ephesus asserted or assumed, whereas Papias (§ 30, 6), according to Georgius Hamartolus, a chronicler of the 9th cent., who had read the now lost work of Papias, expressly declares that the Apostle John was slain “by Jews” (comp. Matt. xx. 23), which points to Palestine rather than to Asia Minor, modern critics have denied the credibility of that ecclesiastical tradition, and have attributed its origin to a confusion between the Apostle John and a certain John the Presbyter, with whom we first meet in the Papias-Fragment quoted in Eusebius as μαθητὴς τοῦ κυρίου. Others again, while regarding the residence of the Apostle at Ephesus as well established, have sought, on account of differences in style standpoint and general mode of thought in the Johannine Apocalypse on the one hand, and the Johannine Gospel and Epistles on the other hand, to assign them to two distinct μαθηταὶ τοῦ κυρίου of the same name, and by assigning the Apocalypse to the Presbyter and the Gospel and Epistles to the Apostle, they would in this way account for the residence at Ephesus. This is the course generally taken by the Mediation theologians of Schleiermacher’s school. The advanced liberal critics of the school of Baur assign the Apocalypse to the Apostle and the Gospel and Epistles to the Presbyter, or else instead of the Apostle assume a third John otherwise unknown. Conservative orthodox theology again maintains the unity of authorship of all the Johannean writings, explains the diversity of character discernible in the different works by a change on the part of the Apostle from the early Judæo-Christian standpoint (Gal. ii. 9), which is still maintained in the Apocalypse, to the ideal universalistic standpoint assumed in the Gospel and the Epistles, and is inclined to identify the Presbyter of Papias with the Apostle. Even in Tertullian we meet with the tradition that under Nero the Apostle had been thrown into a vat of boiling oil, and in Augustine we are told how he emptied a poisoned cup without suffering harm. It is a charming story at least that Clement of Alexandria tells of the faithful pastoral care which the aged Apostle took in a youth who had fallen so far as to become a bandit chief. Of such a kind, too, is the story told of the Apostle by Jerome, how in the extreme weakness of old age he had to be carried into the assemblies of the congregation, and with feeble accents could only whisper, Little children, love one another. According to Irenæus, when by accident he met with the heretic Cerinthus (§ 27, 1) in the bath, he immediately rushed out to avoid any contact with him.
§ 16.3. James, the brother of the Lord.—The name of James was borne by two of the twelve disciples of Jesus: James, the son of Zebedee and brother of John, who was put to death by the command of Herod Agrippa I. (Acts xii. 2) about A.D. 44, and James, son of Alphæus, about whom we have no further information. A third James, designated in Gal. i. 19 the brother of the Lord, who according to Hegesippus (Euseb., Hist. Eccl., ii. 23) on account of his scrupulous fulfilment of the law received the title of the Just, is met with in Acts xii. 17; xv. 13; xxi. 18, and is recognised by Paul (Gal.