Nietzsche believed that if only a Dostoyevsky had been among the apostles who followed Jesus, someone who understood the environment in which “the scum of society, nervous maladies and ‘childish’ idiocy keep a tryst,” we might have been spared centuries of ovine idiocy. One genius could have given us a work of ennobling art. Instead, we got 12 bleating sheep and one filthy religion. Nietzsche is hardly alone in his contempt for the disciples. Many a preacher, whether for castigation or consolation, has pointed out their all-too-human foibles. There’s Thomas and his infamous doubt, Peter’s craven denials as Jesus is being tried and crucified. There are all the parables the disciples are too boneheaded to understand, kiddie squabbles about who is going to get the best seat in heaven. Even at Jesus’ most agonizing moment in the Garden of Gethsemane, the disciples, like exhausted teenagers, fall sound asleep. It almost seems as if the Gospel writers wanted to emphasize these inadequacies, wanted to root an entire religion in the very human weakness that so appalled Nietzsche.
Given the mediocrity of those to whom Jesus’ message was entrusted, it seems surpassing strange that the message should have taken hold with such force. Somehow those hapless men rose out of their stupor to become paragons of Christian virtues. Somehow that general obtuseness and vague malaise became a wildfire of faith so fierce that some were willing to go to their death for the sake of what they’d seen.
Or at least that’s one story. Tom Bissell, in his new book, “Apostle,” is out to tell another. “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.” This is overstated — the Gospel of John claims to rely on eyewitness testimony, and scholars are still debating this — but the larger argument is really Bissell’s point. From the standards of modern history, we know very little about the disciples, sometimes only their names, and even those are often in dispute. Their lives are mostly legends, scattered around the world like their bones.
It is these legends (and these bones) that Bissell, an intelligent and lively writer probably best known for “The Disaster Artist,” sets out to investigate. Over the course of four years he travels to nine countries and more than 50 churches. Along the way, often while standing in front of relics whose provenance he has just decimated, he meets priests, pilgrims, students and others.
Aside from substantial digressions for Jesus and Paul, each chapter is devoted to one or two apostles, and divided between passages of history and journalism. At one moment you might learn that many of the Christians in Syria and India trace their origins to Thomas, or that crucifixion began “as a way to humiliate the already dead,” or that in one of the apocryphal Gospels, Peter resurrects a smoked fish. Turn a page and Bissell is in his favorite falafel restaurant in Jerusalem, or talking geopolitics with his guides in Kyrgyzstan, or giving yet another update on the state of his beleaguered bowels.
Even for a writer as protean as Bissell — I would especially recommend his 2012 essay collection, “Magic Hours” — “Apostle” is a quixotic project. An altar boy when he was growing up in Michigan, Bissell lost his faith when he was 16 and has never recovered it. Nevertheless, he says in his preface, he has continued to find Christianity “deeply and resonantly interesting” and feels that anyone who disagrees “has only his or her unfamiliarity with the topic to blame.” He wrote this book, he says, to put that belief to the test.
This is ominously anodyne language for such an ambitious project, and “Apostle” seems fundamentally confused about its aim and audience. Readers familiar with the material will be frustrated by the unfocused scholarship, not to mention the jagged contrasts in tone. And many an amateur is going to plow into a sentence like this — “Traditionalists such as the Maccabees overthrew the Seleucid modernizers seeking to bring Judaism into a place of accommodation with Hellenism . . .” — and reach for the remote.
A steady, low-grade, dyspeptic irony keeps Bissell at the surface of his subject. At times this takes the form of evoking complicated theological arguments he doesn’t engage. (“Why was Judas’s soul the price of God’s vacation into mortality?”) At others he keeps a descriptive distance from human interactions that might challenge or change him.
In St. Sernin’s Basilica in Toulouse, France, for example, Bissell finds himself momentarily alone in the reliquary when two young Americans come down. “Two young Americans always come down,” he says irritably, paving the way for the tiny annihilation that follows. The man’s hair is “so gleaming and brown it seemed like an accessory picked to match his outfit,” and his sandals show off “the seashell perfection of his toenails.” Together he and his wife look like “Mr. and Mrs. Leisure Traveler on their way to a travel magazine cover shoot.”
In this instance, Bissell is surprised. The woman discusses the Letter of Jude. She even knows that Paul is called “an Apostle Not of the Twelve. Like Mark and Luke and Barnabas.” This leads Bissell to conclude: “A person visiting a Christian church who knew something about Christianity. It had taken me four years, but I finally found her.”
This sentence occurs late in the book — after beers with the earnest young evangelical Glenn in Rome, after a conversation with a grief-stricken mother and son in Turkey, after countless exchanges with ordinary Christians around the world. The apparent compliment releases an unpleasant current of retroactive contempt.
Continue reading the main story Book Review Newsletter Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Then there’s this: Is being able to recite obscure historical information really what it means to know something about Christianity?
Bissell’s brief, beautiful last chapter gives some idea of what this book might have been. “What Christianity promises, I do not understand,” he begins. “What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine.” This sandblasting candor comes as a relief. Bissell has just completed the 500-mile pilgrim walk known as the Camino de Santiago and discovered that he feels . . . not much, really. One hears so many rhapsodic accounts of this walk that Bissell’s wry impiety is refreshing — and promising.
He goes on to privilege fiction over religion, which is “vulnerable to mere fact.” This will be a familiar argument to anyone who reads literature. It will be equally familiar to anyone who has read modern theology. (“Religion may produce deep emotions,” Paul Tillich wrote, “but it should not claim to have truth.”) In fact, there is a raft of modern scholarship — see Northrop Frye or Jack Miles, for instance — devoted to using literary analysis for theological insight. Which is to say: Bissell’s revelation here is a place from which to set out, not a place at which to end. But then, as he himself says of the disciples, all too often “the footprints they left behind lead us to places we long to be led.”
APOSTLE Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve By Tom Bissell Illustrated. 407 pp. Pantheon Books. $28.95.