They were history’s most elite corps: 12 men, chosen by God Himself to establish His Church on earth.

Elite, yes. But the apostles, each and all, emerged from obscurity only to do their appointed work, and then faded again into obscurity. “Bartholomew we don’t know much about, Matthew almost nothing and Matthias nothing at all,” said C. Bernard Ruffin, author of an excellent popular history of the apostles’ later years, The Twelve: The Lives of the Apostles After Calvary. “None of the apostles seems to have had the slightest interest in perpetuating his own memory. Their whole beings centered on their Master, and on spreading the Good News.”

Thus most of what modern Christians know about the Twelve Apostles is what the apostles themselves wrote about the life and teachings of Jesus — the various books of the New Testament. After that, there are snippets, quotations and anecdotes in the documents of the early Church, and legends and oral tradition handed down among the peoples of the Middle East and India. But these are not widely known. Still, they are fascinating to consider. For example:

• What happened to Peter’s wife (see Mk 1:29-31)? And what about the couple’s children?

• What was John’s life like when he shared a home with Mary (see Jn 19:27)?

• What did the apostles do to celebrate Easter?

• How did a Jew like Thomas take the culture shock that went with evangelizing India?

Ruffin set himself the task of sifting through all the available evidence to answer such questions and compile vivid profiles of the Twelve Apostles and their lives after Jesus’ resurrection.

“Few things can be known for sure about events 2,000 years ago,” Ruffin told me in an interview about his book. “Yet, as I did my research, I was surprised to find that we know as much as we do, and especially that we have much material that is better than legendary. It comes on very good authority.”

Ruffin said that material on Jesus’ inner circle — Peter, James and John — is especially plentiful, and recorded by reputable and reliable early Christian authors. St. Polycarp, for example, whose writings survive, knew St. John the Apostle. The writings of Polycarp’s disciple, St. Irenaeus, relate many more stories of John. Another “hearer” of John, a bishop named Papias — whose work survives only in fragments — wrote about his master as well as the other apostles. Eusebius and St. Jerome, both historians of the fourth century, drew from these and other first-century documents, now lost, as they wrote their own works.

In addition to these, there are also fanciful and apocryphal books of “Acts” of the various apostles — novels, really, but sometimes based on real historical events.

Ruffin’s book sometimes reads like a detective story as he pieces stories together from far-flung sources. “A lot of it has to be supposition and guesswork,” he told me. “But if you have a number of apparently independent traditions about a certain event, and they’re reasonably similar to one another, I think you can be reasonably sure that they’re based on a real event.”

The chapter on the apostle Thomas provides a good example of Ruffin’s investigative technique. Early Church testimonies named Thomas as the apostle to the Far East, including China, but especially India.

“In the West, a number of traditions refer to Thomas’s work in India,” Ruffin said. “I cite papers in the Edessan archive, which we know from citations in Eusebius in the fourth century. There is more information in the ‘Doctrine of the Apostles,’ a Syrian document from the third century, and the ‘Acts of Thomas,’ which is one of the apocrypha. Centuries later, Marco Polo and Western missionaries found a number of Thomas traditions in India. The ancient Mar Thoma church, for centuries, has passed down an oral tradition called the ‘Rabban Song’ about Thomas. What is interesting is the degree to which the traditions in India seem to corroborate the traditions from the West.”

According to tradition, Thomas received his Indian mission in a vision of Christ. To go to India was, for Thomas, to travel to the end of the earth. It was a place as remote from his native Judea — in terms of geography, culture, climate and especially religion — as one could imagine. Thomas reportedly asked Jesus, “How can I, a Jew, go and preach the Truth to Indians?”

But, according to the ‘Rabban Song,’ preach he did. Through the 50s, 60s and early 70s A.D., he brought the Gospel through large areas of the Indian subcontinent, with intermittent success. Legends attribute 17,000 conversions to Thomas and his followers in that short time. Ruffin relates the tradition that Thomas was martyred on July 3 in the year 72 by priests of the goddess Kali who feared that the apostle’s religion was beginning to eclipse their own.

For years, these traditions were dismissed as folklore. Even some Catholic missionaries charged that ancient heretics invented the Thomas stories in order to fabricate apostolic origins for their teachings. Then, in the last hundred years, archeological discoveries began to confirm some of the historical details of the “Rabban Song” and “Acts of Thomas.” In the late 19th century, for example, coins were found with the image of a prince who plays a key role in Thomas’s story — and his dates correspond with those of Thomas’s work in India.

Though Ruffin approaches all ancient documents with caution, he refuses to follow those scholars who dismiss testimony as untrustworthy merely because it is old or because it shows fervor in faith.

“Some scholars tend to overly skeptical,” he said. “In approaching material like this, if you go into the project determined to throw it all out, you probably will persuade yourself to do so. But, then, what’s the point of beginning at all?”

Ruffin, a Lutheran pastor who also teaches history, recalled his own experience studying at Yale Divinity School and Bowdoin College. “When I was in seminary, some of my professors took skepticism to ridiculous extremes,” he said. “They were determined to distrust everything, so they did. If we applied the same skepticism to all ancient records that these historians apply to early Christian traditions, we would not only have no Church history, we would have no ancient history at all.

“It comes down to how much value you place on tradition,” he concluded. “As a Christian, I think that there are good reasons for us to believe the traditions, even as I acknowledge that not all traditions are of equal weight. Many of the traditions about the apostles do stand scrutiny.”

Ruffin’s favorite characters in the apostolic corps coincides with Jesus’ favorites: Peter, John and James. “Theirs are the most well-documented lives,” he said.

Ruffin tells a well-documented story of John, at an advanced age — “maybe 70 or 80,” he said — risking his life to save a soul.

“In Smyrna, John had trained a certain young man in the faith. But then came a persecution, and John had to flee. When the apostle came back, he asked the local bishop what had happened to the fellow. At first, he was told that the man was dead. But with further inquiry, he found that the fellow had become a bandit. So John rode out to the back country where the man was hiding out. Soon, he was surrounded by members of the gang. John told the bandits that he wasn’t going to escape and he was asking for no mercy, but that he wanted to see their leader.

“When the bandit leader saw John,” Ruffin continued, “he turned to run away — but John ran after him! Remember, now, John was very old by this time. He called to the bandit, ‘Why are you running from your own father, who is unarmed and very old? Be sorry for me, my child.’ And the man fell to the ground sobbing. He repented and returned to the fold. The story showed that John had courage and endurance, even at an advanced age.”

Still, in the apostles’ biographies, there remains much more shadow than light.

“There are several different traditions about what happened to Matthew,” Ruffin said. “Some have him dying in Ethiopia, and some have him dying elsewhere. I labeled his chapter ‘The Phantom Apostle,’ because I can’t figure out what happened to him.”

Yet even the questionable material is valuable, he explained, because “it shows us the qualities that the early Christians esteemed above all others. Some of their stories may be metaphorical, describing more a spiritual state than a historical event. But I don’t think we should approach these cultures in a condescending way, explaining them away as prescientific storytellers.”

Most fascinating to modern Catholic readers, perhaps, will be the degree to which the apostles’ Church mirrors the Catholic Church today — in its sacraments, ritual, hierarchy, dogma and even its foibles.

But that shouldn’t be surprising at all. Ruffin cited St. Irenaeus, of the second century A.D., who “maintained that the apostles had ‘perfect knowledge’ and maintained that they appointed bishops to whom they passed on their sacred mysteries.”

Uh-oh, they’ve let my friend Rod Bennett out of his cage again. That’s the only explanation for the headline you just read.

Visit Rod’s blog for the best in contemporary satire. And read his book on the Apostolic Fathers, Four Witnesses. You’ll know the earliest Fathers as you never knew them before. They’ll be real and vivid characters in the story of your life.

Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield is creating quite a buzz with his new book Manliness, which I’m only just beginning to read. It strikes me that he’s describing a quality possessed by the Fathers. Mansfield is especially taken with the Greek word “thumos.” He says, “Thumos is a quality of spiritedness, shared by humans and animals, that induces humans, and especially manly men, to risk their lives in order to save their lives.” Sound familiar? Try Matthew 16:25.

Thumos is also the name of one of my favorite blogs. It’s more perennial and present-day than patristic, though its host, a Mr. Penn Jacobs, has an Augustinian turn of mind. Lately he’s turned his attention to the problem of evil. Join him. And while you’re there, check out his archives.

Two thousand years of Church life have proven the old Preacher true: There’s nothing new under the sun (Eccl 1:9). In the era of the Church Fathers — the first eight centuries of Christianity — the Church faced many of the difficulties it faces today: the threat of heresy, challenges to authority, priests abusing their position of trust, quixotic quests for common ground, lax clergy and uppity laity, rigorist clergy and lax laity.

Father George Kaitholil, a priest of the Society of Saint Paul in India, has examined those early Church responses and found them to be useful models for life in these latter days. His book Church: The Sacrament of Christ examines the “patristic vision” in light of modern theology.

I interviewed him about his book, shortly after its release in 1998.

Aquilina: In your book you describe an ancient Church in which modern Catholics would find much that is familiar. We can even recognize many of the topics of debate — such as the nature and extent of Church authority, the relationship between Church and state, and even liturgical change. What light can the Fathers shed on modern discussions of these issues? Why have these issues remained current through 2,000 years?

Fr. Kaitholil: The Fathers never imagined the Church as a democratic organization in which authority comes from the will of the people. Though democratic processes are used in the Church, its authority comes from God’s will. Christ alone chose His twelve apostles. Peter, chief among them, was not elected by them, but appointed by Christ. The Church’s authority extends to faith, morals and interpretation of the Word of God, and has to guide and regulate these.

The Church-state relationship was a live question then, as now, because both have extensive powers that often come into conflict. In many instances, Church and the state have tried to control each other. Emperors and kings interfered in Church matters, while the Church consecrated emperors.

Emperor Constantine convoked the Council of Nicea in 325. That was a sign of the coexistence of the Church and the state and cooperation between them. This was even more clearly seen in the Council of Chalcedon in 451. Emperor Marcian convoked it at the request of the Roman Synod.

The ideal Church-state relationship would be one of mutual respect and support. The Church should remain the highest authority in theological and spiritual matters while recognizing the supremacy of the state in political and civil matters. The fourth century witnessed this.

Aquilina: In what ways was the Church of the patristic era different from the Church we know today?

Fr. Kaitholil: The Church in the patristic era struggled to cultivate faith and morals in a non-Christian world. Then the Church had more problems from without; today she has more problems from within.

Aquilina: In debates today, some Catholics — citing patristic precedents — tend to emphasize the authority of the local bishop over that of the pope. Does this accurately represent the Fathers?

Fr. Kaitholil: Not at all. There were sometimes disagreements between popes and bishops — for example, between Bishop Cyprian and Pope Stephen I regarding heretical baptism. Cyprian advocated parity and communion among all bishops, but did not place the authority of the bishop over that of the pope. He taught that Christ instituted a unique episcopate in Peter, and that all the bishops, in their communities, represent the see of Peter. Cyprian also considered the see of Peter as the principal church; all other churches were to be in communion with it.

Other Fathers, like Ignatius of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, also insisted on the primacy of the See of Rome. This primacy, however, is not papal absolutism, an idea the Fathers did not teach.

Aquilina: Meanwhile, others say that their loyalty to the pope gives them freedom to reject the authority of their local bishop. Again, they invoke the Fathers, noting that many bishops succumbed to the Arian heresy. What is the consensus of the Fathers on this issue?

Fr. Kaitholil: It is absurd to think that loyalty to the pope justifies rejection of the authority of the local bishops. Just the contrary. As Cyprian held, the local bishop represents the see of Peter. There is a wide consensus among the Fathers regarding the authority of the local bishop and the need of being in communion with him. When a bishop is no longer in communion with the pope, he breaks off from the Church, and the pope as the chief pastor intervenes to do the needful. If a bishop is a confirmed heretic, fidelity to the pope demands rejection of that bishop’s authority.

Aquilina: How did the Christians of the patristic era view their local bishops? What can we learn from this today?

Fr. Kaitholil: They viewed their local bishops as their spiritual leaders, teachers and guides in faith, morals and liturgy. They accepted the discipline of the bishops and supported them in their pastoral ministry. The people formed well-knit communities around their bishops, who kept them united. Here again, Cyprian insists that concord with the bishop is the condition for peace and unity in the community. He taught that the Church was built upon the bishops. The individual members of the community, through their bishops, belong to the one universal Church. The lesson we learn here is one of communion, cooperation and docility.

Aquilina: How did the Christians of the patristic era view the pope? What can we learn from this today?

Fr. Kaitholil: As I see it, Christians of those times viewed the pope as the center of unity, the source of guidance and encouragement for the whole Church. Jesus appointed Peter chief shepherd, the key holder and the rock foundation. From the earliest times, churches in other places accepted the Church of Rome as the center of unity and acknowledged that authority over the whole Church belongs to the successor of Peter. Today the jurisdiction of the pope over the bishops — which Cyprian did not favor — is an accepted fact.

The authority of the college of apostles is a shared one, exercised in communion and love. Yet Peter has a special duty to strengthen others in faith, as we see in Luke 22:32. According to Pope Leo the Great, Peter is the prince of apostles. The primacy of the pope subjects the bishops to him, and collegiality unites them to him.

Aquilina: How did lay Christians of the patristic era view their own role in the Church and in the world? What can we learn from this today?

Fr. Kaitholil: Lay Christians were deeply involved in the mission of the Church and collaborated with their pastors. They were open to social and cultural life, and adapted themselves to new conditions. They considered themselves the people of God, pilgrims and strangers in the world but at home everywhere.

Cyprian held that every member of the Church has an honorable function. The laity formed active and united communities and played their role in organization and activity.

Tertullian was a fervent lay theologian and preacher. So was Origen, before he was ordained a priest. Their writings still inspire many. The lesson for us is that the Christian community is not to be a passive flock, but to be active in Church life under the guidance of legitimate authority.

Aquilina: What can we learn from the divisions within the early Church and the ways the Fathers conducted themselves in debate? What behavior was productive? What wasn’t?

Fr. Kaitholil: Divisions in the early Church were generally based on convictions and not personality conflicts or quest for advantage. In debate, the Fathers were often fiery, fanatical and polemical. They used Scripture and logic, but also resorted to argumentum ad hominem. They took clear positions and were willing to bear the consequences. Some of them went by their own wisdom and did not follow the magisterium of the Church, thus paving the way for divisions.

Yet the debates led to clarification of ideas, to greater precision in doctrine, to creative thinking and deepening in theology. Free thinking and honest expression of thought were thus productive.

It’s astonishing that the finest minds in patristic and biblical studies have felt compelled to set aside their important work to respond to Dan Brown. But, since they’ve done it — and done it so well — we should read what they have to say. Jesuit Father Gerald O’Collins, a venerable prof at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University, took his razor to the Code and sliced it up for our amusement and apologetic recycling. So did Chrysostom scholar Margaret M. Mitchell, who chairs the Early Christian Lit department at University of Chicago Divinity School.

They’re good reading for us, and for people we know who’ve been troubled by the Code.

Viewing the mosaics of Ravenna, Italy, is a truly visionary experience — even for those of us who have never seen them up close. They were completed during a transitional period in a true cultural borderland. Ravenna was Byzantium’s capital in the West, and so the images shine with the transcendent quality of eastern icons. Yet they also possess the warmth and representational character of western art. Somehow, too, they incorporate the most developed symbolic sense of paleo-Christian art. I’m no art historian and no critic, so I’m making it sound like a mishmash. But it’s not. For the Christian who’s passionate about patristic history, Ravenna is the sweetest eye-candy the world has to offer.

It’s probably best if you just go and see for yourself. There’s an Italian website that offers a a virtual tour in English. Another site gives you a sampling of the images, but the text is in Italian. Same goes for this one, which offers a catalog of many mosaic details, close-up.

The Ravenna mosaics make great screen savers, desktop backgrounds, and e-cards. They’ll inspire you to pray. Go wild.

Oh, by the way, the image of the Fathers at the top of this blog — it’s from Ravenna, of course.

My KVSS radio interview on St. Athanasius is now available for free download. Just visit Spirit FM and scroll on down till you see the name of our man from Alexandria.

At GrailCode.com, my dear friend and co-author Chris Bailey has pointed out yet another gem from the treasury of ironies we call The Da Vinci Code. I had missed this one.

If you want the true story of the Grail, buy the book Chris and I wrote, The Grail Code. It takes you from the patristic through the medieval to the modern, with great entertainment all along the way to a profound and life-changing conclusion. OK, so I’m an enthusiast…

Like many of us, the 19th-century poet Matthew Arnold was happy that the rigorists lost the battle for the early Church — so that we sinners could have a second chance. And a third…

The Good Shepherd with the Kid

By Matthew Arnold

HE SAVES the sheep, the goats he doth not save! :
So rang Tertullian’s sentence, on the side
Of that unpitying Phrygian sect which cried:
‘Him can no fount of fresh forgiveness lave,

‘Who sins, once wash’d by the baptismal wave!’
So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sigh’d,
The infant Church; of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord’s yet recent grave.

And then she smiled, and in the Catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid

Her head in ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd’s hasty image drew;
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

A contemporary of Ignatius and Polycarp, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus observed that some people become fearless through madness, but Christians are different. They become fearless through habit.

In his Wednesday audience talks, Pope Benedict has been unpacking a notion dear to the Fathers of the Church: the Apostolic Tradition. The talks are worth our study, especially the most recent, “The Living Gospel, Proclaimed in its Integrity” (May 3, 2006), in which he invokes characters as diverse as Tertullian of Carthage and Clement of Rome. Good stuff.

Tradition is, therefore, the living Gospel, proclaimed by the apostles in its integrity, in virtue of the plentitude of her unique and unrepeatable experience: By her work, faith is communicated to others, until it reaches us, until the end of the world. Tradition, therefore, is the history of the Spirit that acts in the history of the Church through the mediation of the Apostles and their successors, in faithful continuity with the experience of the origins.

It is what Pope St. Clement of Rome explained toward the end of the first century: “The Apostles,” he wrote, “proclaimed the Gospel to us sent by the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ was sent by God. Christ, therefore, comes from God, the Apostles from Christ: Both proceed in an orderly way from the will of God. Our Apostles knew through our Lord Jesus Christ that disputes would arise around the episcopal function. Therefore, foreseeing the future perfectly, they established the chosen ones and ordered them that at their death other men of proven virtue assume their service” [Ad Corinthios,” 42.44: PG 1, 292.296].

This chain of service continues to our day; it will continue until the end of the world…

Read the rest at Zenit.

Spiritual writers, since the dawn of Christianity, have observed that impurity and cruelty arise as sibling vices in the soul. The elder is impurity, which reduces other people first to mere means of sensual satisfaction, and then to mere objects of sport.

It’s as true of cultures as it is of souls. Consider Rome of the late first and second century A.D. — but don’t judge by what you see in museums. Be grateful, instead, that today’s curators have some sense of decorum.

For the remains of imperial Rome could justly be rated X. The walls of Pompeii are shocking because the volcanic ash preserved them in lurid color, but their motifs are little different from those that appear on common vases, lamps, and jewelry of the time. The homes of some of the bourgeois were little different, in decoration, from the common rooms of brothels.

Families seemed unwilling or unable to preserve the innocence of children. Those who sent small boys to school assumed that the tutors would molest them. With limitless leisure time and no supervision, teenaged boys roamed the streets in gangs. They passed time in mischief, now and then assaulting a streetwalker.

Girls were married off at age 11 or 12 to a mate much older, and not of their choosing. “Friends” celebrated the wedding by singing bawdy songs. “The wedding night,” writes the French historian Paul Veyne, “took the form of legal rape.”

Marital custom meant that the newlywed girl could look forward to a predatory relationship, rife with unnatural acts, abortion and contraception. Adultery was expected of men. Infanticide was common, especially for female offspring. In one city of the empire, the census enrolled 600 families — of which only 6 had raised more than one daughter. Though most of those were large families, they had routinely killed their baby girls. In another city, a recent archeological dig turned up an ancient sewer clogged with the bones of hundreds of newborns.

But if marriage grew too miserable, at least divorce was easy. All it took was for one party to leave home with the intention of divorcing. Divorce took effect ex opere operato.

All of these mores were reflected in popular entertainment — the music business, the theatre. And when Romans tired of that sort of degradation, they flocked to the circus to see criminals tortured and killed, by beasts or by gladiators. The gladiators drew life’s blood from one another as well.

That’s the world where the first Christians raised their families. You might call it a culture of death.

Yet Christians immediately set themselves apart. They took no part in the impurity or cruelty. We have many sermons and tracts from those years, condemning the grossness of the theatre, the sickness of the circus, and the bedroom behavior of ordinary Romans. But what is more remarkable is the testimony of the pagans themselves.

The Romans were frankly astonished by the Christians, for the Christians routinely achieved something the Romans had thought impossible. Christians preached and practiced a range of virtues that involved continence — chastity, purity and even lifelong celibacy. The great pagan physician Galen wrote: “Their contempt of death is patent to us every day, and likewise their restraint in cohabitation. For they include not only men but also women who refrain from cohabiting all their lives; and they also number individuals who, in self-discipline and self-control, have attained a pitch not inferior to that of genuine philosophers.” Even most stoics, who supposedly despised human passion, believed that passions were best quelled by indulgence.

But even married Christians strove for chastity and true love. “They marry, as do all others; they beget children; but they do not commit infanticide. They share a common table, but not a common bed.”

It was Christian morality, and the evident love of Christian families, that gradually converted the Roman empire.

The brothels had exercised a certain attractive power over Rome, but those places did not satisfy. Restless pagans had indulged their cruelest blood lusts at the circus, but the circus did not satisfy.

What drew these weary citizens to the Church was the paradox evident in the family life of Christians, who were chaste, but who had found peace.

One of the many pseudo-historical howlers in Dan Brown’s pretentious potboiler is his claim that Christ’s divinity was invented by Constantine in 325 A.D. All the biblical record aside, the patristic testimonies are overwhelming. Dr. Marcellino D’Ambrosio did us the favor of cataloging the early texts at the website of the Crossroads Initiative. Catholic Answers has also posted a nice chain of early-Christian teaching.

But if you’re extremely lazy and you’d rather just look at pictures, don’t worry: God loves you, too. In fact, He arranged for an archeological dig late last year to turn up the oldest-known Christian church, and it had all its mosaics intact. One mosaic was clearly dedicated to “the God, Jesus Christ.” Visit the secular media’s news stories on the house-church at Meggido. The BBC posted pictures. You’ll find good images here, too. They’re quite beautiful — not to mention useful. Remember: with every hour that passes, another sixty suckers are born into the world, and Dan Brown probably sells another sixty books. In hardcover.