The Twelve Apostles

139:0.1It is an elo­quent tes­ti­mony to the charm and righ­teous­ness of Je­sus’ earth life that, al­though he re­peat­edly dashed to pieces the hopes of his apos­tles and tore to shreds their ev­ery am­bi­tion for per­sonal ex­al­ta­tion, only one de­serted him.

139:0.2The apos­tles learned from Je­sus about the king­dom of heaven, and Je­sus learned much from them about the king­dom of men, hu­man na­ture as it lives on Uran­tia and on the other evo­lu­tion­ary worlds of time and space. These twelve men rep­re­sented many dif­fer­ent types of hu­man tem­per­a­ment, and they had not been made alike by school­ing. Many of these Galilean fish­er­men car­ried heavy strains of gen­tile blood as a re­sult of the forcible con­ver­sion of the gen­tile pop­u­la­tion of Gal­i­lee one hun­dred years pre­vi­ously.

139:0.3Do not make the mis­take of re­gard­ing the apos­tles as be­ing al­to­gether ig­no­rant and un­learned. All of them, ex­cept the Al­pheus twins, were grad­u­ates of the syn­a­gogue schools, hav­ing been thor­oughly trained in the He­brew scrip­tures and in much of the cur­rent knowl­edge of that day. Seven were grad­u­ates of the Ca­per­naum syn­a­gogue schools, and there were no bet­ter Jew­ish schools in all Gal­i­lee.

139:0.4When your rec­ords re­fer to these mes­sen­gers of the king­dom as be­ing “ig­no­rant and un­learned,” it was in­tended to con­vey the idea that they were lay­men, un­learned in the lore of the rab­bis and un­trained in the meth­ods of rab­bini­cal in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the Scrip­tures. They were lack­ing in so-called higher ed­u­ca­tion. In mod­ern times they would cer­tainly be con­sid­ered un­e­d­u­cated, and in some cir­cles of so­ci­ety even un­cul­tured. One thing is cer­tain: They had not all been put through the same rigid and stereo­typed ed­u­ca­tional cur­ricu­lum. From ado­les­cence on they had en­joyed sep­a­rate ex­pe­ri­ences of learn­ing how to live.