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    Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
    Unavailable
    Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
    Unavailable
    Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
    Audiobook14 hours

    Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A profound and moving journey into the heart of Christianity that explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles-an audiobook both for those of the faith and for others who seek to understand Christianity from the outside in.

    Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell provides rich and surprising answers to these ancient, elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren't), but also how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia.

    Ultimately, Bissell finds that the story of the apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus's ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations. In his quest to understand the underpinnings of the world's largest religion, Bissell embarks on a years-long pilgrimage to the supposed tombs of the Twelve Apostles. He travels from Jerusalem and Rome to Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, India, and Kyrgyzstan, vividly capturing the rich diversity of Christianity's worldwide reach. Along the way, he engages with a host of characters-priests, paupers, a Vatican archaeologist, a Palestinian taxi driver, a Russian monk-posing sharp questions that range from the religious to the philosophical to the political.

    Written with warmth, empathy, and rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant synthesis of travel writing, biblical history, and a deep, lifelong relationship with Christianity. The result is an unusual, erudite, and at times hilarious audiobook-a religious, intellectual, and personal adventure fit for believers, scholars, and wanderers alike.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 1, 2016
    ISBN9780399567896
    Unavailable
    Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

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    Reviews for Apostle

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    • 4/5
      It would be apt if this sprawling book could be described as 'three books in one', echoing the Christian Trinity. But no, this is four books in one. The first, which is the book it purports to be, is a travel book which sends the author to visit the tombs of all twelve of Christ's apostles. These segments of the book are in parts a great travel yarn; the author is a talented, engaging writer, but travel books can rarely overcome the interest level of the places visited and the people encountered. The places he visits are occasionally interesting (Kyrgyzstan, India), but more often banal (Rome, Jerusalem, Turkey). As for the people, they too often are extremely dour and uncommunicative pilgrims and keepers of the shrines.The remaining books, which I felt are the books which he really wanted to write, use these jaunts as a launching pad for biographies of the apostles, accounts of the development of the organization, theology, and Christology of the early church, and an expression of his own non-belief. Two of the chapters are on non-apostles Paul and Jesus, and devoted almost entirely to an examination of the church topics, and his final chapter, nominally on James the Greater, is for the most part a statement of his reasons for non-belief, which I found eloquent and thoughtful. His treatment of the apostolic biographies and the early church topics is exhaustive --or at least exhausting for the reader-- and, however interesting it may be at many points, makes the book simply too long. In addition, he advances no claims of credentials as a Biblical scholar, though he does append a very long bibliography which indicates that if he is a layman, he's a very well-read one. But at bottom he ends up citing a relatively small number of scholars, not well-known, at least to me, and they inevitably support his conclusions. There's a lot to like about this book, but it does take higher levels of either interest in the early church or stamina and determination than I possess to avoid a little frisson of happiness when one turns the final page.