Whoever and Whatever They Needed to Be, at Any and Every Point in Time - A Review of Apostle

Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Anyone who has been to the Philippines and lived here for more than a year knows that an enormous majority of the schools are run by Catholic, Catholic-affiliated, or Christian institutions. I myself studied at Catholic schools my entire life - yes, even when I went to university. As a result, I am entirely familiar with the notion of catechism, or, as we called it in grade school and high school, “Religion” classes. In these classes we were taught such things as scripture, doctrine, dogma -everything the school deemed necessary for us to know in order to become good Catholics. By the time I graduated high school, my head was filled with a whole host of facts, figures, and ideas about the Catholic Church that I rather quickly forgot unless it had been insistently drummed into my head by constant repetition. This means that if someone asked me to list all of the Twelve Apostles I would probably only be able to name the most famous of them - but I can go through the motions of the average Catholic Mass (my cousin calls it “doing Catholic aerobics”) without thinking too hard.

However, despite my rather complicated relationship with organised religion in general and Catholicism in particular, I still find myself drawn to the stories told about and within it - in particular, its history. And there is plenty to be interested in - not least the many conflicts and questions that have shaped Christianity into the form (or, more accurately, forms) we recognise today. When I read Reza Aslan’s Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, I did so in an attempt to understand the figure at the heart of Christianity. It made sense, therefore, to read Tom Bissell’s Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, in order to understand the disciples who followed Jesus and who, for better or worse, laid down the groundwork for turning Christianity into the globe-spanning faith it is today.

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