Wilusa said
Well, any disciples/followers he might have had surely weren’t “noting down his every word”! They were almost certainly illiterate.

 

Beyond that, I won’t presume to guess about their numbers. But I, personally, find it impossible to believe he went around calling out to strangers to come and follow him, and they obediently did. I think it more likely that unless the men were his longtime friends, they took the initiative after being impressed by his preaching. (Maybe scholars should give more thought to exactly what elements of his message would have made that strong an impression?)

I’m certainly not a scholar, but I agree that the assumption found in many Jesus books, that his disciples inherited the literacy percentage from the overall rural population of Galilee and its small towns, may be spurious. More likely his disciples were drawn from existing, deeply religious substrata of Galilee. This is what is implied in John 1:35-ff. Within such groups the literacy may have been much higher, due to the need for studying the Scripture.  This is not to say that any of them wrote the Gospels, but some of them may have been able to produce simple cheat sheets, for use with preaching. Perhaps some of it ended up being assembled into larger documents like Q?

As to the number of disciples, it must have been rather small, Luke alone establishes a number like 70, which may be another example of his creative storytelling.

Jim5 said
I have a weird question and am not sure whether it belongs on this thread on disciples or not – but it’s hard to categorize weird questions.

Does anyone else find it strange that Paul doesn’t mention Mary (mother of Jesus) much? I would have thought that she might receive some specific mention at least in I Cor 15.3-8, or that he would have tried to make contact with her while on route to Jerusalem and then mention it in one of his letters.

Now it’s hard to come up with explanations why someone “didn’t” write something. Also, I suppose Paul could have included her in some writings that are now lost.

I would have thought he would have wanted to contact the one who gave birth to the person whom he had seen in his vision(s), and he does refer to meeting James the brother of the Lord. But am I the only one to think this is a bit strange?

Paul doesn’t refer to her name, but to her being a Jewish woman, which is a way of stating that Jesus too was a patent Jew. In Judaism , Jewish status passes through the mother, not the father. There is not much factual information about Mary in the Gospels neither, once the obvious legendary embellishments have been removed.  She was perhaps not alive at the time of Paul’s first visit to Jerusalem, or it may have been, in a male dominated society, inappropriate to approach her. Paul would probably not like to make himself into a kind of second rate apostle/ordinary disciple,  and later he makes a point of meeting solely the key players in the existing community, putting himself on the same rank. This seems to be a key trait in his character.

Jim5 said
Thanks for your comment gavriel and as you have noted, the Galatians 4.4 line is not very clear regarding the context of my weird question.

My thoughts were not so much along the mythicism vein, but that from the letters available to us, Paul doesn’t seem to care a lot about the details of Jesus’ actual “human” life and teachings other than the meaning of crucifixion and resurrection.

A very interesting exercise is to try to forget everything written in the Gospels, and then read carefully Paul’s authentic letters in order to write down earthly facts about the figure he calls Lord, Christ and Jesus. If we combine this reading with secured background knowledge about  first century Judaism and Roman history a lot information is found also  in between the lines.  For inst. in Romans 9:33 he combines the concept of a “stumbling stone” with Zion, which is a poetic word for Jerusalem. Once the “stumbling stone” and “Zion” is decoded, one may  conclude that Paul knew that the crucifixion took place in Jerusalem.  The overall result of such an exercise is a refutation of the Jesus mythicist legend that Paul knows *absolutely nothing* about the earthly Jesus.

Since Paul knew a trivial detail like Jesus’ views on marriage, he also  knew more, because a detail like this is  necessarily selected from a larger body of knowledge.   From the fact that he once violently opposed the sect, one may conclude that he knew its basic message, or else he wouldn’t have cared. The question is therefor not that he didn’t know, but  why he did not write gospel-style letters.

Bethany said
I get the impression that the general feeling is that the whole twelve-disciples thing is considered fairly well-attested: it’s in Paul, the Synoptics, and John, for example.

 

It’s true that Paul doesn’t mention the betrayal, though, and he refers to there being “the twelve” AFTER Jesus’ death.  Then again, maybe they really did pick a 12th disciple as described in Acts on “there were twelve tribes, there should be twelve disciples” grounds.

Many have made a point out of the fact that Paul does not seem to know about Judas. I think the explanation is fairly simple: After the initial confusion following the crucifixion, the disciples some time later established themselves as a group, including “the twelve”, with a replacement for Judas. In fact, there may have been more replacements, something that is indicated in the inconsistent name lists in the gospels. I find this logically, that Jesus’ actions in the temple and its fatal outcome caused several defections among both apostles and ordinary disciples, of which Judas just was the most extreme.

At the time Paul met Peter and James, they just referred to what “they, the apostles” had experienced during the crucial period, leaving out the defectors. And since they were publicly known as “the twelve” that’s why Paul says what he says.