Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve by Tom Bissell review – what do we know about Jesus’s closest followers?

Bissell was brought up within the church and leaving it has not stifled his fascination with early Christianity. This book – part history, part travelogue – is an attempt to unravel its mysteries

Origen, one of the wisest and most interesting of the early theologians, had an ingenious theory about the obvious discrepancies in the Bible. If one discovered a difference in, for example, the genealogies of Jesus as they appear in Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels, he argued that these were hermeneutic trip wires deliberately inserted by the holy spirit to make the reader think that bit harder about the New Testament’s other meanings – symbolic, ethical and allegorical – rather than the merely literal.

Unfortunately, most readers threw their considerable intellectual efforts into elaborate literal interpretations designed to iron out the inconsistencies, with all the fervour of Star Trek fans circa 2003 coming up with theories about why Koloth, Kor and Kang had smooth foreheads in the original TV series and bony ridges in Deep Space Nine. Nowhere does this nimbus of lore, inference, legend, presumption and legerdemain accrete more creatively than around the 12 apostles.

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