If you hear the word apostle and think only of the Twelve and Paul, you’d be mistaken. The New Testament refers to a wide variety of people as apostles. The noun apostolos was not a common word in secular Greek, but it appears seventy-nine times in the New Testament, mostly in the writings of Luke and Paul. The verb apostellō means “to send,” and frequently “to send with a particular purpose.” The noun apostle means someone sent with a commission.
