Apostle Quotes

“Scribes working throughout Christianity’s first five centuries were troubled by the New Testament’s discrepancies...In time, a process called harmonization emerged within Christian thought, which involves taking contradictory passages from different gospels and explaining away the differences by creative imagining.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“What Christianity promises, I do not understand. What its god could possibly want, I have never been able to imagine, not even when I was a Christian.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“Even after I lost my religious faith, Christianity remained to me deeply and resonantly interesting, and I have long believed that anyone who does not find Christianity interesting has only his or her unfamiliarity with the topic to blame.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“I could imagine a hot day. I could imagine a number of curious people spontaneously following a young man of great wisdom, a young man rumored to wield power over the mysterious afflictions they saw every day in their villages. They are not sure where they are going, and once the young man stops to speak, they find themselves on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, the nearest town now very far away. Many are feeling hunger pangs, uncertain of why they have come so far. What will they do? One of the young man's friends arrives, unexpectedly bearing food. The people are happy and relieved, and among them talk circulates of the surprising tenderness with which the wise young man hands out victuals to the people, few of whom he knows well.

Eventually, the story is written down. Years go by, then decades, and in this time the crowd increases from fifty to five hundred to five thousand. The unexpected arrival of the follower bearing food vanishes from the telling. An event experienced by its participants in miraculous terms is transformed into a miraculous story. The core of the story remains the same: the hungry were fed when they were not expecting to be, and the young man who fed them do so of his own volition. You could base a code of ethics on a single act of unexpected munificence, and perhaps even fashion from it a crude if supple morality, but you would not have a cosmology, or anything close to one, and cosmologies were what most people craved.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“Sitting there, I remembered two things about going to mass with my father: he never took Communion because of his and my mother's divorce, and he always tapped his heart three times, with solemn insistence, after the recitation of the Apostles' Creed. I asked him about his ritual once. His eyes filled with such alarm that I instantly knew his heart tapping had something to do with a loss or devastation: his parents' early death, his divorce, his wounding in Vietnam. There was no reason for me to invade that space. Maybe that was the best simple explanation for religion: it filled our spaces.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“Were we not standing atop the birthplace of a certain kind of religious nationalism? Zion lay all around us. See where the Prophet left this earth, where Christ rose from the dead, where the Messiah would, finally, appear. Which of us, in this war, was not Judas to someone?”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve

“For this writer, evil was a matter not of behavior, or even choice, but of being.”
― Tom Bissell, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve