HOW MANY DISCIPLES DID JESUS HAVE?

Some time ago during a Sunday school class, the teacher stated the following during the course of his teaching:

    1. There were no more than 12 (or 13 if you count Matthias) disciples.

    2. There were 12 apostles.

    3. There were 12 original disciples.

In my usual pedantic manner, I later replied to him that he was incorrect on all three counts. I realize that we sometimes use the terms “apostle” and “disciple” loosely as synonyms for the same thing. But if we go back to the original Greek words, here is what we find: Apostolos means literally “one sent forth” while mathetes (“disciple”) designates a learner, one who follows a teacher.

 With that in mind, let us test the three contentions above:

    1. In a general sense, in the New Testament we read of “disciples” of John the Baptist (Matthew 9:14); of the Pharisees (Matthew 22:16), and even of Moses (John 9:28). But when it comes to Jesus' disciples, throughout the gospels and Acts are mentions of “a great crowd of disciples” (Luke 6:17), “a whole multitude of disciples” (Luke 19:37), “more disciples than John had” (John 4:1), “many of his disciples who turned back” (John 6:66), “the number of disciples was increasing” (Acts 6:1), and “a multitude of disciples” (Acts 6:2). And these included women as well as men (such as in Acts 9:36). Therefore there were far, far more than 12 disciples, even if we are just limiting ourselves to disciples of Jesus.

We could even point to one of the major Protestant denominations founded in America called "The Disciples of Christ," which rightly indicates that all followers of Christ today can call themselves disciples.

    2. Next we come to the number of apostles. 

        Paul, in most of his letters, calls himself an apostle. 

        In addition, Hebrews 3:1 even refers to Jesus as the “apostle and high priest of our confession.”    

       And the related verb “to send” is also applied to Jesus in John 17:3. 

       Barnabas is labeled “an apostle” in Acts 14:4,14. 

      The definition is extended to Andronicus and Junia (a woman!) in Romans 16:7. 

       II Corinthians 8:23 mentions two anonymous “apostles of the churches.” 

       Epaphroditus is called “your apostle” in Philippians 2:25.

       Finally, I Thessalonians 2:6 indicates that Paul, Silas and Timothy were all apostles. 

So that amounts to many more than just twelve.

It should be pointed out that in many of these instances, apostolos is usually translated more generally as “messenger” instead of “apostle.” Since apostolos originally had a purely secular meaning in Greek thought, Fitzmyer ponders where it came to be applied to a religious setting. He points to two possibilities:

        (a) It came from the Jewish Palestine custom during the 1st century of the Jerusalem authorities sending out emissaries to Jewish settlements outside of Jerusalem in order to settle both secular and religious disputes.

        (b) It arose from the OT pattern of God sending out his prophets to the people or even to the example of King Jehosophat sending Levites and priests out as teachers (II Chronicles 17:7-9).

    3. What about the third statement that there were 12 original disciples? Surely that is a safe assertion to make. But it turns out that even here it is incorrect. Luke 6:13 makes it clear that the 12 apostles were chosen by Jesus out of a large number of original disciples that were already present at the time.

So what should one say instead regarding the apostles who were specially chosen by Jesus during his lifetime?  The only correct naming would be to call them “The Twelve” (as in Matthew 20:17; Luke 9:1; John 6:67; etc.) or the “original apostles.”Interestingly, the term “The Twelve” is such a technical term that it is used for these apostles in John 20:24 when Judas was dead but Matthias had not yet been appointed to take his place.