[Previous: lines 199-238]
John narrates. Jesus gathers his disciples.
“Credita res paucis, donec se ostendere coram------------
supra hominem cœpit Deus ipse ingentibus orsis. [240]
Nam primùm numero ex omni delegit amicos
bis senos, queiscum curas durumque laborem;
partiri, et casus posset deducere in omnes:
antè quidem solus ter denos egerat annos.
Sed ne forte putes multis è millibus illi [245]
nos ideo placuisse, dolis quòd et arte magistra
spectatos longè ante alios deprenderit omnes,
aut opibus, claraque domûs à stirpe potentes;
omnibus obscurum genus, et sine luce penates,
atque humilis fortuna, nec astu praedita vita. [250]
Quinque adeò sumus exigua Bessaïde creti:
nobis ars erat insidias piscosa secundùm
flumina squamigerûm generi hamo tendere adunco,
atque innare salum, fœcundaque piscibus arva.
Tunc etiam, cùm nos ad se primùm ille vocavit, [255]
humida littoreâ sarcibam retia arenâ.
Ipse Iacobus adhuc salientes littore pisces
servabat frater: nec tum procul inde secabant
Andreas parvâque Petrus vada salsa carinâ,
isdem acti fratres studiis, eadem aequora circum. [260]
Tum, mihi conjunctus patriaque domoque, Philippus
accitus, pisces et retia torta reliquit.
Addunt se socios Thomas, Thaddaeus, eademque
arte Simon, Cana quem genuit Galileïa, amicum
fluminibus patriis, mutisque natantibus hostem. [265]
Namque Iacobus ei cognato sanguine fretus
Alphaeo natus patre se subiunxerat antè.
Ut genus indecores penè omnes, sic quoque nostra
nomina dura vides, insueta atque aspera dictu.
Haud facies sola est impexis horrida barbis. [270]
Tres alii neque enim longè meliore sequuti
fortuna addiderant sese, Matthaeus, et aevo
iam gravis, effœtisque Petri iam proximus annis,
Bartholomaeus, et ipse mali fabricator Iüdas.”
“Few believed him, until his miracles------------
revealed the superhuman nature of the God. [240]
The first thing he did was select from his friends
twelve men to share his cares and hard labour;
men he could count on in any circumstance:
(before this he’d lived three decades alone).
But don’t think he chose us out of thousands [245]
because we seemed to him cleverer or
more learned than all those the others, or that
we came from wealthy or illustrious families:
we are humble men, not aristocrats,
our ways simple, and we don’t live by our wits. [250]
Five of us were born in humble Bethsaida.
Our only skills are casting for fish beside
teeming rivers, to dangle the slender line,
and ply the watery fields fecund with fish.
When he first came for me I was repairing [255]
damp nets on the sandy shore of the sea;
James gathered the still-twitching fish on the strand—
my brother! Not far from us, on the salt flood
Andrew and Peter were steering their boat,
two more brothers, of the same watery trade. [260]
Then a man from the same country as me: Philip
was called, and left the fish and his tangled nets.
We were joined by Thomas, Thaddaeus and
Simon—from Cana in Gallilee, friend
of his land’s rivers, enemy of its mute fish! [265]
His blood-relative James had already
joined (he was Alphaeus’s son). Since we come
from humble families, you can see that our
names are hard, unusual, tricky to pronounce.
It’s not just our faces that are rough and bristly! [270]
Three others, no more fancy than the rest,
soon joined us: Matthew, and an older man
(second only to Peter in his age)
Bartholomew: and Judas the maker of evil.”
The order in which Vida introduces the apostles here is standard enough.
One of the most characteristic features of the Gospels is the fact that Jesus gathered a circle of disciples around him. The selection of his disciples was a gradual process, which seems to have begun with four (Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, James son of Zebedee and his brother John) and ultimately led to the number twelve, clearly alluding to the twelve tribes of Israel. The twelve disciples accompanied him until his arrest in the garden of Gethsemane, celebrated the Last Supper with him, witnessed the betrayal of one of them (Judas) who delivered him to the authorities, and the remaining eleven saw him after his resurrection. [Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton University Press 2009), 75]The Gospels record the recruitment of these twelve; or more precisely, Matthew only describing the recruitment of Simon, Andrew, James, and John, where John 1:32-51, Mark 3:13-19 and Luke 6:13-16 talk of all twelve. Since so many of them are fishermen, Vida indulges in a few stylistic flourishes to vary the expression. His Peter is always Peter, and never Simeon, Simon or Simon-Peter.
Why twelve? Vida implies a kind of, not arbitrariness exactly, but mystery about the process. These twelve men weren't the cleverest or best-educated from among the multitude of Jesus's followers; they were low-class, rough, humble men. Vida doesn't pick up on the connection between twelve apostles and the twelve tribes, although some contemporary scholars see this as central. In the words of Dale B Martin: ‘Jesus also appointed twelve male disciples, doubtless as an eschatological symbol for the messianic reconstitution of the twelve tribes of Israel. He probably expected that these twelve men would be heads of the miraculously reconstituted twelve tribes in the eschatological world.’ Indeed, Martin's common-sense extraction of a ‘historical Jesus’ from the later accretion of legend and back-formation is very interesting. This is it, in a nutshell:
Jesus began as a follower of John the Baptist. Jesus was certainly baptized by John, and he seems not to have begun his own ministry until after the arrest of the Baptist. That all suggests that he was in the beginning a disciple of the Baptist. All our evidence about John the Baptist indicates that he was a prophet attempting to prepare the Jewish people for some urgent, imminent apocalyptic event, probably the arrival of the “reign of God.” So Jesus began as an adherent of an apocalyptic movement. [Dale B. Martin, New Testament History and Literature (Yale University Press 2012), 191]Martin goes on:
Beyond that general picture, we can say a few more things about the historical Jesus, most of which I cannot defend here because doing so would merit a book of its own. Jesus was a lower-class Jewish peasant from Nazareth, a small village in Galilee. There is no reason to believe the later legends that he was born in Bethlehem. He grew up probably in a family of hand laborers. He had brothers and probably sisters. His mother was named Mary, and his father, Joseph. Since we hear nothing of Joseph’s activities from Jesus’ adulthood, he likely was dead by the time Jesus began his preaching. His mother, though, and at least his brother James later were figures in the movement after Jesus’ death, with James ending up as the main leader of the Jewish church in Jerusalem. Jesus certainly spoke Aramaic as his first language. If he spoke Greek at all, it was only enough to get by in bilingual situations. He probably could not write, and if he could read, it was only minimally.We're a long way from Vida with all this, of course. But I do find it very interesting.
Jesus did gather followers around him, some of whom were certainly women in central positions. Mary Magdalene was doubtless a close follower, later respected by the community after Jesus’ death. ... I also think Jesus taught against the traditional household and formed, in its place, a band of men and women separated from their traditional households and families and bound to one another as a new, eschatological household of God. There are few aspects of Jesus’ ministry more certain to be historical than that he called people away from their families for the sake of the coming kingdom of God. The historical Jesus, therefore, was certainly not a “family man” in any way advocated by modern Christianity or ancient household ethics.
In spite of the possibility that Jesus was something of an ascetic with regard to marriage and family, he was not one with regard to eating and drinking. In fact, one of the things that may have differentiated the ministry of Jesus from that of John the Baptist, his early teacher, and other Jewish ascetics was that he and his followers did not follow an ascetic agenda with regard to food and drink. I think it is historical that he was rumored to be a man who enjoyed feasting and drinking when the rare opportunity arose for someone so poor, and that he kept the company of tax collectors, prostitutes, and other disreputable persons. [Martin 193-4]
At the top: Vocation of the Apostles, a fresco in the Sistine Chapel by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1481-82)
[Next: lines 275-311]
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