Book of the Month - October 2024
Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve
Tom Bissell - ISBN: 978-1538707944 - 2023
Author:
Tom Bisell
Tom Bissell is the author of Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia. Born in Escanaba, Michigan, he attended Michigan State University before teaching English as a Peace Corps volunteer in the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan. He returned stateside and worked for several years in book publishing, first for W. W. Norton and later for Henry Holt & Company. Among his editorial endeavors was the restoration to print of Paula Fox’s novels and editing her memoir Borrowed Finery, conceiving and editing The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, and conceiving A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on Twenty-five Years of Star Wars. His criticism, fiction, and journalism have appeared in Agni, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Boston Review, BOMB, Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, Men’s Health, Men’s Journal, and Salon. He is currently finishing a collection of Central Asia-themed short stories entitled Death Defier. He lives in New York City and has returned to Uzbekistan four times since completing Chasing the Sea.
His short fiction has won two Pushcart Prizes and has been published in multiple editions of The Best American Series. He has also written eight works of nonfiction, including Apostle and (with Greg Sestero) The Disaster Artist, as well as many screenplays for video games and television. Bissell lives in Los Angeles with his family.
Brief Synopsis:
A profound and moving journey into the heart of Christianity that explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles—a book both for those of the faith and for others who seek to understand Christianity from the outside in.
“Expertly researched and fascinating… Bissell is a wonderfully sure guide to these mysterious men.… This is a serious book about the origins of Christianity that is also very funny. How often can you say that?” —The Independent
Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell provides rich and surprising answers to these ancient, elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren’t), but also how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia.
Ultimately, Bissell finds that the story of the apostles is the story of early Christianity: its competing versions of Jesus’s ministry, its countless schisms, and its ultimate evolution from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today in all its forms and permutations. In his quest to understand the underpinnings of the world’s largest religion, Bissell embarks on a years-long pilgrimage to the supposed tombs of the Twelve Apostles. He travels from Jerusalem and Rome to Turkey, Greece, Spain, France, India, and Kyrgyzstan, vividly capturing the rich diversity of Christianity’s worldwide reach. Along the way, he engages with a host of characters—priests, paupers, a Vatican archaeologist, a Palestinian taxi driver, a Russian monk—posing sharp questions that range from the religious to the philosophical to the political.
Written with warmth, empathy, and rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant synthesis of travel writing, biblical history, and a deep, lifelong relationship with Christianity. The result is an unusual, erudite, and at times hilarious book—a religious, intellectual, and personal adventure fit for believers, scholars, and wanderers alike.
Insights:
“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?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
Should I read it or skip it?
First, I appreciate Tom’s viewpoint as someone who claimed Christianity and now has recanted his claims. He grew up in the Catholic tradition but has deconstructed his faith. He makes this clear which I think predisposes him to a specific approach any time he discusses any theological topics. He immediately discards any supernatural or faith based assessment.
Second, he can be graphic. When visiting Thomas’ tomb in India, he experienced explosive diarrhea and stomach issues. He uses curse words to discuss other times. Not the worst way to do this book but often language is used when you can’t imagine other words in their place.
Finally, I feel like he took much time dealing with certain topics. Because of this fact, he doesn’t spend enough time on James’ grave. Overall, the book is fourteen hours and seventeen minutes of listening time. He could have used that time better.
Should you read this book? The travel portions contained great descriptions and humor. The theological portions focused on heterodox positions and wrote off most orthodox positions. I gave the book three stars on Goodreads. If you are looking for a travel book and that is your jam, sure. But if you are looking for something to give you better insight into the development of Scripture or how the apostles spent their last hours, I would say you can spend 14 hours in a better way.
