By Brad Miner.
In The Cost of Discipleship (1937), Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that Christ invited St. Peter "to the supreme followship of martyrdom for the Lord he had denied. . .thereby forgiving him all his sins. In the life of Peter, grace and discipleship are inseparable." (p. 49)
In Bonhoeffer's famous reckoning, this was a case of costly, as opposed to cheap, grace. Bonhoeffer, of course, would come to embody the former. On his way to be executed by the Nazis at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945, Bonhoeffer told a fellow prisoner, "This is the end – but for me it is the beginning of Life!"
That's the attitude of all true martyrs when their time comes.
Bonhoeffer was hanged. The deaths of the original Twelve Apostles were often more excruciating.
So: how, when, and where did the Twelve meet their deaths? And how have artists imagined each man's martyrdom?
To begin, we know that Christ's betrayer died by his own hand (cf. Matthew 27:3-5 and Acts 1:18-19). Judas was a suicide, not a martyr.
We also know John (December 27 is his feast day) was not martyred. And he is the only one, according to tradition, not killed for preaching the Gospel.
Scripture (Acts 12:1-2) tells us that John's brother, James the Great (feast on July 25), was the first apostle-martyr, c. 44. He was "killed with the sword," presumably in Jerusalem. Luke, the author of Acts, may have got the story from John himself, and the facts are corroborated by Irenaeus (c. 125 – 202), who knew Polycarp (c. 60 – 155), who knew John, whom we believe died as late as the end of the 1st century. Luke prefaces his account of James' death by indicating it was King Herod Agrippa who gave the order, using the same method his uncle Antipas had chosen to murder John the Baptist. James' body, they say, now resides in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.
The order of subsequent martyrdoms is largely unknown, but all (save John, of course) were likely gone by the year 80. What we know comes from early Church historians (Eusebius, Tertullian, the aforementioned Irenaeus and Polycarp, and others, including St. Jerome), some apocryphal "gospels," and a scattering of ancient local traditions. Many of these were gathered in the 13th-century Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. The dates given here are approximate, debatable, and by no means gospel. As to place, I have simply chosen the city that claims to be the site of martyrdom. (And I have included in parentheses, as in John and James above, the date of each saint's feast.) I also note where relics are claimed to reside. Relics were often separated to be used in other altars. They still are.
Between 60 and 70:
Andrew (November 30) was crucified on an X-shaped cross, called a saltire (or crux decussata), in Patras, Greece. He was put to death because of the number of Greeks he converted, including the wife of the pagan governor. It took three days for him to die, and he never stopped preaching. Andrew's remains, they say, reside in the Cattedrale di Sant'Andrea in Amalfi.
Bartholomew [Nathanael] (August 24) was flayed alive and beheaded in Albanopolis, Armenia. From that, we get a macabre association: he is the patron saint of tanners. And, again, his murder resulted from his conversion of the local Roman satrap. His relics reside at the Basilica di San Bartolomeo all'Isola, Tiber Island, Rome.
James the Less, known to the Early Church as "the Just" (May 11), was defenestrated, then stoned, and (perhaps) clubbed to death in Jerusalem. He was condemned by the Sanhedrin and thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple, survived, and began praying for his attackers. The coup de grâce was delivered by a laundryman with his clothes beater. His relics, they say, are in Santi Apostoli, Rome. That is, unless, as some say, they reside at the Cathedral of Saint James, Jerusalem. Maybe they're in both places.
Matthew took the Good News to North Africa and was martyred in Ethiopia. His preaching converted Ephigenia, daughter of Kin...
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