Resurrection Day 2024: 1 Corinthians15:3-9---Four Categories of Apostles

 In 1 Corinthians 15:3-9, Paul mentions a number of individuals and groups of people to whom the resurrected Jesus appeared:

• Cephas (Luke 24:34)
• the twelve
• five hundred brethren
• James
• all the apostles
• Paul, "the least of the apostles"

This listing raises the question of how "apostle" ("one sent") was defined.  We know that the twelve were apostles, and they were people who had traveled with Jesus from the time of his baptism until the time of his ascension (Acts 1:22).  

Jesus' half-brother James was also an apostle (Gal 1:19).  James may have become a follower of Jesus when the resurrected Jesus appeared to him.  James became the leader of the Christians in Jerusalem.  Those who led the Jerusalem Christ-followers seem to have been called apostles in the book of Acts. 

Paul also became an apostle a few years after James did.  The risen Jesus appeared to him and commissioned him.  

There are also cases where a person who was sent by one congregation to help another is called an apostle.  Titus (2 Cor 8:23) and Epaphroditus (Phl 2:25) are examples.   Today we call people like this missionaries or church planters.

So there seem to be four categories of apostles in the New Testament:'

1. The Twelve
2. James and other leaders of the early Jerusalem congregation.
3. Paul, who is in a kind of category of his own.
4. People sent be one congregation to help another.

The people in the first three categories had seen the risen Jesus.  These categories seem only to have existed in the initial generation of Christianity.  There are people in the fourth category throughout Christian history, but we probably should not loosely throw around the title of apostle for them, since this designation has such exalted connotations. 

Michael Heiser gives a concise discussion of this topic in the Logos Mobile Ed Course BI 165,  one of a series of courses on difficult passages in scripture.