Sublime

the New Testament records a total of twenty-two apostles, not just the original twelve apostles,

The early Christians believed that Jesus was Israel’s Messiah, not, as some Jewish apologists today have absurdly said, “the Christian Messiah.”

The twelve

The men and women who made up the nucleus of the church weren’t simply believers in an abstract philosophy or even faithful followers of a great leader; they were eyewitnesses of an event.

Just as Christ was sent by the Father, he himself sent apostles, filled with the holy Spirit, and for the same purpose: that they should preach the good news to every creature,14 and thus announce that the Son of God, by his death and resurrection, had freed us from the power of Satan15 and death, and carried us over into the Father’s kingdom.

Healing, forgiveness, renewal, the twelve, the new family and its new defining characteristics, open commensality, the promise of blessing for the Gentiles, feasts replacing fasts, the destruction and rebuilding of the Temple: all declared, in the powerful language of symbol, that Israel’s exile was over, that Jesus was himself in some way