Apostles' Creed

The medieval story is neat: the apostles, before scattering to preach, composed a creed together, each contributing one clause, so that twelve articles carry twelve names. It is a good story and it is not true. No ancient writer knows it, the earliest versions of the tale disagree about which apostle said what, and the text itself grew slowly in one region rather than arriving whole from Jerusalem.

The moment the legend was tested is worth recording. At the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century, Latin and Greek delegates met to seek reunion, and the Latins appealed to the creed of the apostles. The Greeks replied that they possessed no such thing. The Eastern churches had never used it, never had, and knew nothing of the story of its composition. A creed the apostles wrote could hardly be unknown to half the church they founded.

What is true is more interesting than the legend. The creed descends from the baptismal interrogation of Rome, which is genuinely very old, and it reached the wording used today in Gaul, from where Charlemagne's reform of the liturgy carried it across the West. Its content is apostolic in the sense that it says what the earliest preaching said. Its manufacture is not, and treating the two claims as one is how a legend gets defended long after the text that supports it has been read.

This is the creed of ordinary Western Christian life rather than of the altar. It is said at baptism, where it began. It is the frame of catechesis, and the classic Western catechisms are structured as commentaries on it clause by clause. It opens the rosary. It is said at the daily office in traditions that keep one, and it is the creed most Western Christians could recite from memory without having learned it deliberately.

Its shortness is the reason. Where the creed recited at the Eucharist stops to say that the Son is of one being with the Father and that the Spirit proceeds and is worshipped and glorified, this one keeps moving: born, suffered, crucified, dead, buried, descended, rose, ascended, seated, will come. It is a story with a shape a child can hold, and that is what has kept it in use for more than a thousand years in the places where teaching happens rather than where doctrine is defended.

One line has caused persistent difficulty, the clause on the descent, which different traditions render as descended into hell, into the realm of the dead, or omit. Another difference is confessional rather than textual: the Eastern Orthodox churches do not use the creed liturgically at all, so a text that feels universal in the West is regional when the whole church is in view.