Apostle

The apostles were those sent out with the direct commission of Christ, and in the original and strict sense the office could not be transmitted, which is the root of a long argument in Christianity.

Witnesses and envoys

The word means one sent, and the apostles were the envoys commissioned by Christ himself, the inner group of the Twelve together with a few others such as Paul, charged with founding and governing the earliest church and bearing witness to the resurrection. In the strict sense the office was unrepeatable, since it required a direct commission from the risen Christ and, for the Twelve, having accompanied him, so the apostles could have no simple successors in the full sense of their office.

Succession and its disputes

From this arose the doctrine of apostolic succession, the claim that the authority of the apostles passed to the bishops they appointed and so continues in the episcopate, which the Catholic and Orthodox churches hold and much of the Reformation rejected or reinterpreted, making the transmission of apostolic office one of the central disputed questions of Christian order. The word has also been used more loosely, for the first missionaries who brought the faith to a nation, called the apostle of that people, and some modern movements have revived the title for present leaders. The tension between the unrepeatable original office and the claim to continue it runs through the whole history of the church.

For most of Christian history the title apostle was treated as closed, a description of a specific first generation rather than an office that could be filled again, and its reappearance as a functioning modern title is a comparatively recent and contested development. Nineteenth century movements such as the Catholic Apostolic Church revived it first, appointing twelve apostles of their own on the model of the original Twelve, a body that was never replaced once its last member died.

The larger modern revival runs through Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, particularly the loose set of networks scholars group under the label New Apostolic Reformation, where self-identified apostles claim authority to oversee, correct and commission other churches and ministers, sometimes across whole regions or nations, without belonging to any denomination that ordains or supervises them. Because there is no central body granting or withdrawing the title in this setting, recognition of a given apostle rests entirely on the following and networks that accept the claim, which critics both inside and outside Pentecostalism argue removes any check on how the authority is used, while proponents hold it restores a governmental gift the institutional churches abandoned. Mainline, Catholic and Orthodox churches do not recognise the title in this modern sense at all.