Apostle of the Quorum of the Twelve

An apostle in Latter-day Saint usage is a man ordained to the highest office of the Melchizedek priesthood and set apart as a special witness of Jesus Christ. Fifteen hold the office at any time: the twelve members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and the three members of the First Presidency, all of whom are apostles. Ordination is for life, and a vacancy is created only by a death, so the composition of the quorum changes slowly and its members are usually in their seventies and eighties.

The work is full time. Apostles are given a living allowance, which makes theirs among the very few paid positions in a church otherwise run entirely by unpaid volunteers, and the church says little publicly about the amount. They preach at the two general conferences each year, which are broadcast worldwide and are the occasion on which most members hear them; they supervise geographical areas of the church by assignment and travel constantly; they create and reorganise stakes and call stake presidents; they dedicate temples; and they sit on the boards that govern the church's finances, its educational system and its welfare operations.

All fifteen hold the same keys. In practice only the president exercises them all, and the others exercise what he delegates, which is the doctrinal device that keeps fifteen men who each claim apostolic authority working as one body rather than as fifteen.

The atlas holds two entries for the word apostle, and the reason is a genuine disagreement rather than a filing decision. The Latter-day Saint claim is that this is the New Testament apostleship restored, conferred on Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery by Peter, James and John as resurrected beings, and continued by unbroken ordination since. On that account there is one office and it went out of use for seventeen centuries.

Other Christian bodies reject the claim by two different routes. Most Protestant traditions hold that the apostleship was unrepeatable, tied to men who had seen the risen Christ, and that it ended with them. Catholic and Orthodox teaching holds that it continues, but in the episcopate, through a succession that never lapsed, so the Latter-day Saint claim fails at its first premise rather than at its last. Both positions make the modern Latter-day Saint apostleship a new office bearing an old name.

The atlas records the claim as a claim and keeps a separate entry, because the two offices as they are actually lived have very little in common. A first century apostle was an itinerant witness with no institution behind him. A modern Latter-day Saint apostle is a lifetime officer of a corporation, ordained in a settled sequence, with an administrative portfolio and a place in a fixed order of succession. Describing them in one entry would serve a reader badly whichever theology they hold, and would quietly make the atlas take a side.