Apostolic Reach

From this month's Ensign:

Elder Quentin L. Cook explained that over a four-year period, every single stake and ward, district and branch, in the Church has a member of the Twelve coming and meeting with its leaders—and training them on prophetic priorities.

Furthermore:

“As we go different places, we feel the goodness of the members,” said Elder Gerrit W. Gong. “We hear the experiences and we learn things that help us to understand as we counsel together as a quorum about what is happening in the different parts of the world and in different groups within the Church.”

Six years ago, I argued that

A stake president, therefore, is better informed about what is going on in the Church than a typical scholar of Mormonism, albeit often for a more restricted geographical area.

and

while someone who does Mormon Studies may be an expert in his or her particular niche, he or she will be in less of a position to say what is generally happening Church-wide than a typical General Authority.

From what is reported in the Ensign, the apostles are far more in touch with what is going on in the Church than I had even argued. I have always been impressed with how in touch the apostles are with what is going on in the Church. I am now even more so.

Apostles in Chronicles

Some passages illustrate word usage very nicely. The Septuagint version of the end of 2 Chronicles has one such passage:

And after those things Sennacherib, king of the Assyrians, sent (ἀπέστειλεν) his servants against Jerusalem, and he himself and all his army was attacking Lachish, and he sent (ἀπέστειλεν) to Hezekiah, king of Judah, and all of Judea which was in Jerusalem (2 Chronicles 32:9).

Sennacherib sent emissaries to Jerusalem with full authority to take action on his behalf. They were there to negotiate terms of Hezekiah's surrender to the Assyrians. Whatever terms they agreed to would be effective and accepted by Sennacherib. This passage thus provides a nice illustration of the use of the Greek verb ἀποστέλλω in the sense of to send an ambassador.

This is the sense used in the New Testament of ἀπόστολος (apostle) as an ambassador. In the New Testament and even today an apostle of Jesus Christ is a personal ambassador of Jesus Christ with the power and authority to say and do what Jesus would say or do in the same circumstance and to have those pronouncements binding in heaven and earth.

Chronicles uses the term as a generic term and in this case for a hostile force. Sennacherib's ambassadors argued that all other nations had succumbed to overwhelming Assyrian superiority and that Hezekiah should just succumb to the obvious and irresistible flow of events. As it turned out, Hezekiah was true to his people and did not surrender to the world's demands even though almost all other nations had. Hezekiah was faithful. A hundred years later the Neo-Assyrian empire would be only a memory. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Reading the Gospel of Judas IV: Judas the Apostle

That the Gospel of Judas is ascribed to Judas already alerts the reader to specific things. To understand those things, we need to understand who Judas was. 

The name Judas is simply the Greek version of Hebrew Judah.

Judas was called as an apostle (Matthew 10:4), given power to heal sickness and cast out demons (Matthew 10:1), and sent forth to preach the gospel (Matthew 10:5), which he did.

Judas must have had some real financial capacity. After all, he was the one who held the bag and was in charge of the finances of Jesus and the twelve apostles (John 12:6; 13:29). Of the other apostles, we know that Peter was a successful fisherman and owned his own boat (Luke 5:4); so Peter had been successful in his own business. Matthew, presumably the same as Levi, was a tax collector (Matthew 10:3; Luke 5:27-32) who made a living accounting for the government’s, other people’s, and his own money. In spite of this, Judas had the bag and charge of the finances for the group.

Judas also had some weaknesses, which the other apostles did as well. He wanted to be important and in charge. He wanted to be the greatest (Matthew 18:1-6; 20:20-29; 23:1-12). He did not approve of some of the things that Jesus did and found fault with them (John 12:3-6). These faults were and are not uncommon among mortals. Judas shared many of the same faults as his fellow-apostles. In spite of any of his short-comings, Judas was an apostle. He was a leader in Jesus’s church. Even up to Jesus’s last supper, none of the twelve thought Judas as anything different than the rest of them, neither better nor worse. Judas was simply one of them.

That is why Judas could not melt into mere mediocrity.