Does the Bible Record How the Apostles Died? Only James and Judas

The Bible tells how only two of the twelve apostles died. Acts says that Herod “killed James the brother of John with the sword” (Acts 12:2), and Matthew and Acts both tell how Judas Iscariot died. Jesus foretells Peter’s death (John 21:18–19), and everything else we know about how the apostles died comes from later tradition.

James and John were brothers, and they once asked Jesus for the places at his right and left in his glory. He answered with a promise they had not asked for, “The cup that I drink you will drink” (Mark 10:39), and the two brothers drank it in very different ways. James is the one apostle whose death for the faith Scripture tells, and he died by Herod’s sword. John, as the early church remembered him, was on Patmos “on account of the word of God” and died at a great age in Ephesus. A sword and a long life can both be a witness, and witness is just what the old word martyr means.

Which apostles’ deaths does the Bible record?

Only one apostle who died for his faith has his death told in the New Testament, and Acts gives it in a few words: “About that time Herod the king laid violent hands on some who belonged to the church. He killed James the brother of John with the sword, and when he saw that it pleased the Jews, he proceeded to arrest Peter also” (Acts 12:1–3). This Herod was Herod Agrippa I, who ruled Judea from AD 41 until his death in about 44, so James was killed within those few years. It was the cup Jesus had promised the two brothers long before: “The cup that I drink you will drink” (Mark 10:39). Clement of Alexandria, writing late in the second century, passed on a story he had received from earlier generations: the man who brought James to trial was so moved by his testimony that he confessed he was a Christian too, “and thus they were both beheaded at the same time” (quoted by Eusebius, Church History 2.9).

The other death the Bible records is that of Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, and it tells of his death twice. In Matthew, Judas is seized with remorse, tries to return the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests, saying “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood,” throws the money into the temple, “and he went and hanged himself.” The priests buy a potter’s field with the money, which is why it “has been called the Field of Blood to this day” (Matthew 27:3–8). In Acts, Peter tells the believers that Judas “acquired a field with the reward of his wickedness, and falling headlong he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out,” and that the field was called Akeldama, “Field of Blood” (Acts 1:18–19).

Since Augustine, many readers have combined the two: Judas hanged himself, and his body later fell and burst open. Many modern scholars instead treat them as two separate traditions, each explaining the name of the field. Matthias was then chosen by lot to take the place “from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place” (Acts 1:25–26).

Does the Bible say how Peter died?

Scripture foretells Peter’s death, though it never records it. After the resurrection Jesus tells him, “when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go,” and John adds, “This he said to show by what kind of death he was to glorify God” (John 21:18–19). Tertullian, writing around AD 200, took the prophecy as fulfilled when Peter “is girt by another, when he is made fast to the cross” (Scorpiace 15). And in 2 Peter the apostle himself says that “the putting off of my body will be soon, as our Lord Jesus Christ made clear to me” (2 Peter 1:14).

The writers after the New Testament agree that Peter died a martyr, and they place his death in Rome, though the earliest of them says the least. Around AD 96 Clement of Rome reminded the church in Corinth that Peter “suffered martyrdom” (literally, “bore witness”) and “departed to the place of glory due to him” (1 Clement 5). Corinth remembered it too: around 170 its bishop, Dionysius, wrote that Peter and Paul taught together in Italy “and suffered martyrdom at the same time” (quoted by Eusebius, Church History 2.25). It was Tertullian who named the city and the reign, Rome under Nero, the city “where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s” (Prescription Against Heretics 36).

The detail that Peter was crucified upside down first appears in the apocryphal Acts of Peter, from the late second century, where he asks to be crucified “with the head downward and not otherwise.” Origen repeated it in the third century: Peter “was crucified head-downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way” (quoted by Eusebius, Church History 3.1). A Roman presbyter named Gaius, writing around 200, could point to the “trophies” of the apostles, their monuments, on the Vatican hill and on the road to Ostia (Eusebius, Church History 2.25). Catholic tradition holds that St. Peter’s Basilica stands over Peter’s grave.

Does the Bible say how Paul died?

Paul was not one of the Twelve, but he called himself an apostle, and people often ask about his death along with theirs. The Bible does not record it either, for Acts ends with him under guard in Rome, where “he lived there two whole years at his own expense” and preached “with all boldness and without hindrance” (Acts 28:30–31). In 2 Timothy he writes as a man expecting to die: “For I am already being poured out as a drink offering, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:6–7).

Clement of Rome says that Paul, “having taught righteousness to the whole world, and come to the extreme limit of the west,” “suffered martyrdom under the prefects” (1 Clement 5). Tertullian wrote that in Rome “Paul wins his crown in a death like John’s,” meaning John the Baptist, who was beheaded (Prescription Against Heretics 36), and Eusebius recorded that “Paul was beheaded in Rome itself, and that Peter likewise was crucified under Nero” (Church History 2.25). The Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls is built over what tradition holds to be his burial place.

Did John die a martyr?

The Bible does not say how John died, and it corrects a rumor that he would not die at all. When Peter asked about him, Jesus said, “If it is my will that he remain until I come, what is that to you? You follow me!” John’s Gospel adds: “So the saying spread abroad among the brothers that this disciple was not to die; yet Jesus did not say to him that he was not to die” (John 21:22–23). The author of Revelation, whom tradition identifies with the apostle, says he was “on the island called Patmos on account of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (Revelation 1:9).

Irenaeus, writing around 180, says that John stayed with the church in Ephesus “until the times of Trajan” (Against Heresies 3.3.4), who became emperor in 98, and Origen says John lived in Asia and “died at Ephesus” (quoted by Eusebius, Church History 3.1). Neither mentions a martyrdom, and the tradition, as the Catholic Encyclopedia summarizes it, is that he died at Ephesus “about A.D. 100 at a great age.” Tertullian adds a legend that John was first “plunged, unhurt, into boiling oil” in Rome and then sent into exile on his island (Prescription Against Heretics 36).

What does tradition say about the other apostles?

For the rest of the Twelve we have only later stories, and they often conflict. Here is the best-known tradition for each apostle, with the earliest source we know for it.

At least one early writer doubted that all the apostles were martyrs. Heracleon, a Valentinian teacher of about 170 quoted by Clement of Alexandria, said that not all who are saved made their confession before the authorities and died for it, and he named Matthew, Philip, Thomas and Levi among them (Stromata 4.9). If you look the passage up in English, the standard translation leaves out the “not” that is in the Greek.

James the brother of the Lord

A third James, “the Lord’s brother,” led the church in Jerusalem (Galatians 1:19; 2:9; Acts 15:13). The Eastern Orthodox Church honors him separately from the two apostles named James, while Catholic tradition has often identified him with James son of Alphaeus. His death is one we know of from outside Christian sources too. The Jewish historian Josephus records that in about AD 62 the high priest Ananus brought before the Sanhedrin “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James,” and had him stoned (Antiquities 20.9.1). Hegesippus, a second-century Christian writer quoted by Eusebius, says James was thrown from the pinnacle of the temple, stoned, and killed with a fuller’s club, and places his death just before the Roman siege of Jerusalem, later than Josephus does (Church History 2.23).

How reliable are the traditions?

Some of these deaths are far better attested than others. The deaths of Peter and Paul in Rome are reported by several early writers, beginning within a generation, and the death of James the brother of the Lord by a Jewish historian of the first century. For most of the others the stories come from centuries later, disagree with one another, and are mixed with legend. Sean McDowell, who examined the evidence apostle by apostle in The Fate of the Apostles (Ashgate, 2015), found it strongest for Peter, Paul and the two Jameses, and judged that Thomas’s martyrdom in India “seems at least more probable than not.” Writing in Biola Magazine in 2013, he argued that the case for the resurrection drawn from their deaths does not depend on proving that all of them were martyred; what matters, he wrote, is “their willingness to suffer for their faith and the lack of a contrary story that any of them recanted.”

The Greek word martys means a witness, and the Catholic Church defines martyrdom as “the supreme witness given to the truth of the faith: it means bearing witness even unto death” (Catechism 2473). It keeps a joint feast of Saints Peter and Paul on 29 June. James bore that witness by the sword, and John, as far as the early writers knew, bore it into old age. When Peter asked what would become of John, Jesus did not tell him; he gave him instead the word he gives each of us: “You follow me!” (John 21:22).

Related reading

• How the apostles died
• Judas Iscariot in the Bible
• Apostles and disciples: the difference