Expositor's Bible Commentary Commentary Acts 1:21

"Of the men therefore that have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us," — Acts 1:21 (ASV)

A twelvefold apostolic witness was required if early Jewish Christianity was to represent itself to the Jewish nation as the culmination of Israel’s hope and the true people of Israel’s Messiah (cf. Matthew 19:28; Revelation 21:10, 12, 14). The “remnant theology” of Late Judaism made it mandatory that any group that presented itself as “the righteous remnant” of the nation and had the responsibility of calling the nation to repentance and permeating it for God’s glory, must represent itself as the true Israel, not only in its proclamation, but also in its symbolism. The Qumran community, for example, had twelve leaders heading up their community. Consequently, the early church found itself required to replace the defector Judas so as to have a full complement of twelve in its apostolic ranks.

For a candidate to succeed Judas among the apostles, Peter laid down two qualifications. The first was that the successor had to have familiar and unhindered association with Jesus from John’s baptism to Jesus’ ascension. Perhaps not all the Eleven themselves could claim association with Jesus from the days of John the Baptist (Jn 1:35-51 suggests that about half could). But they evidently wanted to make quite sure that there would be no deficiency on this first point. The second qualification was that of having been a witness to Christ’s resurrection. From these two verses we may derive a strict definition of the term “apostle” (GK 693) and one that determines much of what Luke presents in the remainder of Acts (though, of course, Luke also uses the word “apostle” more broadly; cf. 14:14). An apostle was a guarantor of the Gospel tradition because he had been a companion of the earthly Jesus and a witness to the reality of his resurrection through an encounter with the risen Lord.