No you don’t understand how frustrated I am that we always depicted the Apostles as old men, especially when it comes to during-Jesus-alive stuff.
They were probably late teens to early 20s, given the time and the description and some Biblical passages.
They were not ancient old men with long beards and wrinkles at the Last Supper.
They were young adult rebels with a cause.
where my punk-rock apostles at
I can’t remember where, but the bible says that Jesus was the only one who was old enough to pay the temple tax required by Jewish law, none of the disciples had hit that age. A quick google tells me that Jewish men pay it from the age of 20 – all of the disciples were teenagers.
Not all of them! Matthew 17:24-27 addresses the issue of the temple tax, in which Jesus tells Peter to get a four-drachma piece from a fish’s mouth to account “for my tax and yours”. In addition, Peter is the only person directly mentioned to have a mother-in-law; Jesus heals her in according to three accounts (Matthew 8:14-17, Mark 1:29-31, and Luke 4:38).
So! The “Disciples were ancient old men with long beards and wrinkles" factoid is actually just statistical error. The average disciple was under 20. Simon Peter, who lived with his mother-in-law and his fishing boat and payed the temple tax was an outlier adn should not have been counted.
#did i just see a spiders georg meme backed up with chapter and verse citations