What happened to the people who knew him?

Acts reports that Herod "killed James, the brother of John, with the sword", in a single sentence, and then moves on to Peter’s arrest. That is the only apostolic martyrdom the New Testament narrates. It is not the only death of one of the twelve: Judas’s is told twice, and differently.

The book covers roughly thirty years and ends with Paul under house arrest in Rome, without narrating his death or Peter’s.

John’s Gospel has Jesus tell Peter that in old age another will "carry you where you don’t want to go", "signifying by what kind of death he would glorify God", and does not say what that death was. Clement of Rome writes to Corinth, by the usual dating around 96, and refers to both Peter and Paul. Peter "endured not one or two, but numerous labours; and when he had at length suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him". Paul, "after being seven times thrown into captivity, compelled to flee, and stoned", likewise reached his reward.

That they died is there. Almost nothing else is. Paul "suffered martyrdom under the prefects" after reaching "the extreme limit of the west", which names no prefect and no place; Peter gets no manner, no place and no date. That is striking in a letter written from Rome within living memory of people who would have known.

The crucifixion upside down, the flaying, the specific countries and the specific instruments come from the second century onward, and in several cases from much later still. Eusebius lays out an early map in the fourth century, Parthia allotted to Thomas and Scythia to Andrew "according to tradition", with Peter crucified head downwards at Rome, and names Origen, writing in the third, as the source. Some appear first in the apocryphal Acts written about individual apostles, which are full of marvels and which Eusebius already set aside as "absurd and impious".

Later does not mean invented. It does mean that the confident lists of twelve deaths are assembled from sources of very different quality, and that the assembly is rarely shown to the reader.

For Peter and Paul, the plainest early notice is Clement writing from Rome within a generation, who says both suffered and died but gives no manner and no date. For James the brother of John, Acts is explicit: killed with the sword by Herod. For James the brother of Jesus, Josephus records a judicial execution in Jerusalem, with the high priest named and the time fixed between two Roman governors.

For most of the rest the New Testament records no death at all. What can be said is that some of the first generation were killed, on the strength of those three documents, and that no list exists.

At its strongest it establishes sincerity: people do not generally accept death for something they know to be a fabrication. That is a real point, and what it rules out is one specific explanation, deliberate fraud.

What it does not establish is that a sincere belief is a correct one, and it is regularly asked to. People have died for many incompatible things.

Take the twelve as a list and go looking for each one after about the year 50. Most of them appear in the Gospels and in the list of names at the start of Acts, and then the New Testament falls silent on them: no death, no burial, no later mention.

Whatever they did with the rest of their lives, and however long those were, is not recoverable.

Churches across the world trace themselves to particular apostles, and those traditions carry real weight inside them: Thomas in India, Mark in Egypt, Andrew in Byzantium. They are how a community says where it came from and whose it is.

The early versions do not agree with each other. Eusebius, writing about 325 and naming Origen as his source, gives Parthia to Thomas, Scythia to Andrew and Asia to John, and calls it tradition. An apocryphal Acts of Thomas, probably older than 220, had already sent Thomas to India. Eusebius has Mark in Alexandria, as something "they say", but not Andrew in Byzantium.

A tradition of that kind is making a claim about identity as much as about travel itineraries, which is why showing that a detail is late does not usually do to it what the person showing it expects.

The popular account has twelve men fanning out across the known world and dying spectacularly in twelve places. The sources have a handful of documented deaths, a large silence, and a movement that kept going through both.

The second is the one the evidence supports, and it is the harder thing to explain, because it means whatever carried the movement forward was not a set of famous deaths.