In his 1977 book The Dead Sea Scrolls, Professor Geza Vermes makes the significant point that Judaism in the time of Jesus was a non-dogmatic religion in terms of creed. You were born a Jew, and whether you were an extreme liberal or ultra-orthodox, you remained a valid part of the single entity of believers. Even the Sadducees, who denied so fundamental a point – as far as any credal religion might have been concerned - as the resurrection, remained fully within the ambit of Judaism, and indeed provided many of the more influential members of the priesthood.

Now Jesus both inherited this wide-ranging concept of what constituted membership of the group, and put it into practice as far as his disciples were concerned. The true Church of the Apostles was a church of many facets, where each facet, however different, was accepted and valued within the group as a whole. It is worth itemizing some of these differences, which stand out in extra-canonical scripture, but which have been largely eliminated from the New Testament, where the only who seem to emerge in any degree as rounded personalities are Peter, John and Paul.

Let us start with the question of celibacy and marriage among the Twelve. From the canonical New Testament we know of only one member of the Twelve who was married, Simon Peter: the fact is established by the reference at Matthew 8:14 and Luke 4:38 to Peter's "wife's mother". In terms of logic, it should - one may observe - be impossible for the Roman Catholic Church to deny its priests the chance of marrying when the disciple whom that church claims as its first head was himself married. The assumption is often made that Peter must have been something of an exception, and that other members of the Twelve were all celibate. But, as we shall see, that was far from the case!

One may remark, in passing, that the reason for the promotion of celibacy in the New Testament is abundantly clear, being mentioned by Luke twice. At 21:23 he writes “But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days!”, and at 23:29 "For, behold, the days are coming, in which they shall say 'Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bare, and the paps which never gave suck!'". The predicted end of the world will be revolutionary in its upheaval, and it will be much better not to be encumbered in any way with children then. No doubt that is why Salome, a follower of Jesus, declares in a surviving fragment of the Gospel of the Egyptians "I have ... done well in not bearing children", and why Jesus himself says, at Matthew 19:12, "There be eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it". But as the concessive nature of the final comment here indicates, Jesus' advocacy of celibacy here is of something optional, not something compulsory.

The marriage of Peter is confirmed by the extra-canonical Acts of Peter, and elsewhere we learn that Philip was married and had daughters (according to Polycrates, a second-century Bishop of Ephesus) and that Thomas was married and had descendants (according to Hegesippus, the early church historian, Thomas's grandson's Jacob and Zokar were interrogated by the Emperor Domitian, who asked them "if they were of David's family"). And in 1904 E. Revillout, in his book Les Apocryphes Coptes, published a Coptic fragment - from which Gospel or other work is uncertain - mentioning that Judas Iscariot, too, had a wife. By contrast, it is clear from the Acts of John that John did not marry, indeed voluntarily renounced the possibility of marriage.

But the most interesting case among members of the Twelve is Bartholomew. Towards the end of The Questions of Bartholomew, Jesus and Bartholomew are discussing marriage and lustfulness and celibacy. It is difficult to be certain of what is said, as the text is in some degree corrupt; but Jesus seems to be advocating chaste living and celibacy. Nonetheless, we know from Bartholomew's work The Book of the Resurrection that he had a son Thaddaeus, since the work is bequeathed to him for safe-keeping. And Jesus appears in no way to have limited or rejected the discipleship of Bartholomew (or of Peter, Philip, Thomas and Judas Iscariot), although they had chosen a different way from, apparently, Jesus himself and John. If this is a correct interpretation of the still-meagre facts, Jesus emerges as one accepting of different approaches, rather than coercive by nature.

Let us move on to consider the position of the Eucharist among the Apostles. This may not seem, at first sight, to be an issue where the notion of pluralism has any relevance. The mainstream Christian Churches commonly regard the Communion Service as the central rite of Christianity, and in extra-canonical scripture, on the surviving evidence, the Eucharist played an important part in the ministries of Peter, John, Philip, Thomas and Paul; there is nothing very surprising about that.

Quakers, who have no Communion Service, are regularly taxed by other Christians with the apparently leading question "Why not?". But both Quakers and others (such as many Unitarians) for whom the holding of Communion Services is a rare or even non-existent practice can legitimately claim the apostolic warrant of Andrew himself. For one thing that is clear from the Acts of Andrew is that Andrew's circle of adherents lived a life devoted to Christian ideals without eucharistic celebrations. This remarkable divergence from what may be considered the norm cannot simply be regarded as an invalid aberration. It illustrates something very important about the nature of the Twelve as a group, to which we shall return later.

Another significant trend is Jesus's inclusion, among the disciples, of outsiders. Most of the disciples, like Jesus himself, were Galileans, an easily distinguishable group in speech and demeanour, as is evident from Mark 14:70 and Luke 22:59. But Judas Iscariot was probably not a Galilean. Professor George Milligan has written of Judas: "If the generally accepted explanation of his surname ('man of Kerioth') be correct, he was the only original member of the apostolic band who was not a Galiliean". Another disciple was a tax-collector, a despised occupation among the Jews - this was not in fact Matthew, but Matthias, the thirteenth disciple, who (according to Acts 1:26) was chosen to replace Judas Iscariot. Jesus, therefore, was no slavish conformist or follower of convention, but showed a true liberal's willingness to do and to accept the unusual, if such action was called for.

But the most interesting instance - by far - of the inclusion of 'oursiders' or 'minorities' by Jesus lies behind an apparent and otherwise inexplicable duplication od names in the canonical lists of the Twelve. The eighth member of the group was Thomas, the tenth member is given variously as Judas od Thaddaeus. In fact all these names refer to the same person, Judas Thaddaeus or Judas Thomas, the Judas, not Iscariot" of John 14.22. "Thomas" is the Aramaic word "theuma" meaning twin, so "Judas Thomas" means actually "Judas the twin" - "Thomas didymos" as he appears three times in John's Gospel, "didymos" being the Greek word for "twin". It the eighth and tenth members of the Twelve are the same person masquerading under different names, it is clear that the name of an original member of the group has, for some reason, been suppressed. There is not time today to go into all the details, but there can be no doubt, from the extra-canonical evidence, that the name of the suppressed member was the name of a woman, Mary Magdalene. Indeed in the last saying of the Gospel of Thomas we can see Simon Peter trying to exclude Mary from the group; for, he says there, "women are not worthy of the life", i.e., if the demands of the life of being disciples. Peter, whose view was in fact shared by his brother Andrew, is immediately and firmly contradicted by Jesus, who did not hold tht view of women. But, as is all too evident, Jesus's own position was overturned by the hardliners in the emergent Church - the successors of Peter and Andrew - before very much time had passed. What we can say, in summing up, is that hardliners were a minority within the total group which Jesus gathered around himself, and that that group was constituted on the essential principle of 'inclusiveness', not 'exclusiveness'.

But it is when we come to look at the Twelve as Apostles of the emerging faith that their true pluralist nature as a group becomes evident, and when we consider the range of their divergent endeavours, and the circumstances in which the endeavours were carried on, and the fact of differences of emphasis - John, for example, favouring celibacy, others not; Andrew living without the Eucharist, others treating it as central; some, such as apparently John and Paul, having numerous female followers, while others, such as Peter and Andrew and James the Younger seem to have been accompanied and surrounded mostly by men -, we can see that the Apostles as a group actually typified pluralism in action, the Unitarian notion - to put thing in modern terms - of toleration of, and coexistence with, different ways of doing things, without any particular way being declared superior or "the only way". That was the true and original emphasis of Jesus himself, inherited - as we saw earlier - from the 'broad church' that was the Judaism of his time. and the emergent institutional church, in moving to and adopting the principle of centralised authoritarianism, was - not to mince words - simply betraying the pluralist legacy of Jesus himself and those around him.

Truth to the historical position of Jesus means that concentration on dogma and belief, items which for too long have bedevilled the 'official' Christian Churches, must take second place to shared experience in practice. The ecumenical movement has concentrated too much on trying to formulate agreed statements of belief and dogma. But the true path to ecumenism is shared experience, not shutting out those who think or interpret differently, but letting each take from the shared experience what is important in personal terms.

I venture to suggest that the propagation of that pluralist and tolerant approach, in imitation of Jesus and his disciples, is among our principal tasks and duties as Unitarians. And it is an approach that should strike deep chords of sympathy and agreement in a modern world which is striving, so often without success, for valid and meaningful patterns of dialogue and mutually respecting coexistence.

Martin Pulbrook