It is a truism for interpreting any text that misunderstanding the genre invariably leads to misunderstanding the text. Reading the title of Sean McDowell's book, one might expect the contents to follow the conventions of early Christian history. However, the first sentence quickly reveals that this is a work of quite another genre: ‘How can we trust in the historical resurrection of Jesus?’ (p. 1) This book is unapologetically apologetics. One of the reasons frequently cited as proof for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection is the subsequent transformation of his followers from cowards hiding in an upper room to those willing to endure torture and martyrdom. However, McDowell rightly notes that there is very little in the way of scholarly interrogation of the claim that Jesus’ disciples actually did die martyrs’ deaths. This is the question which the author seeks to answer, and he advances two theses: all the Apostles were willing to die for their faith; and all but one them was in fact martyred. This is an interesting question, but it is not obvious why this has any bearing on the historicity of the resurrection. As McDowell himself concedes, ‘the apostles’ willingness to die for their beliefs does not demonstrate the inherent truth of the Christian message, but that the Apostles really believed that Jesus had risen from the grave’ (p. 2). Even this claim is questionable. To be sure, it is hardly a point of scholarly contention that early Christians believed Jesus to have risen, but while McDowell insists that the Apostles where ready to die primarily for their belief in the resurrection, it is worth noting that the resurrection is not a particularly prominent feature in second- and third-century Christian martyrologies. There is no reason, therefore, to imagine that it was any more important to first generation martyrs. While McDowell is initially circumspect in what establishing the martyrdom of the disciples might demonstrate, by the end of the book the disciples’ deaths are in fact proof of the historical event, because ‘if the resurrection did not happen, the apostles would have willingly suffered and died for something they knew to be false’ (p. 260). In other words (as all apologists seem at pains to establish), ‘the apostles were not liars’ (p. 3).

The title notwithstanding, McDowell is commendably upfront about his apologetic agenda. However, it renders the analysis that follows somewhat predetermined. Given how important the Apostles’ deaths become for him to demonstrate the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection, it is hardly surprising that McDowell judges the martyrdom accounts of all the disciples (except John, who is taken to be the author of the Fourth Gospel), James, and Paul to be more likely than not. McDowell acknowledges that his main problem is a lack of evidence; there are no contemporaneous accounts of the martyrdom of any of the first generation of Apostles. Indeed, even the basic task of establishing a definitive list of the twelve, given the conflicting lists in the Gospels, requires some imaginative interpretative leaps (pp. 25–8). McDowell compensates for the lack of data by appealing to apocryphal acts, and ‘living memory’, that is where second-century writers claim to be passing on memories of the Apostles, distinct from the less reliable ‘shared tradition’ or ‘cultural memory’. So testimony from more than 150 years after the event can be trusted because the writers ‘believed they were transmitting personal memory of events that trace back to the apostles themselves’ (p. 3). Once again, the belief that something is true is conflated with its historicity, and the distinction between living memory and cultural memory appears to rest on convenience rather than methodological precision.

McDowell takes the data on each of the Apostles and by applying a set of criteria – multiple attestation, date, perspective and ‘oral tradition’ – calculates the likelihood of their historical martyrdom on a nine-point scale ranging from (1) (‘Not possibly true’) to (9) (‘the highest possible probability’) with various rungs in between (3) (‘improbable’; (5) (‘as plausible as not’); (7) (‘more probable than not’). Peter, Paul and James the son of Zebedee, are placed in the highest probable category, with Jesus’ brother James ‘very probably true’. Thomas is ‘more probably than not’ and Andrew ‘more plausible than not’. John, son of Zebedee, is ‘improbable’, while the remainder, for whose deaths there is virtually no evidence, still merit an ‘as plausible as not’ judgement. One does not need to be a rampant sceptic to worry about McDowell's handling of the evidence. The ‘multiple attestation’ cited to get Peter to Rome (for example 1 Peter v.13; Ignatius, Apocalypse of Peter, Dionysus of Corinth) are surely based on shared tradition. Furthermore, McDowell simply assumes the convenient side of several scholarly areas of dispute: the Petrine authorship of 1 Peter, and his influence of Mark; the location of Mark in Rome, and the reliability of Papias's testimony.

It would be unfair to judge this book against the standards expected of a work of early Christian history. The title aside, McDowell is clear that his volume is apologetics. Apologists generally construct binary choices: Jesus rose again or the disciples are liars, or ‘the onus … is on those who claim the stories were all invented’ (p. 13) as if history works on a true/not true binary. While the methodological flaws and questionable handling of the data are weaknesses, McDowell does usefully collect traditions about the Apostles’ deaths in one place. While I am less qualified to judge whether or not The fate of the Apostles is successful in its apologetic aim, it does seem to me that those who will be persuaded by this volume probably did not require persuading in the first place. Ultimately, McDowell appeals to Pascal's maxim: ‘I only believe histories whose witnesses are ready to be put to death.’ But one might also consider Oscar Wilde's quip: ‘A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it!’