On "The Search for the Twelve Apostles" by William Steuart McBirnie ***

This book seems a useful reference, but on the whole it was a disappointment, especially in comparison to the more recent Fate of the Apostles by Sean McDowell. The latter suffered from a kind of formulaicness, but this work suffers in some sense from a seeming lack of method.

McBirnie quotes extensively from various sources, many of them late in history such that one wonders to what extent the later sources are reliable. Further, at least in the edition I read, it was difficult to tell what was a quote and what wasn't--in other words, the design was not well suited to McBirnie's text (a problem likely resolved in more recent reprint editions).

Finally, McBirnie focuses heavily on burial sights of the apostles for his information. This seems somewhat dubious. Granted, in tracking the bodily remains of the apostles, he may at times hit on how true a given myth is, but given how many churches like to claim an apostle for their own and the relative proliferation of relics during the Middle Ages, burial sights seem a difficult way to go about finding the supposed path of the apostles.