What! Who’s the crazy guy claiming there were 70 apostles? Actually that is how the eastern church refers to them and with good reason. Eastern Christians do not use the word apostle as exclusively as does western tradition. It became fashionable in the west, which was further removed from the original Greek of the New Testament, to refer almost exclusively to the original twelve as apostles. However, the Greek term simply means someone sent away, in this case, on a mission. The opening words of Luke 10:1-20 could easily be translated as “the Lord appointed seventy-two others and apostled them two by two ahead of him” that is, if we made a verb out of the noun apostle as does Greek. We simply translate it that Jesus “sent” them, and that is just what apostle means, a person sent.
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