Reddit reviews The Fate of the Apostles: Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus

> and what would they get from that?

Fame, renown, respect, free food, lodging, dozens or hundreds of people wanting to listen to them, etc. These are things that people from their positions (illiterate herders, fishermen, etc.) could only dream of having. Why do you think people get drawn into cults, to begin with? You don't need to be a part of the leadership of some huge group to gain benefits.

>they got the death sentence. would you sign up to be tortured to death for a lie?

We know extraordinarily little about the martyrdom of the apostles. The stories we do have about them are not only centuries later but are also contradictory (one account says an apostle went somewhere in Africa and died while another might say they went off to Europe and died) and contain absolutely fiction elements. I highly recommend Sean McDowell's (a conservative evangelical apologist ironically enough) book The Fate of the Apostles which goes through all the various historical texts/mentions we have of their martyrdom and showcases perfectly what I mentioned prior.

For example, you know the story of St. Peter how he was crucified upside down? That comes from the apocryphal "Acts of Peter" in which in addition to the claim of him being crucified that way also includes talking dogs, raising sardines from the dead, and battling a magician who can fly and whisper in people's ears to kill them. I think that speaks for itself about the historical weight of these accounts and why we should weigh the historical reliability of such accounts very low.

Another good compilation (not in book form like the source I mentioned above) of the accounts of the apostles can be found here.

I would be careful with this. Many of these are based on vague tradition which cannot be firmly authenticated today.

Listening to Pints With Aquinas Podcast, the following book was recommend as a study of what happened to the apostles and what evidence we have for each claim:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1472465202/?coliid=IX0U8S2BQT2Y8&colid=2YXGCX5KIHPRS&psc=0&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

I don’t think it is as baseless as you suppose: https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Apostles-Examining-Martyrdom-Followers/dp/1472465202

Were the heavens gate apostles in a position to know whether or not their beliefs were true?

Moderator message: Reddit automatically removes comments that contain some URLs which it doesn't allow. That's what happened to your comment above, probably because you used the "amzn.to" link shortener. Then I manually approved for your comment to appear to others.

In the future you could use a longer link to an Amazon page, such as: https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Apostles-Examining-Martyrdom-Followers/dp/1472465202/

... which should be ok. Note that you don't need to include the "ref=" part of the original URL.