( continues...) are letters, that give snap shots, and then there's
Revelation,
which is also a letter, but it's a letter about a vision and people have spent the last 2000 years trying to unpack the symbolism.
After the Christian NT, there are the writings of the people commonly referred to as "The Church Fathers," some of the earliest of whom knew some of the Apostles. I think many of these bishops were Gentile converts, and from what I understand of their writings, when an issue would arise, they would analyze it in light of the Gospels and the Hebrew Bible, and what they knew from the Apostles' teachings/
As to saints, my education is extra-light on them. I know there's a Catholic encyclopedia online (New Advent, I think) and I've found various (Roman Catholic POV) stories of saints I've wanted to read about, there. "Saint" is one of those words that has different meanings, depending on who is saying it. In the broadest sense, it would apply to any believer, and that's how it is used in the NT.
When it comes to Renaissance art, you're probably mostly seeing people who were canonized by the church, often because they were matyrs, but there is other criteria, too. Eastern iconography and other art (which I think JZ has an interest in) would be of similar subjects, I think. To hook up a saint with his/her symbology, you'd probably do just as well to search on the web, as to buy any one book on the saints.
generally "Apostle" is reserved for the original followers of Jesus, and yet it includes Paul, because of the experience he had on the road to Damascus
Basically, the fifth Beatle. Not the one who died of a brain hemorrhage right before they got famous.
Some good reading, if you're up for slogging through ancient primary sources, is Gregory of Tours'
Historia Francorum
-- his is the history I read of St. Gregory, the pope and famous-maker of Gregorian chants, who got stuck with the extremely raw deal of being pope when the plague of Justinian hit Italy. Anyway, the book itself is an interesting/weird chronicle of the late-Roman, early-Germanic, everything-muddled period of western European history.
Roman Catholic tradition teaches that Peter was the first Bishop of Rome.
Cool archaeological tidbit--they have found bones of a man in Peter's traditional burial spot, and the bones have been dated to the mid-1st century AD, so it's in the correct timeframe.
The infighting in the church over doctrinal issues can be rather interesting--the Marcian heresy is particularly fascinating to me (Marcian argued against the duality of Jesus, saying he couldn't be both God and Man), because it ties into the issues that official Rome had with the barbarians, most of whom were Marcian followers. A lot of the gnostic writings that have been uncovered in the past 60 years or so have been of similar "heretical" origin.
Okay, and in looking up the Council of Nicaea on Wikipedia (and with a detour through that other greatest hit of barbarian theology, the Arian heresy), I discovered that the #1 canon that came out of Nicaea was a rule against self-castration.
1. They needed the rule because some dude in Alexandria (named Orygen) was promoting such a practice.
2. I cannot discern from Wikipedia whether classical Christians were all rugby players, or what.
3. Teh Craxxy has been in evidence in organized religion for a long, loooong time. Let's just be grateful that all the other bishops at Nicaea did some math and figured out that Christians with no balls do not lead to more generations of Christians.
Arian! Thank you, Nutty! I couldn't remember the other (even bigger) barbarian heresy--I knew it began with an A, but couldn't come up with it.
Anyway, even though I'm a verging-on-lapsed-Catholic, I find all the early Christian history stuff fascinating, especially finding out where certain imagery comes from (the Virgin Mother with Baby Jesus pose--complete ripoff of Isis).
And to bring this all back to books--anyone interested in how it was decided which scriptures were going to be Holy Scriptures should read Bert Ehrman's books--"Lost Christianities", "Misquoting Jesus", and lots of others. He's a good writer, drops in quips, and chairs the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Gar, did you mean to put that question in Great Write Way?