(Cont.)
But before they were commissioned to do so, they were learners, learning from Christ for the three years of His public ministry, and therefore rightly called disciples.  As such, the New Testament writings use the terms "disciple" and "apostle" interchangeably.  That does not mean that there were not more than 12 disciples, since all those following Jesus during his earthly ministry were called disciples too.  But when the biblical texts refer to "the twelve", or the "twelve disciples", they mean very specifically those 12 who would later be known as the Apostles.  This is certainly proven by the use of the words in the Gospel texts above denoting the 12 disciples and 12 Apostles. The folks who distort the Gospels to spread the pernicious errors of women priests falsely assume that women, called disciples, were present at the Last Supper, and thus received priestly ordination from Christ along with the 12.