Saint Simon the Zealot: The Apostle Who Is Only a Name

The tenth installment in a series on the Twelve Apostles.

Of all the men Jesus called to be the foundation of his Church, Simon the Zealot is the one about whom we know the least. He has no recorded words. He has no scene of his own — no confession like Thomas’s, no question like Jude’s, no call narrative like Matthew’s. He performs no miracle that anyone wrote down and asks no question that anyone preserved. He is, in the strict sense, only a name: a single entry, always in the third group of four, in each of the four lists of the Twelve, and nothing more.

And yet even the name is a puzzle. Two of the four lists call him “the Cananean”; the other two call him “the Zealot.” The first looks like a place and is not; the second looks like a political party and may not be. The King James Version made the confusion permanent for English readers by printing “Simon the Canaanite,” as though he came from the land of Canaan — which he did not. Three centuries of pious legend then filled the silence with mission journeys to Persia, Egypt, the Black Sea, and even Britain, and with a martyrdom so vivid that it gave him the saw he carries in every painting — a martyrdom that, as it happens, the earliest texts do not actually describe.

This post takes Simon with the same rules the rest of this series has used: the New Testament evidence first, read closely; then what the single Greek word behind his name can and cannot bear; then the legends, labeled clearly as legends; and last, the question of what the most obscure of the apostles still gives the Church that numbered him, against all the odds, among her twelve foundation stones.

Simon in the New Testament

A name in four lists

Every Synoptic Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles gives a roster of the Twelve, and the four lists agree closely — much the same names, in three internal groups of four, with Peter always first and, in the three Gospel lists, Judas Iscariot always last (Acts, naming only the eleven who survived, omits him). Simon sits in the third group in every list, and in every list he carries a distinguishing epithet, because there was already another Simon at the head of the Twelve and the community needed to tell them apart.

Matthew names him last in the eleventh slot before the traitor: “Simon the Cananean, and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.”⁠¹ Mark, likewise, places “Simon the Cananean” between Thaddeus and Judas Iscariot.⁠² But Luke, in the same slot, gives a different word. His Gospel lists the Twelve as:

Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, Simon who was called a Zealot, and Judas the son of James, and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.⁠³

Acts repeats Luke’s choice: in the upper room before Pentecost the eleven include “James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James.”⁠⁴ So the manuscripts hand us one man under two labels: the Cananean of Matthew and Mark, the Zealot of Luke and Acts. Beyond the label, the New Testament tells us nothing about him at all. He is present at the call, present at the table, present in the upper room — and silent throughout. The whole of his biography is the difference between two words.

What “Cananean” actually means

The temptation, for an English reader, is to hear “Cananean” as a place of origin — Canaan, the old name for the land, or perhaps Cana of Galilee, where Jesus turned water into wine. Both readings are wrong, and the second is the more seductive precisely because it is so close.

The Greek word Matthew and Mark use is Kananaios (Καναναῖος). It is not the Greek word for a Canaanite — that is Chananaios (Χαναναῖος), built on Chanaan, and it is what the Gospel uses for the “Canaanite woman” who begs Jesus to heal her daughter.⁠⁵ Nor is it built on Kana, the town. Kananaios is instead a Greek transliteration of an Aramaic word, qanʾanā, from the same Semitic root as the Hebrew qannāʾ, “jealous” or “zealous.” It means, simply, “the zealous one.” That is why Luke — writing for a Greek audience that would not have caught the Aramaic — does not transliterate it but translates it, rendering the identical epithet with the ordinary Greek word zēlōtēs (ζηλωτής), “Zealot.”⁠⁶ The Cananean and the Zealot are not two facts about Simon; they are one word in two languages.

The Catholic translation says as much in its own notes. The NABRE annotates Matthew’s “Cananean” flatly: “this represents an Aramaic word meaning ‘zealot.’”⁠⁷ Even the older Protestant reference tools concede the point against their own King James text: Strong’s concordance, glossing the word, calls the rendering “Canaanite” a mistake — literally, “Canaanite (by mistake for a derivative from Chanaan).”⁠⁸ The King James translators, working from a Byzantine Greek form, printed “Simon the Canaanite” at Matthew 10:4 and Mark 3:18, and an English-speaking world has been quietly misplacing the apostle’s origins ever since.⁠⁹

How old is the confusion? Older than English. When Jacobus de Voragine compiled the Golden Legend in the thirteenth century, he had the equation right and the etymology wrong in the same breath: Simon, he wrote, “was said Simon Zelotes, and Simon Cananean of Cana a street that is in Galilee, there whereas our Lord converted the water into wine. And Zelotes is as much to say as Cananean.”⁠¹⁰ Voragine knew that Zelotes and Cananean meant the same thing — and still reached for Cana to explain it. The pull of the place-name was strong even when the right answer was sitting in the next clause.

The Zealot Question: Was Simon a Revolutionary?

If the epithet means “zealous,” zealous for what — and how zealous? This is where the honest account has to slow down, because it is the point at which the sources most tempt us to say more than we know.

The popular image, captured in the working subtitle “the Revolutionary,” is of Simon as a former guerrilla: a card-carrying member of the Zealots, the armed nationalist faction that fought to throw off Roman rule, plucked by Jesus from the ranks of the insurgency. It is a vivid picture. It is also, on the dominant reading of the evidence, an anachronism — and the Catholic Bible says so in its own footnotes.

The trouble is chronological. “The Zealots,” as the proper name of an organized party, belongs to the great Jewish revolt against Rome of A.D. 66–70 — a generation after Simon was called. The NABRE puts the difficulty plainly in its note on Luke: “the Zealots were the instigators of the First Revolt of Palestinian Jews against Rome in A.D. 66–70. Because the existence of the Zealots as a distinct group during the lifetime of Jesus is the subject of debate, the meaning of the identification of Simon as a Zealot is unclear.”⁠¹¹

That debate is real and long-running. Martin Hengel’s classic study argued for a relatively continuous “freedom movement,” rooted in a theology of zeal that ran from Judas the Galilean’s tax revolt of A.D. 6 down to the war of 66 — on which reading a zealotic milieu did exist in Jesus’ day, and Simon could have come out of it.⁠¹² Others — Morton Smith, Richard Horsley — have pushed back hard, distinguishing the Sicarii and assorted bandit and prophetic movements from “the Zealots” properly so called, and dating the organized party only to the winter of the revolt itself.⁠¹³ What everyone grants is that Josephus, our main source, traces the ideological seedbed to the “fourth philosophy” founded by Judas the Galilean at the census of A.D. 6 — a movement whose distinctive tenet was that God alone is ruler and Lord — but reserves the party-name “Zealots” for the factions of the war.⁠¹⁴

The result, for Simon, is a careful conclusion rather than a colorful one. The epithet most securely means that he was a man of intense, even fierce, religious zeal — zealous for the Law, for the one God, and for Israel’s fidelity to him. Whether that zeal had ever taken organized, political, or violent form before he followed Jesus, the sources do not let us say. Benedict XVI, surveying exactly this question in his catechesis on the apostle, drew the line where the evidence draws it:

it is highly likely that even if this Simon was not exactly a member of the nationalist movement of Zealots, he was at least marked by passionate attachment to his Jewish identity, hence, for God, his People and divine Law.⁠¹⁵

“Passionate attachment” is the responsible ceiling. To call Simon a reformed terrorist is to write a novel; to call him a man consumed by zeal for God is to read the only word the Gospels gave us.

Matthew the collaborator and Simon the zealot

There is, however, one thing the name does let us say with confidence, and it is the most theologically interesting fact about Simon — though it is really a fact about the company he kept.

Stand the lists up and look at who else is in them. In the same band of twelve men, alongside Simon the Zealot — fierce for Israel, the kind of Jew for whom the Roman tax was a religious scandal — sits Matthew the tax collector, a man who had made his living collecting that very tax for Rome, a collaborator in the eyes of every zealous patriot.⁠¹⁶ Of all the pairings in the Gospels, this is the one that should not have worked. A zealot and a quisling, in the ancient world, do not share a table; they share, at most, a knife.

Benedict XVI built his whole reading of Simon on that scandal:

If this was the case, Simon was worlds apart from Matthew, who, on the contrary, had an activity behind him as a tax collector that was frowned upon as entirely impure. This shows that Jesus called his disciples and collaborators, without exception, from the most varied social and religious backgrounds. It was people who interested him, not social classes or labels!⁠¹⁷

The point is not a sentimental one about diversity. It is ecclesiological. “Let us also bear in mind,” Benedict went on, “that the group of the Twelve is the prefiguration of the Church, where there must be room for all charisms, peoples and races, all human qualities that find their composition and unity in communion with Jesus.”⁠¹⁸ The Church was political dynamite from the first roll call. What held the zealot and the tax man in one body was not that their politics had been reconciled, but that something prior to their politics — the person of Christ — had become more determinative than the thing that divided them. Simon’s silent presence in the lists is itself a doctrine: the kingdom does not wait for its members to agree before it makes them brothers.

The Other Simons

Part of why Simon is hard to know is that the New Testament is crowded with men named Simon — it was among the most common Jewish names of the age — and the tradition spent centuries sorting him from his namesakes, not always successfully. A reader meeting “Simon” in an ancient source has to ask which one, every time.

He is not, first of all, Simon Peter. That is obvious from the lists themselves, where the two Simons are distinguished precisely so they will not be confused: “Simon, whom he named Peter,” at the head, and “Simon who was called a Zealot,” in the third group.⁠¹⁹

More consequentially, he is not Symeon, the son of Clopas — the second bishop of Jerusalem. After the martyrdom of James the Just, Eusebius reports, the surviving apostles and disciples chose this Symeon to succeed him: “They all with one consent pronounced Symeon, the son of Clopas, of whom the Gospel also makes mention, to be worthy of the episcopal throne of that parish. He was a cousin, as they say, of the Saviour. For Hegesippus records that Clopas was a brother of Joseph.”⁠²⁰ This Symeon — a kinsman of the Lord, not one of the Twelve — was himself martyred under Trajan at an extreme old age, traditionally one hundred and twenty.⁠²¹ The two men are clearly distinct: one an apostle called the Zealot, the other a cousin of Jesus who led the Jerusalem church into the second century.

And yet the confusion of the two is not a modern slip; it is ancient, and it is built into one of the very earliest “apostle lists” we have. A pseudonymous text once attributed to Hippolytus, On the Twelve Apostles, simply fuses them: “Simon the Zealot, the son of Clopas, who is also called Jude, became bishop of Jerusalem after James the Just, and fell asleep and was buried there at the age of 120 years.”⁠²² In one sentence the compiler has merged Simon the Zealot, Symeon son of Clopas, and a third name besides, and given the composite a peaceful death at 120 — which is the tradition for the bishop, not the apostle. When a text this old already cannot keep the Simons straight, the modern reader is forgiven for needing a scorecard.

A third figure complicates the count: the “Simon” named among the brothers of the Lord. When the people of Nazareth take offense at Jesus, they ask, “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?”⁠²³ Catholic tradition understands these “brothers” not as children of the Virgin Mary — whose perpetual virginity the Church confesses — but as kinsmen in the broad Semitic sense, the same usage that lets the NABRE note observe that “brother” and “sister” in this idiom cover cousins and other relations.⁠²⁴ Some traditions identify this Simon-brother with Symeon of Jerusalem; the medieval West went further and, in the harmonizing instinct of the age, simply gathered several of these men into one family. The Golden Legend opens its life of the apostle by making Simon and Jude “brethren of James the Less and sons of Mary Cleophas, which was married to Alpheus” — a tidy “Holy Kinship” that turns four obscure apostles into a single set of brothers, and that historical scholarship regards as exactly the kind of harmonization it looks like.⁠²⁵

For completeness, the New Testament also gives us Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross; Simon the Pharisee, who hosted a dinner; Simon the leper, in whose house a woman anointed Jesus; Simon Magus, the sorcerer of Samaria; Simon the tanner, with whom Peter lodged in Joppa; and Simon Iscariot, the father of Judas.⁠²⁶ None of them is our apostle. The single most useful habit in reading the traditions about Simon the Zealot is to assume, until proven otherwise, that any given “Simon” is one of the others.

Missions and Martyrdom: A Tangle of Legends

Once the New Testament falls silent — which is to say, immediately — Simon disappears into legend, and the legends do not agree. They send him to opposite ends of the known world and kill him in incompatible ways. The honest thing is not to pick a favorite but to lay the contradictions side by side and label each by its age and its worth.

The Western tradition: Persia, with Jude

The dominant Latin tradition pairs Simon with Jude Thaddaeus and sends the two to Persia. Its textual fountainhead is the apocryphal Latin Passion of Simon and Jude, part of a collection of apostolic acts that circulated under the name of Abdias, the fictitious “first bishop of Babylon” — a corpus that scholars date to roughly the sixth century, and whose own claim to have been written by an eyewitness ordained by the apostles is part of the legend, not evidence for it.⁠²⁷ In this account, Simon (preaching first in Egypt) and Jude (in Mesopotamia) converge in Persia, defeat a pair of court sorcerers, win tens of thousands of converts, and are finally killed when they refuse to sacrifice to the sun. The Golden Legend carried the story into every literate household of the later Middle Ages, and it is the reason the two apostles share an October feast.

It is worth quoting the Golden Legend on the death itself, because the popular memory of it is wrong. When the idols are shattered, Voragine writes, the pagan priests “ran upon the apostles and hewed them to death anon.”⁠²⁸ Hewed — hacked down, cut to pieces. Not sawn. The most famous “fact” about Simon’s martyrdom — that he was sawn in half, the source of the saw he carries in art — is found in neither the Golden Legend nor the underlying Passion, both of which have him simply struck down. The Roman Martyrology, in its traditional form, is similarly silent on the method: “Simon preached the Gospel in Egypt, Thaddeus in Mesopotamia. Afterwards, entering Persia together, they converted to Christ a numberless multitude of the inhabitants, and then underwent martyrdom.”⁠²⁹ A numberless multitude, a shared death, a Persian city — and no saw.

Where, then, does the saw come from? From the art, working backward. Simon’s standard attribute in Western painting from the late Middle Ages is the bucksaw, and the best art-historical reading is that it visualizes the “hewn / butchered to pieces” detail rather than recording a literal sentence of sawing — a bucksaw being the medieval tool for cutting a carcass apart.⁠³⁰ Somewhere between the text and the altarpiece, “hacked to death” hardened into “sawn asunder,” and the tool became the man’s emblem. Rubens’s apostle at the head of this post leans on it; so does half the stained glass of Europe. It is a real piece of tradition — but tradition about a tradition, not testimony.

The Eastern traditions: crucifixion, the Caucasus, and Cana

Travel east of Rome and Simon’s itinerary reverses. The Byzantine tradition does not send him to Persia and does not have him hewn down; it sends him across the northern world and crucifies him. The Orthodox Church in America’s life of the saint has Simon traveling “from Britain to the Black Sea,” preaching widely, and suffering “martyrdom by crucifixion” — and, notably, it takes pains to distinguish him from Symeon of Jerusalem, citing Saint Demetrius of Rostov to keep the two Simons apart.⁠³¹

A more local Eastern tradition anchors him in the Caucasus. Georgian and Abkhazian sources hold that Simon the Canaanite preached along the eastern Black Sea coast and died and was buried at Nikopsia; his cult settled at Anakopia, the site of present-day New Athos in Abkhazia, where a church dedicated to him stands beside a grotto venerated as his hermitage, and where a large monastery of Saint Simon the Canaanite was built in the 1880s under imperial Russian patronage.⁠³² The Byzantine calendar keeps his feast not in October but on the tenth of May, with the wider Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles commemorating him again at the end of June.⁠³³ The Coptic tradition, for its part, also has him crucified — “crucified on a tree,” in the Synaxarium — after a mission into Africa.⁠³⁴

The Eastern tradition also produced the most charming of the Simon legends, and the one that depends most completely on the philological mistake we have already met. Because “Cananean” was misheard as “of Cana,” a story grew up — preserved in the Greek menaion — that Simon was the bridegroom at the wedding of Cana, and that, having watched Christ turn water into wine at his own marriage feast, he left bride and home to follow him, and so earned the name “the Zealot.”⁠³⁵ It is a lovely story and there is nothing behind it but a pun. The name never meant Cana; it meant zeal.

Britain, and the death at 120

At the far edge of credibility lies the British legend: that Simon the Zealot carried the Gospel to Britain and was crucified and buried there. It descends from another late, pseudonymous “apostle list,” this one fathered on a “Dorotheus of Tyre,” and was elaborated by post-Reformation English antiquarians eager to give their island an apostolic founder. It has no early attestation and is generally dismissed as fabrication.⁠³⁶ And at the opposite extreme from every martyrdom account stands the verdict of Pseudo-Hippolytus, whom we have already caught conflating Simon with the bishop of Jerusalem: in that telling Simon does not die a martyr at all but “fell asleep” peacefully at the age of 120.⁠³⁷

Lay the strands out and the disagreement is total. Was Simon hewn to death in Persia, or crucified on the Black Sea, or in Egypt, or in Britain — or did he die in his bed at 120 in Jerusalem? The traditions cannot all be right, and there is no historical instrument by which to adjudicate among them. The Golden Legend itself, with unusual candor, throws up its hands: after reporting the Persian death it admits that “it is founden in divers places, of S. Simon, that he was nailed to the cross,” and then concedes that “some say verily that it was not this Simon that suffered the martyrdom of the cross, but it was another, the son of Cleophas, brother of Joseph, and Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, witnesseth it in his chronicle.”⁠³⁸ Even the great medieval bestseller of saints’ lives could not decide which Simon it was talking about. The honest summary is the one this series has given for most of the Twelve: beyond the upper room of Acts 1:13, we do not know where Simon went or how he died. We know only where the churches that loved him said he went.

Simon in Catholic Worship and Art

October 28 and the calendars

For all the obscurity, Simon is not neglected in the Church’s prayer. The Roman calendar keeps Saints Simon and Jude, apostles, on October 28 as a feast — the rank reserved for the apostles — a joint commemoration born of the tradition of their joint Persian mission and death.⁠³⁹ And Simon stands in the most solemn place the Roman liturgy can put a name: the Roman Canon, where the litany of apostles prayed shortly before the words of institution names “Simon and Jude” among the Twelve — so that wherever Eucharistic Prayer I is offered, the silent apostle is spoken aloud at the altar.⁠⁴⁰ The relics venerated as his rest in Rome, in St. Peter’s Basilica, sharing a single tomb with those of Jude beneath the altar of St. Joseph in the left transept, where they were placed in 1665 — companions in legend, in feast, and in death, and now in the ground.⁠⁴¹ The Christian East, keeping its own May commemoration, remembers him no less.

The saw, and the problem of finding Simon

Simon is, by a quiet irony, one of the hardest apostles to identify in art — which is fitting for a man who is only a name. His attributes are not fixed. Most often, in the West, he carries the saw, the emblem of the martyrdom the texts do not quite describe; sometimes he holds a book, or a fish (a “fisher of men”), or, in English depictions tied to the Britain legend, a boat.⁠⁴² The saw is not even his alone — it belongs as well to other “sawn” saints — and the club or halberd that is sometimes given to Simon is properly Jude’s. Without an inscription or a labeled series, a Simon in a painting is often identifiable only by elimination. The patronages follow the saw: by the logic of his supposed instrument of death, Simon became patron of tanners, curriers, and sawyers — woodcutters and the men of the saw claiming the apostle of the saw.⁠⁴³

What Simon the Zealot Gives the Church

Every apostle in this series leaves the Church a signature gift. Peter left the office; John the theology; Thomas the confession; Matthew the proof that no résumé disqualifies; Jude the patronage of the overlooked. Simon’s gift is the strangest of all, because it is made entirely of absence. He left no words, no scene, no verified itinerary, not even a stable name. What he left is the bare fact of his inclusion — and that fact turns out to carry more than it looks.

Consider what the Church did with a man about whom she knew nothing. She did not quietly drop him from the rolls. She kept his name in every Gospel list, set it in the Roman Canon to be prayed at the altar until the end of the world, gave him a feast and a basilica tomb, and confessed him, with the other eleven, as one of the foundation stones on which she is built. The Catechism states the principle without flinching: “The Church is apostolic because she is founded on the apostles” — all of them, the eloquent and the silent alike — the witnesses “chosen and sent on mission by Christ himself.”⁠⁴⁴ The Book of Revelation sees the same thing from the far end of history: the wall of the heavenly city has twelve foundation stones, “on which were inscribed the twelve names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.”⁠⁴⁵ One of those twelve names is Simon’s. A man we cannot trace is carved into the foundation of the New Jerusalem.

And there is the matter of his zeal — the one thing his name does tell us. Zeal is a dangerous virtue; it is the energy that, misdirected, produces the fanatic and the terrorist, and Simon came out of a world where exactly that misdirection was a live and bloody option. The Gospel did not extinguish his zeal; it converted it. The fire that might have been spent on Rome was spent, instead, on the kingdom of God — and spent in the company of a tax collector he would once have despised. That is the deeper meaning of his place in the lists: the same passion that makes a zealot can make an apostle, if its object is changed. Simon is the patron, if of anything, of redirected fire.

He is the apostle who is only a name. But the name was kept, and prayed, and built into the wall of heaven — which is the Church’s way of insisting that being unremembered by men is not the same as being forgotten by God. In the kingdom Simon followed his Lord into, the silent are not lost. They are foundations.

Further reading

• Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).
• Martin Hengel, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 A.D., trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989).
• John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Vol. 3: Companions and Competitors (New York: Doubleday, 2001).
• Sean McDowell, The Fate of the Apostles: Examining the Martyrdom Accounts of the Closest Followers of Jesus (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
• Els Rose, Ritual Memory: The Apocryphal Acts and Liturgical Commemoration in the Early Medieval West (c. 500–1215) (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Saint Simon the Zealot?

Simon the Zealot was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. He appears in all four New Testament lists of the Twelve — “the Cananean” in Matthew and Mark, “the Zealot” in Luke and Acts — but the Gospels record nothing else about him: no words, no individual scenes, no miracles. He is, in the strict sense, only a name in a list. Later tradition supplied mission journeys (most famously to Persia, with Jude) and a martyrdom, but none of it can be historically verified.

Why is Simon called “the Cananean” in some Gospels and “the Zealot” in others?

Because they are the same word in two languages. “Cananean” (Greek Kananaios) is a transliteration of an Aramaic word meaning “zealous one”; Luke simply translates that same epithet into Greek as “Zealot” (zēlōtēs). It has nothing to do with the land of Canaan or the town of Cana. The King James Version’s “Simon the Canaanite” is a mistranslation, as even Strong’s concordance notes.

Was Simon the Zealot a revolutionary or a member of the Zealot party?

Probably not in the organized sense. The Zealots as a defined political-military party belong to the Jewish revolt against Rome of A.D. 66–70, decades after Simon’s call, and the NABRE itself says the meaning of his title “is unclear.” The most that can responsibly be said — and what Benedict XVI said — is that Simon was a man of intense religious zeal, “marked by passionate attachment to his Jewish identity.” Whether that zeal had ever taken organized political form before he followed Jesus, the sources do not tell us.

How did Simon the Zealot die?

It is genuinely unknown, and the traditions contradict one another. The Western tradition says he was killed in Persia together with Jude; the Byzantine and Coptic traditions say he was crucified; one ancient list says he died peacefully at age 120 (having confused him with the bishop of Jerusalem). The famous image of Simon being “sawn in half” rests on a later misreading — the earliest texts say only that he was “hewed to death,” and the saw he carries in art is a medieval iconographic accretion.

Is Simon the Zealot the same as Simon Peter or Simeon of Jerusalem?

No. He is distinguished from Simon Peter in the apostle lists themselves. He is also distinct from Symeon (Simeon), the son of Clopas, who was a cousin of Jesus and the second bishop of Jerusalem — though the two were confused even in antiquity, and one of the earliest surviving “apostle lists” (Pseudo-Hippolytus) actually merges them.

When is the feast of Saint Simon the Zealot?

In the Roman Catholic calendar, Saints Simon and Jude are celebrated together as a feast on October 28. The Byzantine churches commemorate Simon separately on May 10. He is traditionally invoked as the patron of tanners, curriers, and sawyers, on account of the saw associated with his martyrdom legend.

Footnotes

1. 1. Matt 10:4 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org. The NABRE (New American Bible Revised Edition) is the canonical English Catholic translation used in the United States.

2. 2. Mark 3:18 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

3. 3. Luke 6:14–16 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

4. 4. Acts 1:13 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

5. 5. The "Canaanite woman" of Matt 15:22 is *Chananaia* (Χαναναία), from *Chanaan*, a wholly different word from the *Kananaios* applied to Simon; bible.usccb.org.

6. 6. On *Kananaios* (Καναναῖος) as a transliteration of the Aramaic *qanʾanā*, cognate with Hebrew *qannāʾ* ("zealous"), and Luke's translation of the same epithet as *zēlōtēs* (ζηλωτής), see the standard lexica, e.g., J. H. Thayer, *A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament*, s.v. Κανανίτης / Καναναῖος. The Byzantine/Textus Receptus form is *Kananitēs* (Κανανίτης); the critical text reads *Kananaios*.

7. 7. NABRE note on Matt 10:2–4: "Cananean: this represents an Aramaic word meaning 'zealot.' The meaning of that designation is unclear (see note on Lk 6:15)," bible.usccb.org.

8. 8. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, G2581: the word is "of Chaldee origin (compare *qanna'*)" and means "zealous"; the gloss adds, "Canaanite (by mistake for a derivative from [G5477] *Chanaan*)." The "mistake" is the geographic rendering.

9. 9. Matt 10:4 (KJV): "Simon the Canaanite, and Judas Iscariot"; Mark 3:18 (KJV): "and Simon the Canaanite." The KJV's own Luke 6:15, by contrast, reads "Simon called Zelotes," transliterating the Greek — so the same translation preserves both forms of the one epithet.

10. 10. Jacobus de Voragine, *The Golden Legend*, ch. 159 ("Of the Holy Apostles Simon and Jude"), trans. William Caxton (1483), christianiconography.info (Internet Medieval Sourcebook text). The etymology from "Cana a street that is in Galilee" is Voragine's own error, even as he correctly equates Zelotes with Cananean.

11. 11. NABRE note on Luke 6:15, bible.usccb.org.

12. 12. Martin Hengel, *The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I until 70 A.D.*, trans. David Smith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989), arguing for a continuous "freedom movement" theology of zeal from A.D. 6 to 70.

13. 13. Morton Smith, "Zealots and Sicarii, Their Origins and Relation," *Harvard Theological Review* 64 (1971): 1–19; Richard A. Horsley and John S. Hanson, *Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements in the Time of Jesus* (Minneapolis: Winston, 1985). Both date the organized "Zealot" party to the revolt itself and distinguish it from the earlier Sicarii and bandit movements.

14. 14. Josephus, *Jewish Antiquities* 18.1.1, 18.1.6, on the "fourth philosophy" founded by Judas the Galilean at the census (A.D. 6) and its tenet that God alone is ruler; cf. *Jewish War* 2.8.1. Josephus reserves the party-name "Zealots" for the factions of the war of 66–70.

15. 15. Benedict XVI, General Audience, October 11, 2006 ("Simon and Jude"), vatican.va. Benedict notes that "in Hebrew the verb *qanà'* means 'to be jealous, ardent.'"

16. 16. Matt 10:3 names "Matthew the tax collector"; the same Gospel narrates his call from the customs post at Matt 9:9, bible.usccb.org. On Matthew, see Saint Matthew the Apostle.

17. 17. Benedict XVI, General Audience, October 11, 2006, vatican.va.

18. 18. Benedict XVI, General Audience, October 11, 2006, vatican.va.

19. 19. Luke 6:14–15 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org.

20. 20. Eusebius, *Church History* 3.11, in *Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, 2nd ser., vol. 1, trans. A. C. McGiffert, ccel.org.

21. 21. Eusebius, *Church History* 3.32, narrates Symeon's martyrdom under Trajan, when Atticus was governor, at the age of 120. The detail is the source of the "120 years" later attached, by conflation, to Simon the Zealot.

22. 22. Pseudo-Hippolytus, *On the Twelve Apostles*, no. 11, in *Ante-Nicene Fathers*, vol. 5, trans. J. H. MacMahon, newadvent.org. The text is pseudonymous and late, part of the medieval "apostle-list" genre.

23. 23. Mark 6:3 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; cf. Matt 13:55.

24. 24. NABRE note on Mark 6:3, observing that in Semitic usage "brother" and "sister" extend to nephews, nieces, cousins, and half-siblings, bible.usccb.org. On the Catholic confession of Mary's perpetual virginity, see Is Marian Devotion Idolatry?

25. 25. *Golden Legend*, ch. 159: "Simon Cananean and Judas Thaddeus were brethren of James the Less and sons of Mary Cleophas, which was married to Alpheus," christianiconography.info. The "Holy Kinship" harmonization gathered several New Testament figures into one family; it is a medieval construction, not historical data.

26. 26. Simon of Cyrene (Mark 15:21); Simon the Pharisee (Luke 7:36–40); Simon the leper (Mark 14:3); Simon Magus (Acts 8:9–24); Simon the tanner (Acts 10:6); Simon Iscariot, father of Judas (John 6:71). All NABRE.

27. 27. The *Passion of Simon and Jude* (a unit of the Latin "Apostolic Histories" pseudonymously ascribed to Abdias of Babylon) is generally dated to the latter sixth century; see Tony Burke, "Passion of Simon and Jude," NASSCAL e-Clavis, nasscal.com. The "Abdias" attribution is a humanist-era construct.

28. 28. *Golden Legend*, ch. 159, christianiconography.info.

29. 29. Roman Martyrology (traditional Baronius edition), October 28, English translation, sensusfidelium.com. The modern (2004) *Martyrologium Romanum* revises the entry; the older text is quoted here.

30. 30. Richard Stracke, "St. Simon: The Iconography," christianiconography.info, citing G. Duchet-Suchaux and M. Pastoureau, *The Bible and the Saints*; the bucksaw visualizes the "butchered / hewn to pieces" detail rather than a literal sentence of sawing.

31. 31. "Apostle Simon the Zealot," Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, which has Simon martyred "by crucifixion" and explicitly distinguishes him, on the authority of St. Demetrius of Rostov, from Symeon the second bishop of Jerusalem.

32. 32. On the Georgian/Abkhazian tradition of Simon's burial at Nikopsia and the cult at Anakopia/New Athos, and the Church and Monastery of St. Simon the Canaanite (the large monastery built in the 1880s under Russian imperial patronage), see "New Athos" and "Church of St. Simon the Canaanite, New Athos," en.wikipedia.org. The burial claim derives from the medieval Georgian chronicles and is a regional cult tradition.

33. 33. The Byzantine feast of Simon the Zealot falls on May 10; he is also commemorated in the Synaxis of the Holy Apostles on June 30. See the OCA and Greek Orthodox Archdiocese calendars.

34. 34. Coptic Synaxarium, 15 Bashans (= May 10): Simon "was martyred, crucified on a tree," after a mission into Africa, st-takla.org.

35. 35. The legend that Simon was the bridegroom at the wedding of Cana (John 2) is preserved in the Greek menaion and Orthodox synaxarion for May 10; it depends entirely on the false reading of "Cananean" as "of Cana." See the OCA life, oca.org.

36. 36. The British legend descends from the pseudonymous *Synopsis de Apostolis* attributed to "Dorotheus of Tyre" (a 6th-century-or-later compilation) and was elaborated by later English antiquarians; it has no early attestation. See Tony Burke, "List of the Apostles and Disciples by Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre," NASSCAL e-Clavis, nasscal.com.

37. 37. Pseudo-Hippolytus, *On the Twelve Apostles*, no. 11, newadvent.org: Simon "fell asleep and was buried there at the age of 120 years" — the natural death belonging properly to Symeon of Jerusalem.

38. 38. *Golden Legend*, ch. 159, christianiconography.info. The "son of Cleophas" is Symeon of Jerusalem (Eusebius, *Church History* 3.11, 3.32).

39. 39. Saints Simon and Jude, apostles, are celebrated as a feast on October 28 on the General Roman Calendar; see the liturgical calendar at catholicculture.org.

40. 40. The Roman Canon (Eucharistic Prayer I) names the apostles in the *Communicantes*, including "Simon and Jude," in the list of saints prayed before the consecration.

41. 41. The relics venerated as those of Simon and Jude rest together in St. Peter's Basilica, beneath the altar of St. Joseph in the left transept, where they were placed in 1665; see Saint Jude Thaddaeus for the shared tomb.

42. 42. Stracke, "St. Simon: The Iconography," christianiconography.info, on the saw, the boat (the English attribute tied to the Britain legend), and the difficulty of identifying Simon without an inscription; the club or halberd belongs properly to Jude. The fish is a further occasional attribute, read against a "fisher of men" theme.

43. 43. Simon's traditional patronage of tanners, curriers, and sawyers follows from the saw of his martyrdom legend; the patronages are recorded in the standard saints' calendars and martyrologies.

44. 44. *Catechism of the Catholic Church*, 857, vatican.va; cf. CCC 858, on the apostles whom Christ "named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to preach."

45. 45. Rev 21:14 (NABRE), bible.usccb.org; cf. CCC 869.