Sancti Simon et Iudas Thaddæus, Apostoli — for their feast on the twenty-eighth day of October, II classis
In omnem terram exivit sonus eorum: et in fines orbis terræ verba eorum. “Their sound hath gone forth into all the earth: and their words unto the ends of the world.” — Psalm 18:5
I. Two names at the end of the list
Every list of the Twelve in the New Testament ends the same way. Peter stands first, Judas Iscariot stands last, and just before the traitor, in St. Matthew and St. Mark, come two men of whom the Gospels tell us almost nothing: Simon the Cananean and Thaddeus (Matt. 10:3-4; Mark 3:18). St. Luke names them as Simon who is called Zelotes and Jude of James (Luke 6:15-16; Acts 1:13). They were chosen by name, on the mountain, after a night that Our Lord spent in prayer (Luke 6:12-13). They were sent out two by two to preach and heal. They ate the Pasch with Him in the upper room. They saw Him risen, watched Him ascend, and received the Holy Ghost at Pentecost with Mary and the rest. Then the Scriptures fall silent about them.
The Church has kept them together on one day since the early Middle Ages, and she ranks their feast with those of the greatest Apostles. That decision is itself a kind of teaching. Apostleship is not measured by how much of a man’s story has survived. Christ gave these two to His Church, and what He gives is not small because it is hidden.
What follows separates, as honestly as the sources allow, what Scripture tells us, what the early Church reliably reports, and what pious tradition has handed down. The last of these is venerable and the Church has prayed with it for centuries. It is not, however, documentary history, and it should not be presented as if it were.
II. Simon the Zealot
St. Matthew and St. Mark call him Simon Cananæus (Greek Kananaios). St. Luke, writing for Greek readers, calls him Simon Zelotes. The two names are now generally understood to be the same word: Kananaios renders the Aramaic qan’ana, “the zealous one,” and Luke simply translates it. St. Jerome took the first name to mean “of Cana,” and many Latin writers followed him; the Greek form of the word tells against that reading.
What his zeal was is uncertain. The word may mark him as a man who had been ardent for the Law before his call, or as one who had belonged to the party of armed Jewish nationalists that would later lead the revolt against Rome. If the second, then the Twelve held at one table a Zealot who hated the Roman occupation and a publican, Matthew, who had collected Rome’s taxes. Our Lord did not choose His Apostles from one faction. He chose them out of the world, and made them one in Himself.
Greek tradition adds more. Some Byzantine writers identified Simon with the bridegroom of the wedding at Cana, who, they said, left his bride with her consent to follow Christ; others with Nathanael. These are pious elaborations from the name, not history. Some ancient writers also identified him with Simeon son of Cleophas, the kinsman of the Lord who succeeded St. James as bishop of Jerusalem and was crucified under Trajan at a great age. Eusebius, drawing on the second-century chronicler Hegesippus, records Simeon’s election and martyrdom (Hist. eccl. III.11, III.32), but nothing in Eusebius makes him one of the Twelve. The identification is ancient, it is attractive, and it is uncertain.
III. Jude, not the Iscariot
The second Apostle carries more names than the first, and the reason is plain. He shared the name Iudas with the man who betrayed the Lord, and the Evangelists take care that the two should not be confused. St. Matthew and St. Mark call him Thaddeus. St. Luke calls him Iudas Iacobi, “Jude of James,” which the Douay renders “Jude the brother of James” and many modern versions render “son of James.” St. John, recording his only words, calls him “Judas, not the Iscariot” (John 14:22). In some ancient manuscripts of St. Matthew he is also called Lebbæus.
Those only words were spoken at the Last Supper, after Our Lord had promised that He would show Himself to those who loved Him:
Domine, quid factum est, quia manifestaturus es nobis teipsum, et non mundo? “Lord, how is it, that thou wilt manifest thyself to us, and not to the world?” (John 14:22)
It is the question of a man who expected a Messiah the whole world would see: a king revealed in power, as all Israel hoped. Our Lord’s answer turned the question inward: “If any one love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him, and will make our abode with him” (John 14:23). Christ would not be shown to the world as the world wanted. He would come to dwell in those who kept His word, and through them He would be made known. St. Augustine, commenting on the passage, says that the world of which Our Lord speaks is the world of those who love the world, and that they cannot see Him because they do not love Him (Tract. in Ioan. 76). Jude’s question was answered in Jude’s own life. He became one of those through whom Christ was manifested to the nations.
IV. The Epistle of St. Jude
The Church has always received among the Catholic Epistles a short letter that opens: “Jude, the servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James, to them that are beloved in God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, and called” (Jude 1). Tradition attributes it to the Apostle, and the Council of Trent, in defining the canon in 1546, names it simply as the Epistle of Jude the Apostle (Sess. IV). Its exact authorship has been discussed since antiquity, and the Church’s definition concerns its canonicity and inspiration.
It is a letter of warning. The writer had meant to write of “your common salvation,” but found it necessary instead to exhort the faithful “to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints” (Jude 3), because certain men had crept in unnoticed, turning the grace of God into licence and denying Christ. Against them he sets the examples of God’s judgment: Israel in the desert, the angels who kept not their principality, Sodom and Gomorrha. He recalls that even Michael the Archangel, disputing with the devil about the body of Moses, did not dare to bring a railing judgment against him, but said: “The Lord command thee” (Jude 9). And he cites a prophecy of “Enoch, the seventh from Adam” concerning the Lord’s coming with thousands of His saints to execute judgment (Jude 14-15).
Those two references, to the dispute over Moses’ body and to the words of Enoch, gave some early Christians pause, because they come from writings outside the canon of Scripture. St. Jerome reports that many rejected the letter for this reason, but adds that it had earned its authority by its antiquity and its use in the Church (De viris illustribus 4). Eusebius lists it among the books that were disputed, though known to most (Hist. eccl. III.25). Yet it was read and cited from very early: Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria and Origen all knew it, and Origen praised it as a letter of few lines, but full of the strong words of heavenly grace. The inspired writer may quote a true saying from an uninspired book, as St. Paul quotes the Greek poets, without making the whole book Scripture.
The letter ends with counsel and with one of the noblest doxologies in the New Testament:
“But you, my beloved, building yourselves upon your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto life everlasting… Now to him who is able to preserve you without sin, and to present you spotless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy, in the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, to the only God our Saviour through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory and magnificence, empire and power, before all ages, and now, and for all ages of ages. Amen.” (Jude 20-21, 24-25)
Here is the Apostle’s whole charge to the Church: hold the faith that was handed down, pray, keep yourselves in charity, and wait for the Lord.
V. Among the brethren of the Lord
St. Matthew records the people of Nazareth asking of Our Lord: “Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary, and his brethren James, and Joseph, and Simon, and Jude?” (Matt. 13:55). Many writers, Latin and Greek, have identified this Jude with the Apostle and the author of the Epistle, who calls himself the brother of James; some have identified this Simon with the Apostle Simon as well.
The Church has always held, against Helvidius and his successors, that the “brethren of the Lord” were not sons of the Blessed Virgin, who remained a virgin perpetually. St. Jerome’s explanation, which became the common Latin view, is that they were cousins, kinsmen in the broad sense in which Hebrew and Aramaic used the word “brother.” On that reading, Jude the Apostle may have been a kinsman of Our Lord according to the flesh. The identification is ancient and widely held, but the evidence does not settle it.
Hegesippus, as Eusebius reports him, preserves one moving story about this family. In the reign of Domitian, the emperor, fearing the descendants of David, had two grandsons of “Jude, who was said to be the Lord’s brother according to the flesh,” brought before him. They told him they owned only a small farm, which they worked with their own hands, and they showed him the calluses on their palms. When he asked about Christ and His kingdom, they answered that it was not of this world, but heavenly, and would appear at the end of the world when He came to judge the living and the dead. Domitian dismissed them with contempt, and they lived on as leaders of the churches (Hist. eccl. III.19-20). Whether or not their grandfather was the Apostle, they gave before Caesar the answer that Jude had been given at the Supper. The Kingdom does not come as the world expects.
VI. The missions and the martyrdom
Of the two Apostles’ labours after Pentecost, the New Testament says nothing. Later tradition says a great deal, and the traditions do not agree.
The Roman tradition. The traditional Roman Martyrology reads for this day: “The birthday of the blessed Apostles Simon the Cananean, and Thaddeus, who is called Jude. 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.” This follows a Latin Passio of the two Apostles, preserved in the collection of apostolic acts that circulated under the name of Abdias, said to have been a disciple of the Apostles and first bishop of Babylon. In that narrative the two contend in Persia with two magicians, Zaroes and Arphaxat, who had misled the king’s general; the Apostles defeat them, refuse to let them be put to death, and win many to Christ; and at last, in a city the narrative calls Suanir, the pagan priests stir up the people, who fall upon the Apostles and kill them. The Golden Legend carried this account through the whole medieval West, and the lessons of the Roman Breviary for the feast follow it. The traditional emblems come from the same body of legend: the saw for Simon, said to have been sawn asunder, and the club, halberd or axe for Jude.
The Eastern traditions. Eusebius tells of a Thaddeus whom the Apostle Thomas sent, after the Ascension, to King Abgar of Edessa, in fulfilment of a promise Our Lord was said to have made in a letter to the king; Thaddeus healed Abgar and preached in the city (Hist. eccl. I.13). Eusebius counts this Thaddeus among the Seventy disciples, not the Twelve, and the Syriac Doctrine of Addai tells the same story under the name of Addai. In later Syriac and Latin tradition the two figures were often merged. The Armenian Church honours Thaddeus, together with St. Bartholomew, as the first apostle of Armenia, and the ancient monastery of St. Thaddeus in what is now north-western Iran stands over his reputed tomb. Other traditions send Simon to the Black Sea, to Colchis and Iberia in the Caucasus, to North Africa, and even to Britain, and place Jude’s death at Edessa, at Beirut, or in Armenia.
What can be said with confidence is modest. Both Apostles went out from Jerusalem into the wider world, as the Lord commanded, and the churches of the East remember them as founders. The Roman Church honours them as martyrs, and the red of today’s vestments confesses it. The particular places and manners of their deaths belong to tradition, and tradition here speaks with more than one voice.
VII. One feast, one altar
In the East the two Apostles are kept apart: the Byzantine calendar honours Simon on the tenth of May and Jude on the nineteenth of June, and all the Twelve together on the thirtieth of June. The Roman Church joined them on the twenty-eighth of October, a pairing already found in Western liturgical books of the Carolingian age. The likely reason is the one already given in the Passio: the two were believed to have laboured and died together in Persia, and their relics were honoured together in Rome.
Those relics rest today in St. Peter’s Basilica, in an ancient sarcophagus beneath the central altar of the left transept, where they were placed on the twenty-seventh of October, 1605, in the new basilica then nearing completion. For more than three and a half centuries that transept was known as the Tribune of Saints Simon and Jude, and its altar bore their name. In 1963 Pope John XXIII rededicated the altar to St. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church; the Apostles’ relics remain beneath it, and two oval mosaics of them still flank it. Other churches, among them the basilica of Saint-Sernin at Toulouse, have long claimed portions of their relics.
The 1962 Missal keeps their feast as a feast of the second class, with the Common of Apostles: the Introit Mihi autem nimis honorati sunt amici tui, Deus, the Epistle of the gifts of the ascended Christ, he gave some apostles (Eph. 4:7-13), and the Gospel of the world’s hatred, I have chosen you out of the world (John 15:17-25). The feast falls each year in the last days of October, between the Kingship of Christ and All Saints. It is fitting. The two Apostles who preached a King not of this world stand on the threshold of the feast of all those whom their preaching gathered in.
VIII. Patron of the hopeless
Through most of the Church’s history, St. Jude was among the least invoked of the Apostles. The common pious explanation is that the faithful avoided him because his name recalled the traitor’s, and that he therefore became, by a kind of holy irony, the one to whom people turned when everything else had failed. Whatever the origin, by the nineteenth century devotion to St. Jude as patron of desperate and lost causes had spread widely through the Catholic world. In 1929 the Claretian Fathers opened a national shrine in his honour in Chicago, and through the hard years of the Depression it drew vast crowds to his novenas. Today there is hardly a Catholic church in the English-speaking world without his image, and hardly a newspaper that has not printed a line of thanks to him.
The devotion is not a superstition attached to an obscure name. It is well grounded in what we know of him. The only words of Jude that the Gospels record are a question about how Christ would make Himself known when the world did not see Him. Those who come to St. Jude in desperation are asking the same question: how will the Lord show Himself here, where nothing seems to be happening? The Apostle who received the answer, we will come to him, and will make our abode with him, is the right one to ask.
IX. What their lives teach
That the gift is Christ’s, not ours. To every one of us is given grace, according to the measure of the giving of Christ (Eph. 4:7). Two of the foundation stones of the Church left almost nothing behind but their names. Their obscurity is not a failure of the record. It shows that the Church is built on what Christ gives, not on what men achieve, and that a life can be wholly fruitful and almost wholly hidden.
That Christ makes one Body out of opposites. A Zealot who may have hated Rome sat at table with a publican who had served it, and both became Apostles of a Kingdom not of this world. Whatever divided them before their call was taken up into something greater. Political passion, national grievance and private faction are not the substance of the Church, and must give way before the charity that binds her members to one another.
That the faith is received, kept, and defended. St. Jude’s Epistle asks us to contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints. The faith is not something each generation invents. It is handed down, it can be corrupted by those who creep in unawares, and those who love it must guard it, without railing, as the Archangel did, but without yielding.
That Christ is manifested by dwelling, not by display. Jude asked why the Lord would show Himself to the few and not to the world. The answer was that He would dwell in those who love Him and keep His word. That is still how He is shown to the world: not in spectacle, but in souls in which the Father and the Son have made their abode.
Practice
Examine. Am I content for my place in the Church to be small and unseen, or do I resent that my gifts are less noticed than others’? Do I let partisanship, of politics, nation or faction, divide me from my brothers in the faith? Have I guarded the faith as it was handed down, or have I let it be quietly rewritten in my own mind?
Do. Read the Epistle of St. Jude today; it takes five minutes. Then do one hidden work of charity that no one will see, in honour of two Apostles whose labours God alone has recorded.
Pray. The Collect of the day:
Deus, qui nos per beatos Apostolos tuos Simonem et Iudam ad agnitionem tui nominis venire tribuisti: da nobis eorum gloriam sempiternam et proficiendo celebrare, et celebrando proficere. Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia sæcula sæculorum.
“O God, who by Thy blessed Apostles Simon and Jude hast granted us to come unto the knowledge of Thy name: grant us both to celebrate their eternal glory by advancing in virtue, and to advance in virtue by celebrating it. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end.”
Aspiration. Sancte Iuda Thaddæe, ora pro nobis in rebus desperatis. “St. Jude Thaddeus, pray for us in our hopeless causes.”
Devote. It is Wednesday, in the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Glorious Mysteries, dwelling on the Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Ghost, when the ascended Christ gave gifts to men and Simon and Jude received the fire that sent them out. Bring before St. Jude one cause you have given up on. If you have the custom, begin today a novena to him, and let it carry you through All Saints and All Souls into the month of the Holy Souls.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues through the Apostolic College, distinguishing for each of the Twelve what Scripture records, what the early Church reports, and what tradition adds. The Theology and Doctrine path takes up the canon of Scripture and the disputed books, the perpetual virginity of Our Lady and the question of the “brethren of the Lord,” and the Church’s teaching on the deposit of faith. The Church History path follows the apostolic missions east of the Roman frontier: Edessa, Armenia, Mesopotamia and Persia. The East-West thread compares the Roman joint feast with the separate Byzantine commemorations and with the Edessene and Armenian traditions of Thaddeus.
Sancti Simon et Iuda, Apostoli Christi, orate pro nobis.