Simon the Zealot

Simon appears in every list of the twelve, always with an epithet to distinguish him from Simon Peter, and always at or near the end of the list. Matthew and Mark call him the Cananaean (Kananaios); Luke and Acts call him the Zealot (Zelotes). The two are the same word: Kananaios is a Greek transcription of an Aramaic term for zealous or enthusiast, which Luke has simply translated. It has nothing to do with Canaan or with the town of Cana.

What the word signified for Simon is genuinely uncertain. Later readers have often taken Zealot as a party label and cast him as a former member of the armed nationalist movement that resisted Rome, an appealing picture, since it would set a revolutionary beside a tax collector among the twelve. But that organized movement, the Zealots proper, is usually dated by historians to the revolt of the 60s, a generation after Jesus, which makes the party membership anachronistic. More cautious scholars read the epithet as describing Simon's temperament or his zeal for the Jewish law rather than a political affiliation.

Apart from the lists, the New Testament records nothing whatever of him, no word, no act. He is a name, an ambiguous nickname, and a gap that tradition rushed to fill in incompatible ways.

The traditions of Simon's mission and death are unusually scattered and mutually contradictory, a sign of how little was actually known. The most widespread account pairs him with Jude Thaddaeus and sends the two to preach in Persia or Mesopotamia, where both are martyred, the version behind their shared feast day in the Western calendar.

Other traditions send him elsewhere entirely. One strand has him evangelize Egypt and North Africa; a late and much-repeated legend, without early support, brings him all the way to Britain. The Eastern churches preserve their own local variants. No two agree, and none can be traced to a reliable early source.

The manner of his death is equally unfixed. Western iconography most often gives him a saw, from a tradition that he was sawn in two, and he is accordingly patron of sawyers and woodcutters; other accounts have him crucified or killed with an axe or sword. The saw became his standard attribute in art, allowing him to be recognized in a way the texts never allowed him to be known. Of all the twelve, Simon the Zealot is perhaps the one about whom the tradition preserved the least and invented the most.