Thaddaeus, Judas or Lebbaeus? The Apostle With Three Names

Cold open

Here's a puzzle. Four lists of the twelve apostles in the New Testament. Eleven names line up, more or less. But one slot... keeps changing its name.

In two of the lists, that slot says Thaddaeus. In the other two, it says Judas. And in some old manuscripts, it says something else entirely: Lebbaeus.

Three names. Four lists. One apostle... or is it?

John's Gospel has a "Judas, not Iscariot" who asks Jesus a single question at the Last Supper. Most readers think he's our man, though John never says so. And then he's never heard from again. And yet, over the centuries, people sent this apostle to a king in Edessa, to Persia, to Armenia, gave him a letter in the Bible, and made him the patron saint of hopeless causes.

Which, frankly, is a lot of career for a man with, at most, one line.

So today: what the Bible actually says about him, what came later, and how sure anyone can be. Scripture, tradition, legend: I'll tell you which is which.

Let's begin.

Three names in four lists

Scripture

The New Testament gives us four lists of the Twelve: in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the Book of Acts. And they're remarkably consistent. Peter always comes first. Judas Iscariot always comes last (well, he's missing from Acts, which goes on to tell of his death).

But look near the end. In Matthew and Mark, the tenth name is Thaddaeus. In Luke and in Acts, there's no Thaddaeus at all. Instead there's a second Judas: Ioudas Iakōbou, "Judas of James."

And John's Gospel, which never gives a full list, has a scene with a disciple it calls "Judas... not Iscariot." John doesn't say which slot he fills.

Nowhere does the Bible say, "Thaddaeus, also called Judas." Nobody in the New Testament joins the dots. Outside those two lists, Thaddaeus is never mentioned again, anywhere. And "Judas of James", under that name, only turns up in the lists.

So where does the third name come from? For that... we need some very old books.

Lebbaeus, and the scribes who tidied up

Scholarship

In the King James Version, Matthew 10 reads: "Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus." Two names for the price of one!

But the oldest complete manuscripts of Matthew, like the fourth-century Codex Sinaiticus, have just one name: Thaddaeus. That's why almost every modern Bible prints "Thaddaeus".

Then there's Codex Bezae, a Greek-and-Latin manuscript copied around the year 400. It reads Lebbaeus, in Matthew, and in Mark too.

And the later Greek manuscripts, the ones behind the King James? Faced with two names, they simply kept both. "Lebbaeus, whose surname was Thaddaeus."

So where did "Lebbaeus" come from? Honestly, nobody knows for certain. One suggestion is that it's an attempt to fit Levi, the tax collector from Mark chapter two, into the list of the Twelve. Another plays on the sound: Lebbaeus is close to the Hebrew lev, "heart". Saint Jerome, around the year 400, said the name means "little heart."

Speculation

Some have even tried to make "Thaddaeus" mean "chest", from an Aramaic word for "breast". Which would make him... Mr Heart, also known as Mr Chest. Lovely. But that's an old guess, not the favourite explanation today.

Scholarship

More likely, many scholars think, Thaddaeus is a short form of a Greek name like Theodotus, used in Aramaic as Taddai. Names like it turn up on Jewish ossuaries and papyri of the period.

The verdict of textual scholars: "Thaddaeus" is very probably what Matthew and Mark wrote. Lebbaeus is a secondary reading. So really, it's two names in the Gospels... and a third in the copies.

Son of James... or brother?

Scripture

Now to Luke's name: Ioudas Iakōbou. Literally, "Judas of James." And that little word "of" is doing a lot of work, because the Greek, like a busy text message, just leaves out the relationship.

Scholarship

So which is it? Most scholars, and most modern Bibles, say son of James. In the very same list, one verse earlier, Luke writes "James of Alphaeus", in exactly the same way. And everyone agrees that means James son of Alphaeus. Same pattern, same meaning.

But some English Bibles, from the Geneva Bible in 1560 through the King James, chose "Judas the brother of James." And a lovely detail. In the King James, the words "the brother" are printed in italics. That was the translators' way of saying: "We've added these. They're not in the Greek."

Honest of them, really.

Speculation

Why "brother"? The translators don't tell us. A likely guess is a famous letter near the end of the New Testament, whose author introduces himself as "Jude... brother of James." But notice: that letter actually uses the Greek word for brother, adelphos. Luke doesn't.

Scholarship

So the safest thing we can say is this: Luke tells us this Judas was connected to a James. Probably his father. And we have no idea which James. It was one of the commonest names around.

The one question he asks... maybe

So what did he actually do? The lists don't say.

Scholarship

Well, if he's the same man as John's "Judas, not Iscariot", and most readers assume he is, there's exactly one scene. But that's a harmonisation. John never calls this Judas Thaddaeus, or "of James", or even one of the Twelve.

Scripture

John chapter fourteen. The Last Supper. Jesus has just told his disciples, "Those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them."

And a voice pipes up. "Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, 'Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us and not to the world?'"

Fair question! Why the private showing?

And Jesus answers: "Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them."

That's it. If this is our apostle, these are his only recorded words. And notice John's little aside: "not Iscariot." The other Judas had already walked out into the night, back in chapter thirteen. John still adds the label, so we can't confuse the two.

Scholarship

And a nod to our Thomas episode: one ancient Syriac translation reads this verse as "Judas Thomas"; another just says "Thomas." So even ancient translators handled this Judas in different ways.

One man, or two?

So: is Thaddaeus the same person as Luke's Judas of James?

Tradition

Church tradition has generally said yes. Around the year 400, Jerome put it plainly: this apostle was called Thaddaeus, Judas of James, and Lebbaeus, and "one must believe he had three names." In the West he became one figure, Saint Jude Thaddeus. Orthodox tradition goes further: one apostle Jude, called Thaddaeus and Lebbaeus, who is also the Lord's brother and the author of the letter.

Scholarship

And many modern scholars think one man with two names is the best explanation. Some Jews of this period had two names, a Hebrew one and a Greek one. Ossuaries, Jewish burial boxes, show it: one names a man as both Judah and Jason. A disciple called Judas might well have been known by a second name... especially once the name Judas had become notorious.

But here's the honest bit. That's a harmonisation: a way of fitting the lists together. The Bible never says it.

And there are other possibilities. Some scholars suggest the membership of the Twelve may have changed during Jesus's ministry: that one man left, or died, and another took his place, with no account surviving. Others suggest that, decades later, the names of the less famous apostles simply weren't remembered perfectly.

There's no evidence that settles it either way. One man with two names is the common view. But it's a view, not a verse.

The other Jude

Now let's deal with that letter.

Scripture

Near the very end of the New Testament is a short letter, just twenty-five verses long, that begins: "Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and brother of James."

Notice what he doesn't say. He doesn't call himself an apostle. And later he writes, "Remember the words which have been spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ." Many readers think that sounds like someone looking back at the apostles, not someone counting himself among them.

Meanwhile, in Mark's Gospel, the people of Nazareth name Jesus's brothers: "James and Joses and Judas and Simon." (What exactly "brothers" means here is a famous debate... and a story for next time.)

Scholarship

So, many scholars read "Jude, brother of James" as pointing to that family: James, the leader of the Jerusalem church, and his brother Judas. Not the apostle. Whether that Jude really wrote the letter, or someone wrote later in his name, is genuinely debated. And most scholars keep the apostle and the brother of Jesus as two different men.

Tradition

A wonderful story about that family. Writing in the second century, Hegesippus, quoted by Eusebius, says that the grandsons of Jude, who was "said to have been the Lord's brother according to the flesh," were hauled before the emperor Domitian as descendants of King David. They turned out to be farmers, with a small plot of land, and they showed the emperor their hands, hard from work. Domitian, the story goes, let them go.

But tradition didn't always keep the two Judes apart. Some writers, like Ephrem the Syrian in the three hundreds, made the apostle a son of Joseph, and so a brother of Jesus. And the letter itself? Eusebius listed it among the "disputed" books.

The king of Edessa

Legend

Now for the strangest story of all. It's found in Eusebius's Church History, written in the early three hundreds.

Abgar, king of Edessa, the same city in south-east Turkey we visited with Thomas, is terribly ill. He hears about the miracles of Jesus, and writes to him: please come and heal me. And Jesus writes back! Not now, he says, but after I've gone, I'll send one of my disciples.

So after the Ascension, "Judas, who was also called Thomas," sends a man named Thaddaeus to Edessa. Thaddaeus heals the king, and preaches to the city.

Tradition

Now, Eusebius tells us he took this from the archives of Edessa and translated it from Syriac. And look carefully at how he describes the hero. Not one of the Twelve. Thaddaeus, "one of the Seventy": the wider group Jesus sends out in Luke chapter ten. Seventy, or seventy-two, depending on your manuscript.

And here's the twist. A chapter earlier, Eusebius writes... "there exists no catalogue of the seventy disciples." Then he adds: "They say that Thaddeus also was one of them." They say!

Scholarship

The Syriac version of the story, the Teaching of Addai, probably from around 400, calls the missionary Addai. Some scholars think Eusebius, or his source, turned a local Syriac hero, Addai, into the Thaddaeus of the Gospels. Later writers, like Jerome, made him the apostle himself. Historians today treat the whole correspondence as legend.

Three deaths and a lost cause

So how did he die? Well... how many answers would you like?

Legend

In the West, the best-known story is the Passion of Simon and Jude, from a Latin collection of apostle stories of the late five hundreds or six hundreds. It sends Jude and Simon the Zealot to Persia, where they're killed by pagan priests. It was retold in the Golden Legend around 1260, and the two still share a feast day in the West: the twenty-eighth of October.

Tradition

The Armenian Church tells it differently. It honours Thaddaeus and Bartholomew as the first apostles of Armenia. In north-west Iran, the Monastery of Saint Thaddeus, now a World Heritage Site, still draws pilgrims every summer.

Legend

The fullest Armenian version is in the History attributed to Movses Khorenatsi: traditionally fifth century, though many scholars now date it centuries later. It says Thaddaeus was martyred under a king named Sanatruk. Interestingly, it follows Eusebius here: its Thaddaeus is one of the Seventy, the missionary to King Abgar. And it turns Addai into a different man, Thaddaeus's own disciple, whom he makes bishop of Edessa.

And a later Greek text, the Acts of Thaddaeus, lets him die peacefully at Beirut.

Persia. Armenia. Beirut. None of them written anywhere near his lifetime.

Scholarship

And the hopeless causes? How that began is honestly unclear. The popular explanation is that Christians avoided praying to him because his name sounded like Judas Iscariot, so he became the saint you turned to when you'd tried everything else. The last resort. But that's a popular explanation, and there's no early evidence for it.

What we can date is the boom. In 1929, a priest named James Tort founded the National Shrine of Saint Jude in Chicago, and through the Great Depression, thousands came to its novenas. And in 1962, the entertainer Danny Thomas opened St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, keeping, he said, a promise he'd made to Saint Jude.

Close

So. Let's go back to that one slot in the list.

Here's what the Bible gives us. A man called Thaddaeus in two Gospels. A Judas, connected to a James, in Luke and Acts. And in John, a "Judas, not Iscariot," who asked one good question at the Last Supper: why show yourself to us, and not to the world? Whether he's the same man, John doesn't say.

Everything else (the three names merged into one, the letter credited to him, the king of Edessa, Persia, Armenia, the lost causes) came later. Some of it early tradition, some of it legend. All of it filling in a silence the Bible leaves.

But maybe that's the point. Here's a slot in the list that can't settle on a name... and two thousand years later, people still call on him when they've run out of hope.

Not bad, for the apostle with too many names.

Next time: two apostles called James. James son of Zebedee, and James son of Alphaeus. Two Jameses in the Twelve... and why people keep mixing them up with a third James: the brother of Jesus. Somebody get a whiteboard.