Was Simon the Zealot a Revolutionary? The Apostle With a Dangerous Nickname

Cold open

Picture the twelve apostles, lined up for a group photo. Peter's at the front, obviously. James and John are elbowing for a spot beside him. And right at the back, half hidden behind Thaddaeus, is a man the Bible gives barely more than a nickname.

Simon the Zealot.

Now, that's quite a nickname. Because to a lot of people, "Zealot" means one thing: a dagger under the cloak, and a burning hatred of Rome. A revolutionary. A freedom fighter. Maybe even a terrorist.

So did Jesus really pick a rebel to be one of the Twelve?

Today we're going to find out what that word actually meant, why two Gospels seem to call him something completely different, and how one quiet apostle ended up dying in at least four different places, in several different ways. Which is impressive, for one man.

As always: Scripture, tradition, scholarship and legend, each labelled. Let's begin.

Simon who?

Scripture

Here's everything the New Testament tells us about Simon the Zealot. Ready? He's in all four lists of the Twelve: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the Book of Acts. And... that's almost it.

He never speaks. He never asks a question. He's never named in a single story. His last appearance is in Acts chapter one, in the upstairs room in Jerusalem after Jesus has gone, where the eleven remaining apostles are praying together. That's the last time he's named. After that, he's presumably just one of "the Twelve."

And it's easy to see why a nickname would help. The New Testament is crawling with Simons. Simon Peter, of course. Simon, one of the brothers of Jesus. Simon the leper. Simon of Cyrene, who carried the cross. Simon the Pharisee, Simon the tanner, Simon the magician... and even Judas Iscariot's father was called Simon.

Scholarship

Simon was simply one of the most popular Jewish names of the day. So if you were one of two Simons in a group of twelve, a label would come in handy. Peter got "the Rock."

Our man got... "the Zealot." Or did he?

Two names, one man

Scripture

Because here's the curious bit. Luke's Gospel calls him "Simon, who was called the Zealot," and so does Acts, which most scholars agree comes from the same author. The Greek word is zēlōtēs.

But Matthew and Mark call him something else: Simon the Kananaios. And if you grew up with the King James Bible, you'll know him as... "Simon the Canaanite."

Canaanite? As in, the people of Canaan, from the Old Testament? Joshua's old enemies, turning up among the Twelve?

Scholarship

Almost certainly not. Kananaios looks like it comes from an Aramaic word, qan'ānā, meaning... zealous. So, most likely, Matthew and Mark kept the Aramaic nickname, and Luke translated it. Same nickname, two languages.

And here's a neat clue. When Matthew wants to say "Canaanite," as he does about a Canaanite woman in chapter fifteen, he uses a different Greek word, spelled with a different first letter. So older English Bibles, King James included, made an understandable slip. Their Greek text spelled it Kananitēs, which really does look like "man from Canaan." Many modern translations now say "Simon the Zealot" in all four lists; others say "Simon the Cananaean."

Tradition

There's a third idea, too. Around the year 400, the great scholar Jerome suggested Kananaios pointed to Cana, the village in Galilee where, in John's Gospel, Jesus turns water into wine. Though, to be fair to Jerome, he also connected the name with "zeal."

Later Tradition

Separately, in Eastern Orthodox tradition, still told on his feast day, Simon was from Cana, and was the bridegroom at that very wedding. Which is a lovely story... but John's Gospel never names the bridegroom, and never connects him to Simon.

Scholarship

Most scholars today go with "zealous." And honestly? It's the one explanation that fits both nicknames.

So the real question is: zealous about what?

What did "zeal" mean?

To us, "zealot" sounds like a fanatic. But in first-century Judaism, zeal had a long and proud history.

Scripture

It goes back to the Book of Numbers, and a priest called Phinehas, who is praised because, quote, "he was zealous for his God." Mind you, he showed it with a spear... so it was never an entirely gentle word.

Scholarship

Then, about a hundred and sixty years before Jesus, came the Maccabean revolt against the Greek kings of Syria.

Scripture (Catholic & Orthodox Bibles)

The book of First Maccabees, which is in the Bible for Catholic and Orthodox Christians, and in the Apocrypha for Protestants, says the old priest Mattathias "burned with zeal for the law, just as Phinehas did," and cried out: "Let every one who is zealous for the law... come out with me!"

So zeal could mean a fight. But listen to how the New Testament itself uses the word.

Scripture

The apostle Paul, writing to the Galatians, describes his own past: he was, quote, "far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors." And the Greek word there? Zēlōtēs. The same word Luke uses for Simon.

In Acts, the leaders of the Jerusalem church tell Paul there are thousands of Jewish believers, "all zealous for the law." Same word again. And nobody's storming anything.

So when Luke calls Simon "the Zealot," that could point to a political radical. Or simply to a man who was intensely, passionately devout. And the word alone can't tell us which.

The Zealots

Scholarship

So where does the idea of Simon the freedom fighter come from? From reading Luke's word alongside a Jewish historian called Josephus, writing in the 70s to 90s AD. Josephus never mentions Simon, but he has plenty to say about zealots.

He tells us that in the year 6, when Rome took direct control of Judea and ordered a census for tax, a man called Judas the Galilean led a revolt. His followers, says Josephus, held that God was to be "their only Ruler and Lord."

Scripture

And the Book of Acts remembers him too. In chapter five, the Jewish teacher Gamaliel mentions "Judas the Galilean," who "rose up at the time of the census"... and perished.

Scholarship

But here's the crucial thing. Josephus doesn't call Judas's movement "the Zealots." He calls it the "fourth philosophy." The faction actually named the Zealots turns up in his story during the great Jewish revolt against Rome, which broke out in the year 66. Around the winter of 67 to 68, they're holed up in the Temple in Jerusalem, and Josephus is scathing about the name: that was "the name they went by, as if they were zealous in good undertakings"... when, he says, they were zealous in the worst.

And that dagger under the cloak? Josephus actually pins it on a different group, the Sicarii, the "dagger-men." He keeps them separate from the Zealots.

Now, Jesus was crucified around the year 30, or 33. So the Zealot party, as a named group, may not have existed for another thirty-five years or so.

Which leaves historians genuinely split. In 1961, the German scholar Martin Hengel argued there was one long freedom movement, running from Judas the Galilean all the way to the war. If he's right, Simon could have belonged to an early form of it. But in 1971, the American scholar Morton Smith argued the opposite: lots of separate groups, and no organised Zealot party until the war itself. Many historians since, like Richard Horsley, have broadly followed that line. On that view, calling Simon a member of "the Zealots" is a bit like calling a woman who campaigned for the vote in 1870 a "Suffragette," a word nobody used until 1906.

So, the honest verdict? Simon might have been a political radical before he met Jesus. He might simply have been fiercely devout. On that question, the texts give us a nickname, and nothing more. Anyone who tells you for certain he was a revolutionary... is telling you more than the sources do.

The tax collector and the Zealot

Scripture

But there is one detail preachers love, and it really is in the text. Matthew's list of the Twelve includes "Matthew the tax collector." And Luke's list puts "Matthew" and "Simon who was called the Zealot" just a few names apart.

Scholarship

Now, tax collectors worked for the system Rome propped up. In Galilee, that meant Herod Antipas, Rome's client ruler. And if Simon was zealous in the political sense, that's quite a pairing.

Speculation

So, did they ever argue over dinner? Did they share a tent? We'd love to know. But the Gospels never show the two of them talking, never mention any tension, and never tell us why Jesus chose either man in particular. That's pure speculation.

Scholarship

In the 1960s, one British scholar, S. G. F. Brandon, went much further, and argued that Jesus himself was close to the Zealot cause. Most scholars were not persuaded. Critics said he assumed a Zealot party that probably didn't exist yet, and built too much on what the Gospels don't say. And that's a good rule for us too. The texts tell us Simon had this nickname. They don't tell us what it meant to Jesus.

Mistaken identities

With so many Simons, confusion was bound to happen. And it did.

Scripture

Mark's Gospel names four brothers of Jesus: James, Joses, Judas... and Simon. So, could this Simon be the apostle?

Tradition

Christians have long differed over what "brothers" means here: sons of Mary, sons of Joseph, or cousins.

Scripture

Well, look at how Acts chapter one lays it out. It lists the eleven apostles, Simon the Zealot among them. And then it adds "Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers." And John's Gospel says that during Jesus's ministry, "not even his brothers believed in him." That doesn't settle it for everyone, but Acts does seem to treat them as two groups.

Tradition

Then there's a third Simon. In the early 300s, the church historian Eusebius, drawing on an earlier writer called Hegesippus, tells us that after James, the brother of Jesus, was killed, the Jerusalem church chose a new leader: Symeon, son of Clopas, who, Hegesippus says, was a cousin of Jesus. And under the emperor Trajan, in the early second century, Symeon was crucified... at the age, so Hegesippus says, of a hundred and twenty.

Notice, though: Eusebius never says this Symeon was one of the Twelve.

Legend

But other writers squashed the Simons together. A list of apostles attached to the name of Hippolytus, though almost certainly not by him, and of unknown date, says "Simon the Zealot, the son of Clopas," became bishop of Jerusalem and died aged a hundred and twenty. A seventh-century chronicle, the Chronicon Paschale, makes the same identification.

And here's my favourite part. By the 1260s, the medieval Golden Legend reports that Simon the apostle was crucified... and then adds, quite honestly, that "some say" it wasn't him at all, but "another, the son of Cleophas." So even in the Middle Ages, people could see the join.

One apostle, five deaths

So how did Simon the Zealot die? Well. Take your pick.

Legend

Option one: Persia. A Latin story, the Passion of Simon and Jude, has Simon and his fellow apostle Jude preaching together in Persia, where they're killed by pagan priests at a city called Suanir. That story was collected between the late 500s and the early 700s, and the Golden Legend made it famous, adding that Simon had preached first in Egypt. And in the West, Simon and Jude still share a feast day: the twenty-eighth of October.

Option two: Britain. Yes, really. A Greek list of the apostles, credited to a "Dorotheus of Tyre" and compiled around the eighth century, says Simon preached across North Africa, and was then crucified in Britain and buried there.

Option three: the Black Sea. Medieval Georgian chronicles, from around the eleventh century, say Simon preached in what's now western Georgia and Abkhazia, and was buried at a place called Nicopsia, probably further up the coast in today's Russia. A separate local tradition puts his tomb at New Athos, in Abkhazia, where there's a medieval church in his name, and a grotto pilgrims still visit.

Option four: Jerusalem. Thanks to that mix-up with Symeon son of Clopas, some traditions, including Coptic and Ethiopic ones, have him crucified as bishop of Jerusalem.

Option five: the saw. In medieval and Renaissance paintings, Simon often holds a saw, linked to a tradition that he was sawn in half. But the written versions of that story are late, and nobody is quite sure where it began.

So: Persia, Britain, the Caucasus, Jerusalem, sawn, crucified, cut down by priests. They can't all be true. And as far as we can trace, not one of them, as a story about Simon the apostle, is recorded in the first four centuries.

Scholarship

The honest answer is: we don't know how, where or when Simon died. The Bible doesn't say, and the earliest church writers don't either.

Close

So. Let's go back to that group photo, and the man at the back.

Was Simon a revolutionary? Maybe. Maybe once. But the word that defines him could just as easily mean a man who was burning with devotion to God. And the oldest texts never tell us which.

What they do tell us is this. He was chosen. He was there. And after Jesus had gone, while the others waited in Jerusalem as they'd been told to, he was in that upstairs room, praying with them.

Sometimes the quietest apostle is the one who makes you check the sources most carefully. And that's no bad thing.

Oh, and one last detail. For more than four hundred years, the relics said to be Simon and Jude's have been kept in a basilica in Rome. A basilica built, so tradition says, over the grave of another apostle.

Next time: the most famous apostle of them all. Peter. How did he die? And what's really under the Vatican?