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"Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" — Saint Jude, at the Last Supper (John 14:22)
Most people can name Peter, James and John. Many can name Matthew and Thomas. Ask for the last four on the list and you will usually get a long pause.
Simon and Jude are near the bottom of every list of the Twelve, the names people skim. The Gospels give Simon no recorded words at all. Jude gets one sentence in the entire Gospel record, and it is a question. We know almost nothing about their childhoods, their families or their days with Jesus. We do not have a single scene in which either of them is the center of the story.
And yet one of them has become the saint people turn to when every other door has closed. At three in the morning, in hospital corridors, over unpaid bills and broken marriages, in the hours when a person has run out of plans, they say his name. They do not say it because the Gospels tell a dramatic story about him. They say it because he is the apostle nobody remembered, and they feel like people nobody remembered.
This article tells what Scripture says about these two men, and then what tradition hands down. It keeps the two clearly separate, because the difference matters. Where the evidence is thin, it says so.
Galilee Under Rome
The Apostles lived in a country under occupation. In the first century, Galilee and Judea were ruled by Rome, either directly through governors or through client kings, and Roman power was felt in the tax collector's booth, the soldier's patrol and the cross at the side of the road.
The Jewish people of that time held a wide range of hopes. Some wanted to cooperate with Rome and keep the peace. Some withdrew into strict religious communities. And some believed that God would soon send a Messiah to drive out the pagans, and that faithful Jews should be ready to take up arms to help. The memory of earlier rebellions, which Rome had crushed brutally, hung over the country. Anyone who spoke too loudly about a coming king risked a visit from soldiers.
The twelve men Jesus chose came out of that world. They included fishermen, a tax collector who had worked for the occupation, and, in the case of one of them, a man whose very name pointed to the heat of the political moment.
A Zealot, a Tax Collector and a Man Named Judas
When the Gospels list the Twelve, the name of Simon comes with a label. Matthew and Mark call him "the Cananean," a word that comes from the Aramaic for "zealous." Luke, writing for Greek readers, translates it directly and calls him "Simon who was called the Zealot."
What the label meant is debated. The Zealots as an organized revolutionary party appear in the historical record mainly in the 60s of the first century, a generation after Jesus. So Simon may not have belonged to a party at all. He may simply have been known as a man burning with zeal for God's Law. But it is also possible that his past had involved some form of political resistance, and that the nickname carried a hint of danger. Either way, the point stands: Jesus chose a man known for fierce conviction.
Consider what that meant in practice. Among the Twelve was Matthew, a tax collector, someone who had made his living collecting money for Rome. Simon, whatever the exact meaning of his name, belonged to a world that despised such men. Jesus put them in the same group, to eat together, walk together and sleep on the same ground. The Gospels never describe an argument between them. But anyone who has ever shared a house with someone whose politics they cannot stand can imagine what it cost. Part of what the call of Simon tells us is that Jesus did not choose his friends from a single side.
The second man's story is complicated by his name. Luke and the Acts of the Apostles call him "Judas the son of James," or possibly "Judas the brother of James," since the Greek can be read either way. Matthew and Mark call him "Thaddaeus." The Church's tradition understands these as the same man, who is also the author of the short New Testament letter that begins, "Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James." Many in the Church's tradition have also seen him as a relative of the Lord, in the broad sense of kinsman that the Bible uses for "brothers."
His name was a problem. In Greek, Jude and Judas are the same name, and the other Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus, ruined it for everyone else. In the centuries that followed, it is likely that many Christians simply avoided invoking the apostle with the unlucky name. The Gospel of John is careful about this: when Jude speaks at the Last Supper, the evangelist adds, "Judas, not Iscariot."
The Night on the Mountain
The Gospel of Luke records how the Twelve were chosen. Jesus went up on a mountain to pray, and he spent the whole night in prayer to God. At daybreak he called his disciples together and chose twelve of them, whom he named apostles. Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James are on the list, along with the others, and also Judas Iscariot, who would become a traitor.
That is all the Gospels tell us about their call. We do not know what Simon was doing when Jesus found him, or what Jude was doing. We do not know what either of them said. The silence is complete, and a reader should not fill it with invented detail.
What we can say is that they went. They left whatever they had been doing and followed a man from Nazareth, and for about three years they walked the roads of Galilee and Judea with him. They heard the Sermon on the Mount. They watched the sick get up from their beds. They saw the loaves multiplied. And, like the others, they often did not understand what they were seeing.
The Question at the Last Supper and the Night Everyone Ran
The one time the Gospels let Jude speak is on the night before Jesus died.
At the Last Supper, Jesus told the Apostles that he was going away, that he would show himself to those who loved him, and that the world would no longer see him. Jude, quite possibly confused and afraid, asked the question that anyone might have asked: Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world? Why only us? Why not everyone? It is an honest question, and a modest one. It is the question of a man who is trying to follow what is happening and cannot.
Jesus answered him directly: If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. It is one of the most intimate promises in the Gospels, and it was given in reply to the apostle we know least about. God does not ask to be shown to the world first. He asks to move into the heart of whoever loves him.
Hours later, Jesus was arrested in a garden. The Gospels say plainly that all of the disciples left him and fled. That includes Simon and Jude. We do not have their individual stories of that night, but we know the outcome. The men who had walked with Jesus for three years were scattered, hiding behind locked doors, ashamed. They were not heroes in that hour. Their first great experience of their own weakness was the Passion.
Fire in the Upper Room and the Long Road East
Then Easter happened, and everything that followed depended on it. The risen Jesus appeared to the Eleven. After the Ascension, the Acts of the Apostles records that they returned to Jerusalem and went up to the room where they were staying, and the list of names that follows includes Simon the Zealot and Judas the son of James. They were there, with Mary the mother of Jesus and other disciples, praying together. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came upon them like wind and fire, and the men who had hidden in fear went out into the streets to preach.
After that, Scripture falls silent about Simon and Jude. For the rest of their story, we depend on tradition.
According to the traditions handed down in the Church, the two Apostles eventually traveled together to the East, to Mesopotamia and Persia, beyond the borders of the Roman world, and spent years preaching there. One tradition sends Simon first to Egypt and North Africa. The ancient accounts that survive tell of healings, conversions and confrontations with the priests and magicians of the local religions. They are colorful, and some of the stories are plainly legendary. A faithful Catholic can honor them as pious tradition without treating every detail as history. What all the accounts agree on is the shape of the story: two Galilean men, without money or power, walked into foreign kingdoms to announce that God had become a man and died and risen.
The Letter That Shouts
There is one piece of evidence from Jude's own hand. The New Testament contains a short letter of twenty-five verses, which the Church has always received as inspired Scripture and which her tradition attributes to Jude the Apostle.
It is the most urgent letter in the Bible. Jude says he had been planning to write about the salvation they all shared, but something happened that forced him to change his mind. Teachers had slipped into the community, men who twisted the grace of God into an excuse for immorality and who denied the Lord who had saved them. So he begged the believers to fight for the faith that had been handed on to the saints once and for all.
He writes with fire. He compares the false teachers to wandering stars, to clouds that bring no rain, to wild waves that throw up foam. He reaches back to the story of the angel Michael contending with the devil, to the sins of the cities of the plain, to the prophecy of Enoch. But he does not end in anger. His last instructions are tender: build yourselves up on your most holy faith, pray in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, and wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then, about the people who are wavering, he writes: have mercy on those who doubt, and save others by snatching them out of the fire.
Snatching people out of the fire is, in a sense, what the devotion to Jude is about. The apostle who wrote it knew that some people are in danger and that someone has to reach in after them.
His letter ends with one of the loveliest doxologies in the New Testament. It is addressed to the one who is able to keep us from falling and to present us faultless before his glory with great joy.
The Temple and the Crowd
The traditions about the last years of Simon and Jude say that their mission ended in violence.
According to the account that has come down in the Western Church, the two Apostles were preaching in Persia when the local priests, alarmed at the loss of their followers, stirred up the people against them. The narratives describe a crowd, a pagan temple, and a demand that the Apostles offer sacrifice to the sun. They refused.
We should not claim to know the details. These stories are among the least verifiable in the Church's memory. What the Church's tradition holds, with great consistency across the centuries, is that Simon and Jude did not die in bed. They were killed by people who could not tolerate what they were saying.
The Saw and the Club
The tradition names the instruments of their deaths, and the Church has carried them in her art for more than a thousand years.
Simon, according to the tradition, was killed by being sawn in two. That is why he is shown in paintings and carvings holding a saw. Jude was struck down with a club, or, in some accounts, an axe, which is why he is often shown holding a club or a halberd. The two are said to have died on the same day, in the same place, side by side. Tradition places their martyrdom in Persia around the year 65, though some accounts put it later.
It is a grim end, and the tradition does not soften it. But the same tradition says that they went to it as they had gone to everything else, together. Two men who had once run away from a garden on the night of the Passion did not run from the temple.
In the Church's art, Jude is also shown with a medallion bearing the face of Christ. It recalls an ancient tradition, connected with the city of Edessa, in which an apostle named Thaddaeus brought healing to a king and carried with him an image of the Lord. How closely that tradition belongs to Jude is a matter of pious memory, but the image has stayed with him: the man who asked how the Lord would show himself, shown carrying the Lord's face.
The Saint of Last Resorts
The Church honors Simon and Jude together on October 28. As Apostles, they are not canonized in the later sense. They were venerated as saints from the earliest centuries, and their joint feast is an ancient one. By long tradition, their relics rest in Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome, though other places also hold relics in their honor.
Saint Simon's patronage comes largely from the instrument of his death. The saw made him a patron of sawyers and woodcutters, the men who work with the same tool, and he is also honored by tanners, an association passed down through the old trade guilds.
Saint Jude's patronage is more famous, and the story behind it is the one we started with. For centuries, the apostle with the unlucky name was largely overlooked. People hesitated to invoke him because of the confusion with Judas Iscariot. Over time, devotion grew among those who turned to him precisely because he seemed to be forgotten, and who found that he did not ignore them. He became known as the patron of desperate causes and hopeless cases, the saint to call when you have run out of options. Saint Bridget of Sweden, in the fourteenth century, is among those traditionally linked to the early growth of this devotion, and in the twentieth century, religious communities, including the Claretians, spread it widely in the United States.
One of the best-known results of that devotion is a hospital. In the 1950s, the American entertainer Danny Thomas, a Catholic who had once struggled to make a living and had prayed to Saint Jude in his worst days, promised that if he ever succeeded he would build a shrine in the saint's honor. The shrine became St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, which opened in 1962 and treats children with cancer and other serious diseases regardless of their families' ability to pay.
The lesson of the two Apostles may be the one the Gospels teach by their silence. Most of the Church's work is done by people nobody writes about. Simon, the man of fierce conviction, and Jude, the man with one question, stood in the second row and did not become famous. They simply kept going, until the end, and in the end gave everything. The Church remembers them, and so does the one who made his home in them.
Prayer
Holy Apostles Simon and Jude, you stood in the second rank and kept faith to the end. Simon, zealous for God, you learned to walk beside those you once opposed. Jude, faithful friend of the Lord, you asked your question and received the promise of his dwelling in the heart. Pray for us who are weary and overlooked. Pray for those who have run out of ways and words. Help us hold fast to the faith handed on to the saints, and to have mercy on those who doubt. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saints Simon and Jude, pray for us.
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