Who Was Simon the Zealot? (12 of 13)

Not one recorded word. One loaded title. And a seat at the table beside a man who collected taxes for Rome.

That last detail is a favourite in sermons, which is a reason to check it rather than to trust it. Some of it holds. The sharpest version does not.

Who Was Simon the Zealot in the Bible?

A name in the lists and nothing else. He appears in Matt 10:4, Mark 3:18, Luke 6:15, and Acts 1:13, always in the third group of four, always distinguished from Simon Peter by the epithet.

That epithet is the only information Scripture gives about him, which puts a great deal of weight on what it meant.

What Does Cananaean Mean?

Zealous one. It has nothing to do with Cana or with Canaan.

Mark and Matthew call him the Cananaean, transliterating an Aramaic word, qan’ana, behind which sits the Hebrew qanna’. Luke, writing for readers who would have missed the transliteration, simply translates it and calls him Simon who was called the Zealot.

Same title, two languages, and the standard reading among scholars is that the Aramaic term carries no inherent political content on its own. It means zealous. What the zeal is for, and whether it had been organised into anything, is the next question and a harder one.

Did the Zealot Party Exist When Jesus Called Simon?

This is genuinely contested, and it matters.

The usual starting point is Judas the Galilean, who led a revolt in AD 6 against taxation to a pagan emperor and founded what Josephus calls the fourth philosophy. That is roughly two decades before Jesus called the Twelve.

The complication is that Josephus then goes largely quiet about organised resistance between Judas and the outbreak of war in 66. Some read that silence as evidence there was no continuous movement to speak of. Martin Hengel argued the other way, treating the Zealots as a broader resistance current with roots in Judas’s rebellion, and reading Josephus’s silence as reflecting his own interest in downplaying resistance rather than an absence of it.

So the honest position is that a movement of some kind traces back to AD 6, that whether it was an organised faction with membership in the 20s is disputed, and that Hengel’s reading makes the political sense of Simon’s title more plausible than a flat denial would.

What Did Zeal for the Law Mean?

Before any party, zeal was a personal religious virtue with a long pedigree.

It meant stubborn adherence to God’s law and exclusive loyalty to God’s people under opposition, and it did not have to carry political content. In post-biblical Judaism it came to mean the determination to maintain the law and the purity of the land, the temple, and the people, up to and including suffering, dying, or killing for it. A man who understood himself as zealous understood himself as an agent of God’s judgment.

The models were Phinehas in the wilderness and Mattathias and his sons against Antiochus. Both of those examples involve killing.

That is the range. Simon’s title places him somewhere on it, and the text does not say where.

Why Did Jesus Choose a Zealot and a Tax Collector?

Because the Twelve were a demonstration as much as a staff.

Matthew’s income came from the margin on revenue collected for Rome. Simon carried a title associated with the conviction that paying that revenue was treason against the only rightful king. Those are not two opinions. They are the two ends of the argument that eventually burned Jerusalem down.

They spent roughly three years travelling together, eating together, sleeping in the same houses. There is no recorded incident between them.

Neither is asked to change sides. Matthew does not become a nationalist and Simon does not become a collaborator. Both are reassigned to something that outranks the argument. Jesus chose twelve men to stand for twelve tribes, and building that group out of two men who should not have been able to share a room was not an accident of recruitment.

An outsider watching would have read the pairing as either shocking hypocrisy or a reordering of what loyalty meant. There is evidence that a teacher known for keeping company with tax collectors could be suspected of disloyalty on that ground alone.

Would Simon Have Considered Matthew a Traitor?

Almost certainly yes as a matter of category. As a matter of what he might have done about it, the sources will not carry the sharp version.

The sharp version, which I wanted to test, is that the Twelve contained a man with a live reason to want another member dead. It is a striking claim and it would make the pairing far more than an illustration.

Here is what the evidence supports. Tax collectors were regarded by resistance-minded Jews as traitors collaborating with an extortion system. Deceiving a Roman collector was treated as no worse than deceiving a pirate, on the reasoning that Rome had no legitimate claim to territory it had seized. Refusal to pay was one of the sparks of the revolt itself.

Here is what it does not support. I could not find evidence of organised violence against individual tax collectors in Judea before 66. The sanctions that show up are social and religious rather than physical: shunning, refusal of their money, disqualification from testimony.

So the pairing is real and it is sharp, and the sharpest form of it is a step further than the sources go. Simon would have regarded Matthew’s work as betrayal of God and nation. That he or men like him were killing collectors in the 20s is a claim I cannot make, and I would rather say so than let a good sermon line stand on nothing.

How Did Simon the Zealot Die?

Nobody knows, and the traditions are the most scattered of any apostle.

Western accounts have him martyred in Persia alongside Jude, sawn in two, which is where the saw in his iconography comes from. Those accounts are late medieval martyrologies. Eastern traditions send him to Egypt and North Africa. Later legends reach as far as Britain.

When the traditions cannot agree on the continent, there is no evidence, only options. Speculative, and the honest answer is unknown.

Part of a series working through the Twelve one at a time. See the overview of the Twelve as a group and the Twelve Apostles timeline.

Footnotes2

1. The Cananaean and Zealot variation is a useful check on how the Gospel writers handled their audiences. Mark and Matthew preserve the Aramaic sound. Luke gives the meaning. Neither is being loose with the text; they are making different decisions about what a reader needs.
2. Hengel's position is doing quiet work in this post. If the organised movement genuinely did not exist until the 60s, Simon's title is a description of temperament and the Matthew pairing loses much of its edge. If Hengel is right that a continuous resistance current runs from AD 6, the title can carry political weight in the 20s and the pairing keeps it. The post follows Hengel while naming the alternative, which is the most that the evidence allows.

Sources

Martin Hengel, The Zealots: Investigations into the Jewish Freedom Movement in the Period from Herod I Until 70 A.D. (T & T Clark, 1989). Supports the reading of the Zealots as a broader resistance current rooted in AD 6 and the argument about Josephus's silence.

Bradley T. Johnson and Jonathon Lookadoo, "Zealot," in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Lexham Press, 2016). Supports the state of the scholarly debate on whether a unified party existed before the war. Free with the Logos Basic package from Lexham Press.

John T. Lowe, "Simon the Zealot," in The Lexham Bible Dictionary. Supports the standard reading of Cananaean as the Aramaic qan'an, zealous one, and not a place name.

Allen C. Myers, "Zeal," in The Eerdmans Bible Dictionary (Eerdmans, 1987), 1082. Supports the account of zeal as a personal religious disposition and the Phinehas and Maccabean models.

Thomas E. Schmidt, "Taxation, Jewish," in Dictionary of New Testament Background (InterVarsity Press, 2000), 1165. Supports the point that association with tax collectors could itself draw suspicion of disloyalty.

Where the sourcing stops: the absence of evidence for pre-revolt violence against individual collectors is an absence in what I searched, not a demonstrated negative, and I would revise the section if a primary source turned up. Reading Matthew and Simon as a deliberate pairing is a common observation rather than a claim I am attributing to a named scholar.