St. Simon the Apostle
What is St. Simon the Apostle the patron saint of?
What was the miracle of St. Simon the Apostle?
Who was St. Simon the Apostle?
What does the epithet Kananaios mean?
What is known about St. Simon the Apostle’s missionary work?
How did St. Simon the Apostle die?
St. Simon the Apostle (flourished 1st century ce—died, Persia or Edessa, Greece?; Western feast day October 28, Eastern feast day June 19) was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus. In the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, he bears the epithet Kananaios, or the Cananaean, often wrongly interpreted to mean “from Cana” or “from Canaan.” Kananaios is the Greek transliteration of an Aramaic word, qanʾ anaya, meaning “the Zealot,” the title given him by Luke in his Gospel and in Acts. It is uncertain whether he was one of the group of Zealots, the Jewish nationalistic party before 70 ce. Apparently the titles may have been an attempt to distinguish him from the apostle St. Simon Peter.
(Read Britannica’s List of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus.)
Nothing further is known about him from the New Testament. He supposedly preached the Gospel in Egypt and then joined the apostle St. Jude (Thaddaeus) in Persia, where, according to the apocryphal Passion of Simon and Jude, he was martyred by being cut in half with a saw, one of his chief iconographic symbols (another being a book). However, according to St. Basil the Great, the 4th-century Cappadocian Father, Simon died peacefully at Edessa.
In the Roman Catholic Church he is venerated as the patron saint of saw workers, tanners, and woodworkers.
