Simon the Zealot

Saint Simon the Zealot
St. Simon, by Peter Paul Rubens (c. 1611), from his Twelve Apostles series at the Museo del Prado, Madrid
Apostle, Martyr, Preacher
Born	Judea
Died	~65 or ~107 place of death disputed. Possibly Pella, Armenia; Suanir, Persia; Edessa, Caistor
Venerated in	Coptic Orthodox Church Eastern Orthodox Churches Lutheran Church Oriental Orthodoxy Roman Catholic Church
Major shrine	relics claimed by many places, including Toulouse; Saint Peter's Basilica
Feast	May 10 (Eastern Christianity) July 1 (medieval Hispanic liturgy as attested by sources of the time, such as the Antiphonary of León) October 28 (Western Christianity) November 5 (Coptic Orthodoxy)
Attributes	boat; cross and saw; fish (or two fish); lance; man being sawn in two longitudinally; oar
Patronage	curriers; sawyers; tanners

Simon the Zealot (Acts 1:13), Simon, who was called the Zealot (Luke 6:15), Simon Kananaios (Matthew 10:4) or Simon Cananeus (Mark 3:18) was one of the most obscure among the apostles of Jesus. A few pseudepigraphical writings were connected to him, and the theologian and Doctor of the Church, Saint Jerome, does not include him in De viris illustribus written between 392–393 AD.

The name Simon occurs in all of the Synoptic Gospels and the Book of Acts each time there is a list of apostles, without further details:

Simon, (whom he also named Peter,) and Andrew his brother, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus, and Simon called Zelotes, And Judas the brother of James, and Judas Iscariot, which also was the traitor.

To distinguish him from Simon Peter he is called Kananaios (Matthew 10:4) or Kananites (Mark 3:18), and in the list of apostles in Luke 6:15, repeated in Acts 1:13, Zelotes, the "Zealot". Both titles derive from the Hebrew word qana, meaning , although Jerome and others mistook the word to signify the apostle was from the town of Cana, in which case his epithet would have been "Kanaios", or even from the region of Canaan. As such, the translation of the word as "the Cananite" or "the Canaanite" is traditional and without contemporary extra-canonic parallel.