Jude Thaddaeus

This apostle is harder to name than most. The lists of Matthew and Mark include a Thaddaeus (some manuscripts, Lebbaeus), while Luke and Acts instead list a Judas of James, usually rendered Judas the son, or brother, of James. The church early identified the two, producing the composite Jude Thaddaeus and taking pains to keep him clear of Judas Iscariot, the betrayer. The Gospel of John marks the distinction explicitly when Judas, not Iscariot asks Jesus a question at the last supper, the one saying attributed to him in the Gospels.

Tradition also made him the author of the short Epistle of Jude near the end of the New Testament, whose writer calls himself Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James. Most scholars doubt the apostle wrote it: its polished Greek, its use of Jewish apocryphal works such as 1 Enoch, and its reference to the apostles as figures of the past point to a later hand, and the brother of James it names is more plausibly James the brother of the Lord than a member of the twelve.

As so often with the lesser apostles, the New Testament offers a name, a single question, and then silence, into which the later church poured a remarkable devotion.

Two very different afterlives grew around this apostle. In modern Roman Catholic devotion he became Saint Jude, patron of desperate and hopeless cases, the saint turned to when all else has failed. The custom is relatively recent and popular in origin; a common explanation holds that, because his name so resembled that of the betrayer Judas, the faithful were long reluctant to invoke him, so that he was thought to be especially eager to help those who finally did. Whatever its origin, the devotion is now worldwide, sustained by shrines, novenas and printed thanks in newspapers.

The older tradition sends him east. With the apostle Simon he is said to have preached and been martyred in Persia, and the Armenian Apostolic Church honours Thaddeus, together with Bartholomew, as its founding apostle, the source of the title by which it calls itself apostolic. The monastery of Saint Thaddeus in northwestern Iran preserves this tradition and remains a place of Armenian pilgrimage.

His common attributes, a club or an axe, and a medallion or flame at his brow, gather the legends of his martyrdom and his presence at Pentecost. Between the newspaper novena and the mountain monastery lies the same shadowy figure of the apostolic lists, remembered under three names.